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Comment by phpthrowaway99 | Hacker News Reader

Do you really think doctors don't understand, or never learned, exponential growth? I knew a bioengineering student at Cal that was pretty smart and barely made it into med school. They had to go to a DO school instead of MD. So unless the bar for doctors used to be much lower than it is today, every doctor 'knows' what exponential growth is.

Whether they apply it to the real world is another thing.

I know people that don't think raising the minimum wage basically just causes inflation. They're just wondering why apartments in undesirable areas became 3x more expensive when minimum wage went from $5 to $15.

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In my country most definitely don't. They take a little calculus in high school, but practically zero at university, unless they take an epidemiology elective or something like that. I know this well because my wife is also a doctor.

It probably varies a lot by country, like many things.

You certainly don't need calculus to understand exponential growth; you'd get a good sense of it from just looking at a chart.

The ability to apply learned theory to real life in cross-domain ways is not common and not so easily taught by rote. Teaching calculus to everyone won't solve this.

> I know people that don't think raising the minimum wage basically just causes inflation. They're just wondering why apartments in undesirable areas became 3x more expensive when minimum wage went from $5 to $15.

That's a pretty poor example though as there are many factors that contribute to property prices and there isn't just a mechanical link between wages and house prices.

Low interest rates probably have a much greater effect, given that most people aren’t buying houses with cash.

> Whether they apply it to the real world is another thing.

'Knowing' it but not applying it (and in what is literally a textbook circumstance, no less) is itself a failure of understanding.

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