You can calculate how long a pencil can stand on its tip before falling using quantum physics.

Basically a version of this was on our freshman accelerated physics final, and no one got it right so our professor happily explained it to us the next day.

It was pretty much the same as is described here.

https://thephysicsvirtuosi.com/posts/old/how-long-can-you-balance-a-quantum-pencil/

I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

That the diesel engine wasn’t originally ran on diesel fuel. (In college I was led to believe that it was hemp oil). It was actually peanut oil and later they tried hemp oil.

Shale tastes like mud, yes, but it has the consistency of a chocolate bar if you eat a little.

Honestly not bad. Great experience.

My highschool friends weren’t really friends, just people who’d been temporarily thrown into the same unfortunate position as me.

That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.

It has been proven that each mathematical reasoning system* either has a statement that cannot be proven true or false, or a statement that can be proven both true or false. In simpler terms, it has been proven that we can’t prove everything.

Gödels incompleteness theorem if anyone wants to look it up.

• only holds for reasoning systems that can reason about numbers

Just how greedy some professors can be.

Like the one that had a publishing deal with Pearson. He wrote his own textbook, charged $700 for it, then made you remove parts from the book so it made used copies of the book worthless.

At a certain point, you need to be force which pushes you forward. I saw a lot of intelligent people fail because they no longer had the external stimulus to go to class.

Also, it is easier to manipulate people in positions of power, but you have to understand how they think and are rewarded. There is a reason why a lot of liberal arts education is focused on having people understand others.

Also, the liberal arts education of a century ago was basically a degree which was intended to make managers. Along with it, the extra-curricular activities were an important part of the education, but just what happened in class.

That if you’re an international student at a small, struggling school, you can miss half your classes and bullshit your way through most assignments and they’ll still give you a degree.

In other words: I learned nothing.

A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:

In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.

Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.

Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.

That I spent years developing proficiency in my language and expanding my vocabulary to get accepted, only to be told to write simplified English in journalism school. Then they doubled down in my business classes to write for a 6th grade education and those who don’t speak natively.

There is no god. No amount of looking for it would be enough. I was already doubtful beforehand. Having grown up conservatively, I kind of already knew it was all fake, but the deprogramming took a while.

If you were to put a big fan on a sailboat and point it at the sail, it would move the sailboat in a similar way as if the wind was pushing the sail.

We are all pretty much screwed