quus · HackerTrans

2 years agodiscuss

yeah, I wish we could be more specific here. Like I appreciate the things you’re saying, and I don’t doubt the truth or sincerity of that opinion — but I feel like I’ve encountered some math PhD students who were surprisingly inflexible in the way they thought, and very parochial in their intellectual interests. I guess I just haven’t (anecdotally) found the transference of math training to other domains as much as others seem to.

quus

2 years agodiscuss

Great, so what are those benefits all the way up?

quus

2 years agodiscuss

You’re sort of making my point — there are people out there who think math education sets the mind free and opens the gates of higher cognition, and then others talking about hum drum stuff like tax brackets and compound interest. If the benefits really just amount to a few units of pre-algebra content, that would be disappointing.

quus

2 years agodiscuss

My claim isn’t really that there’s no benefit or utility to math — that’s obviously false — but that maybe its benefits to regular people are more modest than the cheerleaders want to admit.

quus

2 years agodiscuss

Math doesn’t seem to me the only source of thinking clearly, or learning how to learn, etc. And if I’m searching for an aesthetic high, there are definitely better places to look — and ones that don’t require such a long runway.

quus

2 years agodiscuss

I’m actually interested in the “can benefit from” claim in this title. I don’t particularly doubt that most people could become reasonably good at math, but I wonder how much of the juice is worth the squeeze, and how juicy it is on the scale from basic arithmetic up to the point where you’re reading papers by June Huh or Terry Tao.

As anti-intellectual as it sounds, you could imagine someone asking, is it worth devoting years of your life to study this subject which becomes increasingly esoteric and not obviously of specific benefit the further you go, at least prima facie? Many people wind up advocating for mathematics via aesthetics, saying: well it’s very beautiful out there in the weeds, you just have to spend dozens of years studying to see the view. That marketing pitch has never been the most persuasive for me.

quus

2 years agodiscuss

a post which will spawn many bad takes on philosophy in the comments section by tech workers who barely know the subject but believe they are experts

quus

2 years agodiscuss

lol bro, I can’t imagine thinking that Wittgenstein is obfuscation. If anything that guy’s entire life was dedicated to de-obfuscation through logical analysis. Probably you don’t understand cause you casually picked up the Tractatus or Investigations without doing any background reading on what they were about

quus

2 years agodiscuss

This is not accurate. Ethics is very well-studied in analytic philosophy, and discussion of Plato and Kant are central topics.