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>For those who disagree, how do you explain the very large number of people who spends tons of time and energy trying to get good at maths but fails to even gra
by konjin 6y ago
>For those who disagree, how do you explain the very large number of people who spends tons of time and energy trying to get good at maths but fails to even grasp simple concepts like calculus?
Calculus isn't simple, calculus is an abuse of notation that works by anomalous cancellation in most of the cases you see in university.
Even for something as simple as arithmetic our notation is terrible and misleading. The people who are 'good at maths' are actually good at making unwarranted assumptions and extrapolations from incomplete data. Drawing the actual parse tree for expressions let my 7 year old cousin work at the level of a 12 year old even though she was failing the maths class before I helped her.
- username90 6y agoIt isn't simple to a computer, no. But humans have intuition to help guide us which is what makes maths simple. The more of it you have the simpler maths become, the less of it you have the more you have to approach it like a computer as you describe. Being able to approach something like a computer doesn't mean that you understand it though, otherwise you could argue that anyone being able to follow the instructions of a Turing engine understands basically all knowledge.
- konjin 6y agoWere that the case we could use human brains in jars to solve np problems. We can't. Human intuition is a poor thing that got us through the middle ages. It should stay there.
- username90 6y agoHuman intuition is what lets humans solve problems we still can't solve using computers. It is therefore highly relevant until we have invented general purpose AI.
- konjin 6y agoI'm old enough to remember that being said about chess and go. We do not need general purpose AI to solve either of those, and neither do we need it for solving mathematical problems.
- red75prime 6y agoChess and go aren't solved in the proper sense. There's no mathematically proven optimal strategy. What we have is a sort of artificial intuition engines.
- username90 6y agoI'm not sure how that is relevant for this discussion.