6 ms·

Why are people so afraid of math?

ganafagol 6y ago
Because "I've always been bad at math" is a hip thing to say in today's society and gets you laughter and approving nods.
- cultyyy123 6y ago
  In reality most people are bad/afraid at Numbers not at Maths. The book Maths without numbers highlight what needs to be done to Education system.
  - tgv 6y ago
    Sure. It's much easier to understand the Dedekind cut, rings, and function spaces than to subtract 35% from 140.
    - laichzeit0 6y ago
      Most people afraid of “math” only have exposure to the second kind. I figure it has more to do with finding those type of mechanical operations boring (they are), and hence all of maths must be equally boring. If you’re a software developer, enjoy abstractions, programming language theory, and solving problems there is no way you would find math of the first sort boring. Alas, in high school pretty much all the math is of the boring mechanical kind. At least mine was, anyway. Even the first exposure to non-rigorous calculus is of the shitty plug-and-chug variety.
      - tgv 6y ago
        It's hard to go through life without developing a modest understanding of arithmetic and reading. You wouldn't even be able to check your receipts if school started with Peano's axioms. Consequently, numbers come first, as they have for millennia now. Which makes sense, because maths developed out of intuitive arithmetic. As a matter of fact, my parents complain they never understood maths, because they were taught algebraic rules by rote. a * b = b * a. They can recite that, they just don't have a clue what to do with it. Teachers just aren't good, and certainly not at maths. It's a struggle to teach billions the basic skills. There is no solution. I also don't know any mathematician or physicist bad at arithmetic. Quite a few of them seem to delight in numbers and arithmetic puzzles. So I really don't see how to avoid numbers and boring school work, nor how the former could have a positive effect.
        cultyyy123 6y ago
        I am not good at arithmetic, but I have a doctorate. For arithmetic, there is calculator or your smartphone. Arithmetic does not equals to reading. There is an alternative to arithmetic, it's number sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense We should teach kids how to think mathematically and they can learn arithmetic later down the road if they really wants. Dr Keith Devlin had a great op-ed on this.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
My guess is because they were taught how to plug numbers into an equation and get an answer and didn't get taught math skills like algebraic manipulation. This isn't a slight against people who aren't good at maths. I think the way education system work is pretty broken.
gspr 6y ago
Not only afraid of math. Afraid of math and at the same time confident that one will excel with deep learning.
- anewhnaccount2 6y ago
  Lots of people make use of relational databases without formally understanding set theory/normal forms. They just learn by example and hacking it. What you're seeing here with deep learning is the same situation.
  - gspr 6y ago
    Sure. And I didn't at all mean that people who aren't good at math should stop doing deep learning. I just meant that it's weird to me that people seemingly tiptoe around using simple math to explain what is, at heart, simple math, and instead invent a whole new terminology and a dictionary of imprecise analogies to get by.
jokoon 6y ago
I like math, but ML is applied science, so at some point, it's an algorithm, so I don't really understand why math is really required. I'd rather read pseudo code than math equations. I would just assemble all the bricks myself, read the code, and ask questions later. I have problems with the scholastic method: * fill students with theory * tell them to execute the exercise * hope they understood the material * evaluate with an exam * use grades and eliminate the ones who failed This doesn't work for all students, or it works only for very very "structured" students who managed to learn this way. A lot of people learn by doing, and reading/writing math is not going to help them. That's why a lot of developers want to read the code. Math is a language, but it's not always very well defined and often, teachers have their own notation and usages, which can be frustrating. Code is well defined, and always checked and verified by a parser. Code is more reliable than mathematical notation. It's perfectly understandable for developers to refuse to use math to do machine learning, when machine learning is applied. Most of those developers want a crash course and be operational as fast as possible. The theory is not always required, unless you want to do research and go further. I have nothing against mathematics, I love maths, but for ML, you need statistics and other simple things, you don't need to go very far in the maths. Leave optimization to people who want to optimize. Do things step by step. First step is: let people understand and use machine learning.

Because "I've always been bad at math" is a hip thing to say in today's society and gets you laughter and approving nods.

cultyyy123 6y ago
In reality most people are bad/afraid at Numbers not at Maths. The book Maths without numbers highlight what needs to be done to Education system.
- tgv 6y ago
  Sure. It's much easier to understand the Dedekind cut, rings, and function spaces than to subtract 35% from 140.
  - laichzeit0 6y ago
    Most people afraid of “math” only have exposure to the second kind. I figure it has more to do with finding those type of mechanical operations boring (they are), and hence all of maths must be equally boring. If you’re a software developer, enjoy abstractions, programming language theory, and solving problems there is no way you would find math of the first sort boring. Alas, in high school pretty much all the math is of the boring mechanical kind. At least mine was, anyway. Even the first exposure to non-rigorous calculus is of the shitty plug-and-chug variety.
    - tgv 6y ago
      It's hard to go through life without developing a modest understanding of arithmetic and reading. You wouldn't even be able to check your receipts if school started with Peano's axioms. Consequently, numbers come first, as they have for millennia now. Which makes sense, because maths developed out of intuitive arithmetic. As a matter of fact, my parents complain they never understood maths, because they were taught algebraic rules by rote. a * b = b * a. They can recite that, they just don't have a clue what to do with it. Teachers just aren't good, and certainly not at maths. It's a struggle to teach billions the basic skills. There is no solution. I also don't know any mathematician or physicist bad at arithmetic. Quite a few of them seem to delight in numbers and arithmetic puzzles. So I really don't see how to avoid numbers and boring school work, nor how the former could have a positive effect.
      - cultyyy123 6y ago
        I am not good at arithmetic, but I have a doctorate. For arithmetic, there is calculator or your smartphone. Arithmetic does not equals to reading. There is an alternative to arithmetic, it's number sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense We should teach kids how to think mathematically and they can learn arithmetic later down the road if they really wants. Dr Keith Devlin had a great op-ed on this.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

My guess is because they were taught how to plug numbers into an equation and get an answer and didn't get taught math skills like algebraic manipulation. This isn't a slight against people who aren't good at maths. I think the way education system work is pretty broken.

gspr 6y ago

Not only afraid of math. Afraid of math and at the same time confident that one will excel with deep learning.

anewhnaccount2 6y ago
Lots of people make use of relational databases without formally understanding set theory/normal forms. They just learn by example and hacking it. What you're seeing here with deep learning is the same situation.
- gspr 6y ago
  Sure. And I didn't at all mean that people who aren't good at math should stop doing deep learning. I just meant that it's weird to me that people seemingly tiptoe around using simple math to explain what is, at heart, simple math, and instead invent a whole new terminology and a dictionary of imprecise analogies to get by.

jokoon 6y ago

I like math, but ML is applied science, so at some point, it's an algorithm, so I don't really understand why math is really required. I'd rather read pseudo code than math equations. I would just assemble all the bricks myself, read the code, and ask questions later. I have problems with the scholastic method: * fill students with theory * tell them to execute the exercise * hope they understood the material * evaluate with an exam * use grades and eliminate the ones who failed This doesn't work for all students, or it works only for very very "structured" students who managed to learn this way. A lot of people learn by doing, and reading/writing math is not going to help them. That's why a lot of developers want to read the code. Math is a language, but it's not always very well defined and often, teachers have their own notation and usages, which can be frustrating. Code is well defined, and always checked and verified by a parser. Code is more reliable than mathematical notation. It's perfectly understandable for developers to refuse to use math to do machine learning, when machine learning is applied. Most of those developers want a crash course and be operational as fast as possible. The theory is not always required, unless you want to do research and go further. I have nothing against mathematics, I love maths, but for ML, you need statistics and other simple things, you don't need to go very far in the maths. Leave optimization to people who want to optimize. Do things step by step. First step is: let people understand and use machine learning.