4 ms·

TL;DR: using a calculator to add and multiply, or Mathematica to do integration is okay because as society advances there is no need for certain skills anymore,

by lqet 5y ago

TL;DR: using a calculator to add and multiply, or Mathematica to do integration is okay because as society advances there is no need for certain skills anymore, freeing you to obtain other skills. I am not sure I agree. The argument only seems to work if you consider a very simplistic teleological model of skill learning: that the only benefit in learning a skill is mastering a very specific task, e.g. multiplication, or derivation. But you learn a lot of other skills on the way that may be useful for completely different tasks - or even tasks which aren't known yet and thus cannot yet be trained specifically. As my university teacher in Latin once said: sure, you don't need Latin anymore, but learning it will unlock areas in your brain previously unknown to you.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
Do you know “kill math”? http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
- civilized 5y ago
  The idea that seemingly motivates this project -- that it is somehow impossible or undesirable or not ideal for people to learn enough symbolic manipulation to do basic algebra -- is depressing to me. Now we're going to have people who know algebra programming apps to help people who don't know algebra solve extremely specific problems with no ability to generalize.
  - zafka 5y ago
    I did not get that impression at all. The first example talked about visualizing differential equations.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    That is not the motivation. The motivation is to develop better interfaces for mathematical concepts. In the same way as Arabic numerals are better interfaces than Roman numerals.
    - civilized 5y ago
      "I want to do good things" isn't a substantial description of anyone's philosophy. The question is "what is good". Web apps for visualizing math are nothing new, profs were doing it with Java 20 years ago. The manifesto on this page is the new and bad element being added. Contrary to the manifesto, symbolic manipulation is not a freakish knack possessed only by an elite minority of humans. Barring severe and rare developmental issues, everyone can understand and manipulate written symbols. And in countries with effective educational cultures, people learn it. Our problem is a damaged education culture, not a general human inability to do basic algebra.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        > Barring severe and rare developmental issues, everyone can understand and manipulate written symbols. Yes, but it doesn’t mean the symbols can’t evolve. Like Feynman Diagrams—they made the concepts way more accessible.
- zafka 5y ago
  I did not. Thank you for the link. I hope to explore the idea more. From a quick scan there seems to be a lot of value there.
sampo 5y ago
> As my university teacher in Latin once said: sure, you don't need Latin anymore, but learning it will unlock areas in your brain previously unknown to you. Couldn't you just learn some live language, that has those same grammar features as Latin (declensions for nouns, conjugation for verbs, whatever) that are new to English speakers?
- Jap2-0 5y ago
  In my experience, about half of the benefit of learning a new language is in better understanding of grammatical structures (eg. cases - English has them too; and tangentially, (foreign) language classes taught me more about English from a grammatical perspective than public school English classes), and about half of it is seeing how languages relate to one another (eg. how so many words and phrases in English - and other languages - are derived from Latin). You could get the former, but I doubt you could get (the same level of) the latter from another language. Now of course that's vastly simplified and I'm sure there are other mental affects (and numerous benefits to learning live languages), but those are the ones I've noticed, and the effects would definitely be different.

by lqet 5y ago

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Do you know “kill math”? http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

civilized 5y ago
The idea that seemingly motivates this project -- that it is somehow impossible or undesirable or not ideal for people to learn enough symbolic manipulation to do basic algebra -- is depressing to me. Now we're going to have people who know algebra programming apps to help people who don't know algebra solve extremely specific problems with no ability to generalize.
- zafka 5y ago
  I did not get that impression at all. The first example talked about visualizing differential equations.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  That is not the motivation. The motivation is to develop better interfaces for mathematical concepts. In the same way as Arabic numerals are better interfaces than Roman numerals.
  - civilized 5y ago
    "I want to do good things" isn't a substantial description of anyone's philosophy. The question is "what is good". Web apps for visualizing math are nothing new, profs were doing it with Java 20 years ago. The manifesto on this page is the new and bad element being added. Contrary to the manifesto, symbolic manipulation is not a freakish knack possessed only by an elite minority of humans. Barring severe and rare developmental issues, everyone can understand and manipulate written symbols. And in countries with effective educational cultures, people learn it. Our problem is a damaged education culture, not a general human inability to do basic algebra.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      > Barring severe and rare developmental issues, everyone can understand and manipulate written symbols. Yes, but it doesn’t mean the symbols can’t evolve. Like Feynman Diagrams—they made the concepts way more accessible.
zafka 5y ago
I did not. Thank you for the link. I hope to explore the idea more. From a quick scan there seems to be a lot of value there.

sampo 5y ago

> As my university teacher in Latin once said: sure, you don't need Latin anymore, but learning it will unlock areas in your brain previously unknown to you. Couldn't you just learn some live language, that has those same grammar features as Latin (declensions for nouns, conjugation for verbs, whatever) that are new to English speakers?

Jap2-0 5y ago
In my experience, about half of the benefit of learning a new language is in better understanding of grammatical structures (eg. cases - English has them too; and tangentially, (foreign) language classes taught me more about English from a grammatical perspective than public school English classes), and about half of it is seeing how languages relate to one another (eg. how so many words and phrases in English - and other languages - are derived from Latin). You could get the former, but I doubt you could get (the same level of) the latter from another language. Now of course that's vastly simplified and I'm sure there are other mental affects (and numerous benefits to learning live languages), but those are the ones I've noticed, and the effects would definitely be different.