10 ms·

“Why is it that no one has undertaken the task of cleaning the Augean stables of elementary differential equations? I will hazard an answer: for the same reason

“Why is it that no one has undertaken the task of cleaning the Augean stables of elementary differential equations? I will hazard an answer: for the same reason why we see so little change anywhere today, whether in society, in politics, or in science“ I see a lot of parallels with the Physics department and I think the reason is much more depressing. Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. There is also a certain veneration of the establishment and traditions. I remember on my first day of Classical Mechanics the 50+ year old teacher beamed with pride when he told us he used the same exact textbook when he was in school. As if it was written by the Shakespeare of textbook writing and nobody has managed to surpass it in decades. It' frankly should be an embarrassment As he observed, other departments will step in an do much better. The best linear algebra class I had was a graduate course in the electrical engineering department I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on. I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people

gleenn 3y ago
Came here to quote the same exact part. The author is hilarious and savage but it seems appropriately. Amazing prose and sad state of affairs
tux1968 3y ago
> I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on When the entire video is generated by an AI, that dynamic changes. It's no issue to improve "the script", and have it seamlessly regenerated. We can't be that far away from this capability, and it could have a profound impact on available learning resources.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  The problem isn't writing a better text, it's having departments willing to teach it, or to try alternate approaches at all.
  - tux1968 3y ago
    The OP referenced the Khan Academy as an attempt to displace the ossified educational institutions we have. But it has its own limitations and challenges, some of which will soon be rendered moot by the coming wave of AI technologies, perhaps giving it the final push it needs to truly take hold. Can imagine a world where it doesn't matter where or how you get your education, all that matters is that you can have your knowledge verified by an accredited _testing_ institution. This would open education up to a world of creative competition for students, and allow individuals to find a learning paradigm that best works for themselves.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      This might work well for knowledge/IC-based attainment. There are still other groups, who are possibly the majority when combined: Some people are there for "the experience", no matter how much it costs, nor how little benefit it results in. They will still be paying $80k for an experience that qualifies them for nothing, even though they had that qualification already before they started. Some other people are there for the network, and/or will learn leadership skills in that environment. They can't build/learn those things in an online environment.
      - tux1968 3y ago
        Agreed. One size does not fit all. It's just the hope that options like Khan Academy are made truly viable for those who are well served by such options.
  - siftrics 3y ago
    You have to have a pretty helpless attitude to blame someone else (teachers) on your inability to learn from a good textbook. How are you ever going to learn anything truly novel in the world if you always delegate teaching to a teacher?
daedlanth 3y ago
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The_suffocated 3y ago
Just out of curiosity, what was that classical mechanics textbook?
- kdavis 3y ago
  Goldstein?
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  Pretty sure it was An Introduction to Mechanics Kleppner, Kolenkow The book was probably okay-ish, the point is that surely someone could have made some improvements in the past few decades
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    Doesn’t it use cgs only (I think the new editions finally bit the bullet and switched to mks)
itronitron 3y ago
Khan Academy is excellent for Calculus however their material for Differential Equations is rather minimal since they don't really go into university level material. Perusing online resources for Differential Equations shows that there doesn't seem to be much agreement on how to define the core subject, and there is no grounding on 'how we got here' to provide a path forward to people just starting out. My experience so far, at least.
Baguette5242 3y ago
> "Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained." So true, in many areas. I know a couple of young people that got destroyed by this kind of meat grinding machinery. Typically applies to every medical studies in France, where many kids (with parents that have the money to pay) are going to Spain, Romania or Belgium to study in a less oppressing environment and better teaching methods.
mnl 3y ago
What's the problem with a good book, age? Baby Rudin's first edition is 70 and the latest one is from 1976. It's still widely used and will be for a while. Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old. Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  You're conflating things. This issue isn't that Classical Mechanics has somehow evolved or changed. It's that people continue to find new and better ways to explain and illustrate concepts. At lest personally I don't know of any field or book where I've felt "Hmm, this is basically perfect and I can't imagine a better way to explain these concepts". Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? it's really apparent there is a LOT of room for improvement in pedagogy. As the linked PDF illustrates, most people are teaching along a set formula and sequence of concepts. Good teachers will try to tweak and iterate on these formulas and evolve a better curriculum that sinks in better for students. Naturally as time goes on, if each author has to start from scratch, then it becomes harder and harder to beat "the best book on BLAH" from the last 100 years. (Though I refuse to believe it's a monumental task to write a better textbook than Rudin) If you have open copy-left books, then in theory people could start with a Rudin, fork it, tweak it and improve it. 70 years of improvement could yield some amazing forks! "Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks" That's typically because they select a random new author to in-effect update their copyright date.. and the new author is rarely of the same caliber as the first
  - distcs 3y ago
    > Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? I have. I went through Khan Academy, Brilliant and 3Blue1Brown. After spending more than 100s of hours I started getting the feeling that these are all good for elementary level math. But for any serious math (think real analysis, complex analysis, group theory and beyond), all these platforms did was leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling of having learned something cool but in reality that warm fuzzy feeling was not good enough for solving actual exercises that come in textbooks or really deeply understand the material. I've given up on these online learning media. Back to textbooks. The difference is like night and day.
j7ake 3y ago
This masochism also applies to classical music (eg violin). Decades of rote before you’re allowed to express your own musical thoughts.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  There are plenty of alternative teaching methods for instruments. (TBH, I don't even know what you are referring to by "classical music", but yeah, some places can be quite oppressive.)
- gosub100 3y ago
  I was going to make a variant of this comment. $FAMOUS_COMPOSER's $REALLY_HARD suite is right there, you can get the sheet music and it clearly says "play this note, then play that one, then stop for a specific duration...and so on". That doesn't $EXPLETIVE mean that if you watch Khan Academy's video on how to play notes[1..n] you can play the music according to the composer's specification. I think people who are frustrated they can't grok diff eq in a n-week course are likewise deluded. There is such a deeper meaning those symbols on the page, and I suspect there is simply no way to spoon feed it.
financltravsty 3y ago
> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. In a twist of irony anyone could have predicted: this selects for the middle of the bell curve, and not the right-hand tail. I feel as though there are a set of personality qualities that must not be present in order to achieve anything worthwhile. Wasting time, frivolous activities, and fostering an outsized ego are just a few.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Yeah, the high-capability outliers are used to coast in any subject and may or may not have time to adapt to the laborious requirements before failing. Also, anybody with "street-smarts" can see the cost-benefit ratio and perceive the benefit is kept much smaller than some other, easier subjects, while the cost is artificially inflated. What it does select is people that really love the subject. And is at least a little bit smarter than average.
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pif 3y ago
> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries. And I cannot understand what you are saying there.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  > > If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. > I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries. And I cannot understand what you are saying there. Hrm.
  - pif 3y ago
    ???
    - jlokier 3y ago
      For what it's worth, I was a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries, where I turned down an offer to do a PhD in particle physics :-) (A foolish career decision in retrospect.) I think they are saying that if you were clever enough to do physics at that level, you wouldn't understand the problem being discussed. So when you said you don't understand, you gave a live demonstration. When you emphasised your physics credentials as if to say the above didn't make sense even to a physics-smart and well-credentialed person, that pattern-matched even more strongly with the idea that those who go far through higher education institutes don't relate to the problem so don't tend to work on improvements.
      - pif 3y ago
        What I meant is that I think I know something about academics in science in general, and in Physics in particular. Getting my PhD was not easy for me, as it wasn't for the most people I met, because none of us is a so-called genius. Rather, all of us had to put a lot of effort and discipline in order to move on. And never did we met any artificial obstacles or deliberate difficulties. Physics is hard; it is as hard as many other academic fields. You need focus, you need discipline, and yes, you need passion to be able to keep focus and discipline. But you will be welcome if you try, and you will receive a lot of help. Maybe you will find out it was not the right choice for you and you will change your target, but you will not be screened out and rejected just because.
baz00 3y ago
I don't think it's that at all. The real cause is just some entirely institutionalised academics wrote the textbooks and everyone else is copying it rote as if it's the way of doing everything because that's all they know. You need people from outside the echo chamber. I found The Open University to be a considerably better education provider on that basis than the red brick I attended quite frankly. The material and tuition is far far far better. Incidentally your point in Khan Academy is spot on. That's basically OU but the material is miles better and it actually leads to a qualification. Example free course: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/introduction-differential-equations/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/intr...
JadeNB 3y ago
> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. I have been a on the mathematics faculty, including at some decent places, for almost 20 years. I have never met a single university mathematics teacher who thought this way. To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude (hopefully both). Granted there are high bars for reaching professional competence, but that's intrinsic to the subject—and there is a welcoming place, in math probably more than in any physical science, for amateurs as well as professionals. > As he observed, other departments will step in an do much better. The best linear algebra class I had was a graduate course in the electrical engineering department It's worth noting that this isn't necessarily because EEs are better teachers—although of course in any particular case they might be—but because they can give you a course more focused on your interests. Math departments wind up teaching many courses populated largely, if not entirely, by non-math majors, and we cannot be discipline experts in every field of application in which students might be interested—nor, even if we were, could we simultaneously teach one course in a way that appealed simultaneously and particularly to the diverse applications needed by every student.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I don't think the line of thinking is directly "lets make this painful on purpose" but there is a sense of - everyone has to go through the same gauntlet and some people are just not cut out of math/physics/etc. It's just the way of the world. There is not direct desire to make the experience better/smoother/easier than it was your generation. I don't know how it is in the Math department, but in Physics there is almost a sort of hazing that goes on, where some subjects are just known for how grueling they are and how you just have to go through it "To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude" Not to read too much into it, but this kinda hints at the problem. You're delighted at the students that have passed your IQ test. There is generally very little care given to the 70%+ of students that aren't making the cut. The true horror is how many students are in the class and not getting it. And the teachers are not freaking out From my university experience (which was a while ago) it was abundantly clear that most students hate their math/physics classes, were bored out of their skulls and the teachers are only interested in the engaged students that are getting it. What you should be "delighted" by is when you find a new way to explain something that resonates with most of the class
mhh__ 3y ago
There is nuance to this. It's not so much a habit of being deliberately arcane as, in my opinion at least, badly attempting to keep the sense of the sublime that engineering departments often lose touch with. I went to a pretty shit physics department, but there were glimpses of beauty. The engineering department was more professional, better run, definitely more fun if you like the thrill of actually making something, but as engineers theory is just a means to an end, so I would've been bored on some fundamental level. Aside: As a (I suspect) dyslexia diagnosis in-waiting I am a sucker for really good, crisp typesetting. Old books often struggle with that (e.g. particularly curly non-latin characters are almost unreadable for me), but reasoning is timeless. Landau & Lifshitz is old, ugly, a bit terrifying, and yet timelessly brilliant. Difficult, but in a physically challenging way rather than the more modern, Grecian-thinking, rigour-by-nomenclature style found in modernity.
yawboakye 3y ago
given the current political environment i think we should protect and promote old textbooks as much as possible. they’re lean, devoid of ceremony, makes no assumptions about race/gender/political orientation/socioeconomic status of the students as they work their way through the foundations of the subject. for a modern example of mumble jumble junk, with so much presuppositions about your intelligence, see the rust book[0]. it’s a tough book to study because it wastes so many words saying nothing at all. many people have used it yet rust lifetimes and borrow checker semantics is as arcane and elusive as the holy grail. [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/
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zopa 3y ago
Curricula are hard to change for the same reason widely-used apis are hard to change: it’s the downstream dependencies. There’s a shared understanding of what “took undergrad differential equations” means, and breaking from that has a cost. If you teach differently, your students will be at a disadvantage because they won’t know the things futre courses, tests and employers expect them to know. Maybe that will be outweighed by the objectively superior education you’ll have provided with your bold new approach, and maybe not. Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.
- dooglius 3y ago
  One argument TFA makes is that a lot of the material is not ever subsequently used.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Otoh biology classes don’t suffer from this as much. Textbooks are routinely updated to reflect new understandings. Professors seem to have a lot of choice with what they cover, often highlighting their own subfield where they can speak more to it. Physics classes in comparison felt like a factory. You’d also pay twice as high a lab fee as any biology or chemistry lab to play with 40 year old brass weights and frictionless cars.
brocha 3y ago
Makes me think of Jackson's electrodynamics - yit always seemed to me a hazing ritual. I remember a story of someone asking him a question from the book and he basically said "how the hell would I know?" I enjoyed the book and class myself but it did not make me a better physicist, just a better mathematician
BeetleB 3y ago
> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. Did you go to a top university? And did you study physics in grad school? I find this statement amusing given how easy the undergrad curriculum was compared to grad school physics. In my undergrad, physics was challenging only in that you needed a good command of the mathematics. If you had that, the actual instruction (and textbooks) were of average difficulty. But again, experience may vary from university to university. Certainly I can see professors who could have made it much tougher if they wanted to. As for the rest of your comments in this thread: Sorry, but to me this is another HN thread where people insist it can be taught better, and teachers are being irresponsible in not finding such approaches, but with very little actual proof that it can be as good as imagined. It's not like you have concrete examples of better pedagogy to pointed out.
trashtester 3y ago
> The system acts an an informal IQ test Undergrad textbooks in Physics may be somewhat challenging. But the graduate texts (at least in theoretical Physics) tend to be MUCH harder, especially if your undergrad degree didn't include several courses of abstract algebra and topology. Ideally, physicists should have Geometric Algebra (Clifford Algebra) as part of their undergraduate classes. But at least when I went to Uni, there was no space in the undergrad tracks for this level of math.
frognumber 3y ago
I have a lot of expertise in this domain: > I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on. Not the issue. > I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people The issue. There actually isn't even a good open content license, analogous to the GPL-style licenses. Improving on video means having access to the source files. Ditto for interactive activities. Khan Academy is designed to look as open as possible, while withholding just enough and being just mean enough with license to make any sort of reuse a hopeless endeavor. With the proper piece in place, video is very possible to iterate upon.
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Q_is_4_Quantum 3y ago
>I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people Could anyone explain to me how they think this might work in practice? I am presently producing an undergrad textbook in quantum theory. I have two motivations: 1. IMO the "qubits first" (ie teach finite-dimensional QM before wave mechanics) approach to introducing the theory is superior (basically only Feynman did it of all the "classic" books) and 2. I'm involved in third world education and I want the book to be freely downloadable. Now its a lot of work despite having taught the course multiple times and produced comprehensive lecture notes etc. Once its done I am sure I will not have the time to keep updating it, expanding on the problem sets and so on. A former student on the course is helping with the conversion and he will be a co-author, but like me he sees it as a service not at all about producing a product. So I think we're both very open to the idea of such "open license". Given all that here are the kinds of questions that immediately arise: - Mechanically how should one make the book available for such re-working? Put the source files on github? (Not something I've ever used, but I know roughly how it works). - Via what mechanism does someone get to be credited for work they might do on better versions? - Who decides what is the current "definitive" or "best" version? I will have a separate website for the book so I guess new versions can be announced there. But one way or the other I won't be involved forever. - QM is fraught with crackpots, people who have whacky ideas on how to explain things and so on. Can they be prevented from "taking over", rewriting large chunks into (what I would view as) nonsense and so on? Note that presumably my name would still be associated with the new versions, so the issue is primarily not lending credence to stuff I fundamentally disagree with, not that they shouldn't be allowed to go do their thing. - We will make a POD service available for purchasing hardcopies, the (expected to be small) royalties from which would be donated to third world physics/math education. Is there some license that can ensure any subsequent use of the material is also similarly non-profit? I can see some (though not perfect) analogies with open-source software, so perhaps someone here has useful ideas about this kind of thing already...

gleenn 3y ago

Came here to quote the same exact part. The author is hilarious and savage but it seems appropriately. Amazing prose and sad state of affairs

tux1968 3y ago

> I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on When the entire video is generated by an AI, that dynamic changes. It's no issue to improve "the script", and have it seamlessly regenerated. We can't be that far away from this capability, and it could have a profound impact on available learning resources.

ajkjk 3y ago
The problem isn't writing a better text, it's having departments willing to teach it, or to try alternate approaches at all.
- tux1968 3y ago
  The OP referenced the Khan Academy as an attempt to displace the ossified educational institutions we have. But it has its own limitations and challenges, some of which will soon be rendered moot by the coming wave of AI technologies, perhaps giving it the final push it needs to truly take hold. Can imagine a world where it doesn't matter where or how you get your education, all that matters is that you can have your knowledge verified by an accredited _testing_ institution. This would open education up to a world of creative competition for students, and allow individuals to find a learning paradigm that best works for themselves.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    This might work well for knowledge/IC-based attainment. There are still other groups, who are possibly the majority when combined: Some people are there for "the experience", no matter how much it costs, nor how little benefit it results in. They will still be paying $80k for an experience that qualifies them for nothing, even though they had that qualification already before they started. Some other people are there for the network, and/or will learn leadership skills in that environment. They can't build/learn those things in an online environment.
    - tux1968 3y ago
      Agreed. One size does not fit all. It's just the hope that options like Khan Academy are made truly viable for those who are well served by such options.
- siftrics 3y ago
  You have to have a pretty helpless attitude to blame someone else (teachers) on your inability to learn from a good textbook. How are you ever going to learn anything truly novel in the world if you always delegate teaching to a teacher?

daedlanth 3y ago

[dead]

The_suffocated 3y ago

Just out of curiosity, what was that classical mechanics textbook?

kdavis 3y ago
Goldstein?
contrarian1234 3y ago
Pretty sure it was An Introduction to Mechanics Kleppner, Kolenkow The book was probably okay-ish, the point is that surely someone could have made some improvements in the past few decades
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Doesn’t it use cgs only (I think the new editions finally bit the bullet and switched to mks)

itronitron 3y ago

Khan Academy is excellent for Calculus however their material for Differential Equations is rather minimal since they don't really go into university level material. Perusing online resources for Differential Equations shows that there doesn't seem to be much agreement on how to define the core subject, and there is no grounding on 'how we got here' to provide a path forward to people just starting out. My experience so far, at least.

Baguette5242 3y ago

> "Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained." So true, in many areas. I know a couple of young people that got destroyed by this kind of meat grinding machinery. Typically applies to every medical studies in France, where many kids (with parents that have the money to pay) are going to Spain, Romania or Belgium to study in a less oppressing environment and better teaching methods.

mnl 3y ago

What's the problem with a good book, age? Baby Rudin's first edition is 70 and the latest one is from 1976. It's still widely used and will be for a while. Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old. Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.

contrarian1234 3y ago
You're conflating things. This issue isn't that Classical Mechanics has somehow evolved or changed. It's that people continue to find new and better ways to explain and illustrate concepts. At lest personally I don't know of any field or book where I've felt "Hmm, this is basically perfect and I can't imagine a better way to explain these concepts". Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? it's really apparent there is a LOT of room for improvement in pedagogy. As the linked PDF illustrates, most people are teaching along a set formula and sequence of concepts. Good teachers will try to tweak and iterate on these formulas and evolve a better curriculum that sinks in better for students. Naturally as time goes on, if each author has to start from scratch, then it becomes harder and harder to beat "the best book on BLAH" from the last 100 years. (Though I refuse to believe it's a monumental task to write a better textbook than Rudin) If you have open copy-left books, then in theory people could start with a Rudin, fork it, tweak it and improve it. 70 years of improvement could yield some amazing forks! "Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks" That's typically because they select a random new author to in-effect update their copyright date.. and the new author is rarely of the same caliber as the first
- distcs 3y ago
  > Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? I have. I went through Khan Academy, Brilliant and 3Blue1Brown. After spending more than 100s of hours I started getting the feeling that these are all good for elementary level math. But for any serious math (think real analysis, complex analysis, group theory and beyond), all these platforms did was leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling of having learned something cool but in reality that warm fuzzy feeling was not good enough for solving actual exercises that come in textbooks or really deeply understand the material. I've given up on these online learning media. Back to textbooks. The difference is like night and day.

j7ake 3y ago

This masochism also applies to classical music (eg violin). Decades of rote before you’re allowed to express your own musical thoughts.

marcosdumay 3y ago
There are plenty of alternative teaching methods for instruments. (TBH, I don't even know what you are referring to by "classical music", but yeah, some places can be quite oppressive.)
gosub100 3y ago
I was going to make a variant of this comment. $FAMOUS_COMPOSER's $REALLY_HARD suite is right there, you can get the sheet music and it clearly says "play this note, then play that one, then stop for a specific duration...and so on". That doesn't $EXPLETIVE mean that if you watch Khan Academy's video on how to play notes[1..n] you can play the music according to the composer's specification. I think people who are frustrated they can't grok diff eq in a n-week course are likewise deluded. There is such a deeper meaning those symbols on the page, and I suspect there is simply no way to spoon feed it.

financltravsty 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago
Yeah, the high-capability outliers are used to coast in any subject and may or may not have time to adapt to the laborious requirements before failing. Also, anybody with "street-smarts" can see the cost-benefit ratio and perceive the benefit is kept much smaller than some other, easier subjects, while the cost is artificially inflated. What it does select is people that really love the subject. And is at least a little bit smarter than average.

deleted 3y ago

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pif 3y ago

> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries. And I cannot understand what you are saying there.

michaelcampbell 3y ago
> > If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. > I have a PhD in particle physics, and I've been a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries. And I cannot understand what you are saying there. Hrm.
- pif 3y ago
  ???
  - jlokier 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I was a researcher at CERN with colleagues from multiple countries, where I turned down an offer to do a PhD in particle physics :-) (A foolish career decision in retrospect.) I think they are saying that if you were clever enough to do physics at that level, you wouldn't understand the problem being discussed. So when you said you don't understand, you gave a live demonstration. When you emphasised your physics credentials as if to say the above didn't make sense even to a physics-smart and well-credentialed person, that pattern-matched even more strongly with the idea that those who go far through higher education institutes don't relate to the problem so don't tend to work on improvements.
    - pif 3y ago
      What I meant is that I think I know something about academics in science in general, and in Physics in particular. Getting my PhD was not easy for me, as it wasn't for the most people I met, because none of us is a so-called genius. Rather, all of us had to put a lot of effort and discipline in order to move on. And never did we met any artificial obstacles or deliberate difficulties. Physics is hard; it is as hard as many other academic fields. You need focus, you need discipline, and yes, you need passion to be able to keep focus and discipline. But you will be welcome if you try, and you will receive a lot of help. Maybe you will find out it was not the right choice for you and you will change your target, but you will not be screened out and rejected just because.

baz00 3y ago

I don't think it's that at all. The real cause is just some entirely institutionalised academics wrote the textbooks and everyone else is copying it rote as if it's the way of doing everything because that's all they know. You need people from outside the echo chamber. I found The Open University to be a considerably better education provider on that basis than the red brick I attended quite frankly. The material and tuition is far far far better. Incidentally your point in Khan Academy is spot on. That's basically OU but the material is miles better and it actually leads to a qualification. Example free course: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/introduction-differential-equations/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/intr...

JadeNB 3y ago

> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. The system acts an an informal IQ test - that maintains the prestige of the departments. If you're pigheaded and clever enough to get through the masochistic torture is that their undergrad textbooks then you're probably pretty clever and so the prestige of the degrees is maintained. I have been a on the mathematics faculty, including at some decent places, for almost 20 years. I have never met a single university mathematics teacher who thought this way. To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude (hopefully both). Granted there are high bars for reaching professional competence, but that's intrinsic to the subject—and there is a welcoming place, in math probably more than in any physical science, for amateurs as well as professionals. > As he observed, other departments will step in an do much better. The best linear algebra class I had was a graduate course in the electrical engineering department It's worth noting that this isn't necessarily because EEs are better teachers—although of course in any particular case they might be—but because they can give you a course more focused on your interests. Math departments wind up teaching many courses populated largely, if not entirely, by non-math majors, and we cannot be discipline experts in every field of application in which students might be interested—nor, even if we were, could we simultaneously teach one course in a way that appealed simultaneously and particularly to the diverse applications needed by every student.

contrarian1234 3y ago
I don't think the line of thinking is directly "lets make this painful on purpose" but there is a sense of - everyone has to go through the same gauntlet and some people are just not cut out of math/physics/etc. It's just the way of the world. There is not direct desire to make the experience better/smoother/easier than it was your generation. I don't know how it is in the Math department, but in Physics there is almost a sort of hazing that goes on, where some subjects are just known for how grueling they are and how you just have to go through it "To the contrary, we are delighted when someone shows even a spark of interest or aptitude" Not to read too much into it, but this kinda hints at the problem. You're delighted at the students that have passed your IQ test. There is generally very little care given to the 70%+ of students that aren't making the cut. The true horror is how many students are in the class and not getting it. And the teachers are not freaking out From my university experience (which was a while ago) it was abundantly clear that most students hate their math/physics classes, were bored out of their skulls and the teachers are only interested in the engaged students that are getting it. What you should be "delighted" by is when you find a new way to explain something that resonates with most of the class

mhh__ 3y ago

There is nuance to this. It's not so much a habit of being deliberately arcane as, in my opinion at least, badly attempting to keep the sense of the sublime that engineering departments often lose touch with. I went to a pretty shit physics department, but there were glimpses of beauty. The engineering department was more professional, better run, definitely more fun if you like the thrill of actually making something, but as engineers theory is just a means to an end, so I would've been bored on some fundamental level. Aside: As a (I suspect) dyslexia diagnosis in-waiting I am a sucker for really good, crisp typesetting. Old books often struggle with that (e.g. particularly curly non-latin characters are almost unreadable for me), but reasoning is timeless. Landau & Lifshitz is old, ugly, a bit terrifying, and yet timelessly brilliant. Difficult, but in a physically challenging way rather than the more modern, Grecian-thinking, rigour-by-nomenclature style found in modernity.

yawboakye 3y ago

given the current political environment i think we should protect and promote old textbooks as much as possible. they’re lean, devoid of ceremony, makes no assumptions about race/gender/political orientation/socioeconomic status of the students as they work their way through the foundations of the subject. for a modern example of mumble jumble junk, with so much presuppositions about your intelligence, see the rust book[0]. it’s a tough book to study because it wastes so many words saying nothing at all. many people have used it yet rust lifetimes and borrow checker semantics is as arcane and elusive as the holy grail. [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/

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zopa 3y ago

Curricula are hard to change for the same reason widely-used apis are hard to change: it’s the downstream dependencies. There’s a shared understanding of what “took undergrad differential equations” means, and breaking from that has a cost. If you teach differently, your students will be at a disadvantage because they won’t know the things futre courses, tests and employers expect them to know. Maybe that will be outweighed by the objectively superior education you’ll have provided with your bold new approach, and maybe not. Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.

dooglius 3y ago
One argument TFA makes is that a lot of the material is not ever subsequently used.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Otoh biology classes don’t suffer from this as much. Textbooks are routinely updated to reflect new understandings. Professors seem to have a lot of choice with what they cover, often highlighting their own subfield where they can speak more to it. Physics classes in comparison felt like a factory. You’d also pay twice as high a lab fee as any biology or chemistry lab to play with 40 year old brass weights and frictionless cars.

brocha 3y ago

Makes me think of Jackson's electrodynamics - yit always seemed to me a hazing ritual. I remember a story of someone asking him a question from the book and he basically said "how the hell would I know?" I enjoyed the book and class myself but it did not make me a better physicist, just a better mathematician

BeetleB 3y ago

> Both fields embrace a sort of masochism and active desire to keep knowledge impenetrable b/c it acts as a mechanism to feed out the dummies. Did you go to a top university? And did you study physics in grad school? I find this statement amusing given how easy the undergrad curriculum was compared to grad school physics. In my undergrad, physics was challenging only in that you needed a good command of the mathematics. If you had that, the actual instruction (and textbooks) were of average difficulty. But again, experience may vary from university to university. Certainly I can see professors who could have made it much tougher if they wanted to. As for the rest of your comments in this thread: Sorry, but to me this is another HN thread where people insist it can be taught better, and teachers are being irresponsible in not finding such approaches, but with very little actual proof that it can be as good as imagined. It's not like you have concrete examples of better pedagogy to pointed out.

trashtester 3y ago

> The system acts an an informal IQ test Undergrad textbooks in Physics may be somewhat challenging. But the graduate texts (at least in theoretical Physics) tend to be MUCH harder, especially if your undergrad degree didn't include several courses of abstract algebra and topology. Ideally, physicists should have Geometric Algebra (Clifford Algebra) as part of their undergraduate classes. But at least when I went to Uni, there was no space in the undergrad tracks for this level of math.

frognumber 3y ago

I have a lot of expertise in this domain: > I had a lot of hope for things like Khan Academy, but the issue is video is not text and it's hard to iterate and improve on. Not the issue. > I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people The issue. There actually isn't even a good open content license, analogous to the GPL-style licenses. Improving on video means having access to the source files. Ditto for interactive activities. Khan Academy is designed to look as open as possible, while withholding just enough and being just mean enough with license to make any sort of reuse a hopeless endeavor. With the proper piece in place, video is very possible to iterate upon.

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Q_is_4_Quantum 3y ago

>I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people Could anyone explain to me how they think this might work in practice? I am presently producing an undergrad textbook in quantum theory. I have two motivations: 1. IMO the "qubits first" (ie teach finite-dimensional QM before wave mechanics) approach to introducing the theory is superior (basically only Feynman did it of all the "classic" books) and 2. I'm involved in third world education and I want the book to be freely downloadable. Now its a lot of work despite having taught the course multiple times and produced comprehensive lecture notes etc. Once its done I am sure I will not have the time to keep updating it, expanding on the problem sets and so on. A former student on the course is helping with the conversion and he will be a co-author, but like me he sees it as a service not at all about producing a product. So I think we're both very open to the idea of such "open license". Given all that here are the kinds of questions that immediately arise: - Mechanically how should one make the book available for such re-working? Put the source files on github? (Not something I've ever used, but I know roughly how it works). - Via what mechanism does someone get to be credited for work they might do on better versions? - Who decides what is the current "definitive" or "best" version? I will have a separate website for the book so I guess new versions can be announced there. But one way or the other I won't be involved forever. - QM is fraught with crackpots, people who have whacky ideas on how to explain things and so on. Can they be prevented from "taking over", rewriting large chunks into (what I would view as) nonsense and so on? Note that presumably my name would still be associated with the new versions, so the issue is primarily not lending credence to stuff I fundamentally disagree with, not that they shouldn't be allowed to go do their thing. - We will make a POD service available for purchasing hardcopies, the (expected to be small) royalties from which would be donated to third world physics/math education. Is there some license that can ensure any subsequent use of the material is also similarly non-profit? I can see some (though not perfect) analogies with open-source software, so perhaps someone here has useful ideas about this kind of thing already...