3 ms·

I always thought it tough to really learn math without doing exercise to really understand how things work.

by RandomLensman 2y ago

tombert 2y ago
It is! In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Not sure self-selecting on exercises is really sufficient (at least for me I doubt it).
  - tombert 2y ago
    You're not wrong, but such is the way with nearly anything autodidactic. Learning how to find exercises that are challenging enough to actually learn something is a skill that I'm not going to pretend that I've mastered, but I would like to think I've gotten reasonably good with. I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level. For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on. The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.

3 ms·

I always thought it tough to really learn math without doing exercise to really understand how things work.

by RandomLensman 2y ago

I always thought it tough to really learn math without doing exercise to really understand how things work.

tombert 2y ago
It is! In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Not sure self-selecting on exercises is really sufficient (at least for me I doubt it).
  - tombert 2y ago
    You're not wrong, but such is the way with nearly anything autodidactic. Learning how to find exercises that are challenging enough to actually learn something is a skill that I'm not going to pretend that I've mastered, but I would like to think I've gotten reasonably good with. I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level. For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on. The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.