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Weird. When I was doing boxing, having to run sprints every training session, doing dozens of pushups, situps and what not did not beat the interest I had in bo

Weird. When I was doing boxing, having to run sprints every training session, doing dozens of pushups, situps and what not did not beat the interest I had in boxing :).

borroka 2y ago
Not at all weird, because you were also boxing. But if your boxing sessions were only to be sprints, pushups, situps etc, and no boxing, you would surely lose interest in doing boxing at that place. Likewise, if your jiu jitsu training were only drills and no sparring, there would be no people doing jiu jitsu after a while.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  My boxing training sessions were about 50-50 exercises and the padding/sparring session (in which there were big breaks). In my undergrad, I was made to take 6 math courses, and about 18 physics courses which used that math [1]. Plus additional Engineering/CS electives. So over a 25-75 ratio of exercise to "real" stuff. Much better ratio than boxing. [1] If you decide that the math courses have nothing real/interesting in them. Which is not true.
zamadatix 2y ago
The big difference is probably that I wasn't taking the math classes out of interest in being great at computations. Just like manually doing long division of the factorial denominator wouldn't have made me any better able to apply Taylor series, finding the 3rd derivative of a random trig function manually (well, for some reason a trig reference table was allowed but not a CAS) dozens of times didn't make me any better able to use them either but did wear out my energy for the topic anyways. Of course this "interested in applying concepts to solve the problem, not calculating the values in said solution" lean is probably why I was in a computer program instead of a math program in the first place :).
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Let me state my point explicitly: You are probably referring to real math as one of (1) building abstraction, (2) doing proofs of theorems, (3) solving applied math problems. To build competence at these problems, you need to exercise the basic skills, of which computational skills are a big part. If you don't exercise your computational skills, you can't become good at mathematics in the sense of (1), (2), or (3). The same way you can't get to be good at boxing without doing a lot of pushups. Now, not all teachers are good. Many certainly try to force students to do too much computational practice, compared to their level. But both as a student and later as a prof, I discovered that there is value is doing really dumb and complicated calculations by hand sometimes during your education. The reason is that many times when people your computational algorithm fails, you have to do the dirty thing by hand to figure out what went wrong. And depending on what you do, computing the 3rd derivative of a random trig function manually correctly with nuances is exactly what you need to do [1]. Well, not everyone. Many/most people do jobs that only require low levels of maths, and they might never need to do any of that. But a math course taught to everyone has to take a cookie cutter approach and that usually requires setting a high enough bar, so people who have to do the hard math at their job, have those skills. This is an unfortunate fact of resource optimization. [1] I am an industry researcher now, and have to do all kinds of these crappy calculations.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    I didn't refer to "real math" but, regardless, I was rejecting your explicit point. Not all forms of practice are inherently useful to you even if it's in the same category/topic. E.g. just because you trained running thousands of miles for power marathons does not mean you are necessarily better positioned to box. It does probably mean you've put a bit of a damper on your interest in doing more exercise for boxing though. More directly, just because you calculated hundreds of Taylor Series manually does not inherently mean the practice you did made you better at something you'll be able to use with the topic you've now spent dozens of hours on already. What I mean by randomly calculate in this case is be given a random trig equation, be told to hand calculate an nth level Taylor series, compute the numerical answer to a few values, and move on to the next problem until you've done hundreds in the course. I do NOT mean running through dozens practice problems to get better at learning when/how to apply Taylor series (though that did come in a later course, it thankfully didn't need to be done by hand just as nobody was expecting you to calculate sqrt(5.7) by hand to learn calculus either). This no doubt makes me a great calculator of 5th derivatives of trig functions but, except for the first few perhaps, at the expense of dozens of hours of being great at actually applying tricks to do things with what the Taylor series spits out instead. Like you say, the math course has to give cookie cutter training sometimes not about the direct concept at hand but that means you can be shit out of luck if that cookie cutter training wasn't relevant for boxing even though the topic itself can be.

Weird. When I was doing boxing, having to run sprints every training session, doing dozens of pushups, situps and what not did not beat the interest I had in boxing :).

borroka 2y ago

Not at all weird, because you were also boxing. But if your boxing sessions were only to be sprints, pushups, situps etc, and no boxing, you would surely lose interest in doing boxing at that place. Likewise, if your jiu jitsu training were only drills and no sparring, there would be no people doing jiu jitsu after a while.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago
My boxing training sessions were about 50-50 exercises and the padding/sparring session (in which there were big breaks). In my undergrad, I was made to take 6 math courses, and about 18 physics courses which used that math [1]. Plus additional Engineering/CS electives. So over a 25-75 ratio of exercise to "real" stuff. Much better ratio than boxing. [1] If you decide that the math courses have nothing real/interesting in them. Which is not true.

zamadatix 2y ago

The big difference is probably that I wasn't taking the math classes out of interest in being great at computations. Just like manually doing long division of the factorial denominator wouldn't have made me any better able to apply Taylor series, finding the 3rd derivative of a random trig function manually (well, for some reason a trig reference table was allowed but not a CAS) dozens of times didn't make me any better able to use them either but did wear out my energy for the topic anyways. Of course this "interested in applying concepts to solve the problem, not calculating the values in said solution" lean is probably why I was in a computer program instead of a math program in the first place :).

abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Let me state my point explicitly: You are probably referring to real math as one of (1) building abstraction, (2) doing proofs of theorems, (3) solving applied math problems. To build competence at these problems, you need to exercise the basic skills, of which computational skills are a big part. If you don't exercise your computational skills, you can't become good at mathematics in the sense of (1), (2), or (3). The same way you can't get to be good at boxing without doing a lot of pushups. Now, not all teachers are good. Many certainly try to force students to do too much computational practice, compared to their level. But both as a student and later as a prof, I discovered that there is value is doing really dumb and complicated calculations by hand sometimes during your education. The reason is that many times when people your computational algorithm fails, you have to do the dirty thing by hand to figure out what went wrong. And depending on what you do, computing the 3rd derivative of a random trig function manually correctly with nuances is exactly what you need to do [1]. Well, not everyone. Many/most people do jobs that only require low levels of maths, and they might never need to do any of that. But a math course taught to everyone has to take a cookie cutter approach and that usually requires setting a high enough bar, so people who have to do the hard math at their job, have those skills. This is an unfortunate fact of resource optimization. [1] I am an industry researcher now, and have to do all kinds of these crappy calculations.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  I didn't refer to "real math" but, regardless, I was rejecting your explicit point. Not all forms of practice are inherently useful to you even if it's in the same category/topic. E.g. just because you trained running thousands of miles for power marathons does not mean you are necessarily better positioned to box. It does probably mean you've put a bit of a damper on your interest in doing more exercise for boxing though. More directly, just because you calculated hundreds of Taylor Series manually does not inherently mean the practice you did made you better at something you'll be able to use with the topic you've now spent dozens of hours on already. What I mean by randomly calculate in this case is be given a random trig equation, be told to hand calculate an nth level Taylor series, compute the numerical answer to a few values, and move on to the next problem until you've done hundreds in the course. I do NOT mean running through dozens practice problems to get better at learning when/how to apply Taylor series (though that did come in a later course, it thankfully didn't need to be done by hand just as nobody was expecting you to calculate sqrt(5.7) by hand to learn calculus either). This no doubt makes me a great calculator of 5th derivatives of trig functions but, except for the first few perhaps, at the expense of dozens of hours of being great at actually applying tricks to do things with what the Taylor series spits out instead. Like you say, the math course has to give cookie cutter training sometimes not about the direct concept at hand but that means you can be shit out of luck if that cookie cutter training wasn't relevant for boxing even though the topic itself can be.