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”but I have to see anyone do it” This is a strange take. Why or how would you ever see someone do it? It is very unlikely you would be aware of them. I do con

• paulpauper 2y ago
  Posts by Susan Fowler "so you want to self-study math/physics" have gone hugely viral here and I have yet to see anyone in the comments or later report that they actually became really good after following her tutorial. Same for any other tutorial or guide or self-study overall. maybe one blogger whose name eludes me but extremely rare. This is a strange take. How is it strange? What you meant to say is you disagree.
  • JadeNB 2y ago
    > Posts by Susan Fowler "so you want to self-study math/physics" have gone hugely viral here and I have yet to see anyone in the comments or later report that they actually became really good after following her tutorial. Same for any other tutorial or guide or self-study overall. maybe one blogger whose name eludes me but extremely rare. Well, when you learn something, do you remember everything that contributed to your learning it, and go back and acknowledge it? I try very hard to acknowledge those from whose instruction I have benefited, and I doubt I come anywhere near that ideal. Come to that, one measure of real expertise is knowing you're never done learning, so, even for someone who does acknowledge every single source along the way, the more they know the more presumptuous it'll seem to say they are done learning it, so they probably won't.
  • fsloth 2y ago
    > What you meant to say is you disagree. No, I meant what I wrote. In general there are 8+ billion people on the planet, of which some number are trying to autodidact through MSc physics equivalent. It’s possible you are in a circumstances where you engage with lot of autodidacts, but I personally have no model how you could do that (unless you are a tutor which ofc you may be!). I’m also guessing most autodidacts arent observable through the internet. I may be totally wrong of course!
• mjburgess 2y ago
  It begins when you realise all the physics examples are toy models, and reality is basically unmodellable. That physics is not mathematics, and the rules of inference in physics cases are the rules of reality -- not of mathematics. That what guarentees your modelling works is observation, that "hand waving" is something one does to force one's thinking to be empirical. I suspect people who learn physics via the textbooks end up learning some paralllel reality which is closed-form and models engineered trinkets. Physics isnt mathematics, and it isnt engineering. I think this is communicated in how its performed, in the emotional tensor of its practice. A good physicist has a healthy contempt of both.
  • JadeNB 2y ago
    > I think this is communicated in how its performed, in the emotional tensor of its practice. A typo for "tenor," I presume, but a funny one!
• Jensson 2y ago
  > This is a strange take. Why or how would you ever see someone do it? It is very unlikely you would be aware of them. You would see someone be proficient at math or physics and then get surprised they had no degree, just like anything else. You can find such programmers everywhere, even algorithms are very easy to self study compared to math and physics, but people proficient in math or physics without a corresponding degree is almost non existent. > Maybe it’s just going through a specific set of rote calculations and lab work needed. I think the biggest problem is error correction. Everyone who learns math and physics accumulates errors as they learn, and if nobody is there to correct the wrong assumptions they will just continue to accumulate. To do that you need an instructor grading your tests, or at least almost everyone needs that since they can't grade their own answers fairly, their incorrect understanding leads to incorrect grading of their own answers. This is why programming and algorithms is so easy to learn in comparison, since there its easy to grade yourself. If the program works you did it right, otherwise not. For algorithms there are plenty of sites you can practice implementing algorithms for problems and they tell you if you did it right. There are no such sites for math or physics, so there unless you are a genius at self correcting you need an instructor to just get proficient. Edit: In short, if you can write code that works the first time you run it without testing etc, and you can do that over and over and never be wrong, then you can self learn math and physics without an instructor. But if you need to execute your code and test to get it right, then you need an instructor to learn math and physics correctly as well.