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Agreed. And they didn’t do this. If a physicist says that A is obvious to physicists then this isn’t an insult to others. It’s expected that having expert le
by redczar 2y ago
Agreed. And they didn’t do this. If a physicist says that A is obvious to physicists then this isn’t an insult to others. It’s expected that having expert level knowledge in something indicates that some things are obvious after all the training that are not obvious to those without training.
- globnomulous 2y agoYour comment convinced me to revisit the quotation. It's even worse than I thought. The author contrasts people who 'understand' because they 'did maths' (i.e. studied maths formally in school) with those who don't understand because they haven't. The implication: formal study in school is the only, and a guaranteed, path to understanding.
- redczar 2y agoClearly they were not saying this. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of people who grok mathematics were trained to do so. The set of people who are self taught in math is small enough that one ought to be forgiven for assuming this. Similar to how people who know how to perform brain surgery almost certainly got that knowledge from training.
- globnomulous 2y ago> Clearly they were not saying this. It's the meaning of what the author wrote. Even if the author doesn't believe it, I think I'm accurately interpreting the overall posture and attitude. Given the pretention of the rest of the post, I'm not willing to cut the author slack or give the benefit of the doubt