8 ms·
> One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”. Is it really that common for musicians to not be able to r
by streetfighter64 13d ago
> One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”.
Is it really that common for musicians to not be able to read music? I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know, but it seems far-fetched. Like the story that Einstein failed math. I likewise doubt that there are many people who would be good mathematicians but unable to learn the language.
Sure notation is arbitrary and not the actual "truth" of math, but we need some way to talk about it, so why not just learn the accepted standards?
There might be at least one awesome author out there who never learned to write or type, but they're probably extremely rare, because becoming great at something usually entails a lot of practice, and that's hard to get when you're not making the effort to learn the basics.
In any case, LLMs are probably a bad way to "pivot math towards intuition and accessibility" because they, as language models, are great at generating a bunch of jargon that is hard for somebody with no training to tell apart. See the recent story [0]. Here the author (perhaps) succeeded with his proof, but was it because of superior intuition? Or just throwing compute at the wall to see what sticks?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755024
- Pannoniae 13d agoMost musicians in history didn't know how to read music, yeah. Less so in the present day but just about every folk song has spread by the word of mouth, and even in pop music many genres have a strong oral tradition (jazz, blues, rock, you name it), they play by ear and not by sheet.
- streetfighter64 13d agoWell, that's not really what I mean. Obviously they had some concept of communicating music, somewhat standardized instruments, etc. Pythagoras didn't phrase his teachings using algebraic symbols either. I suppose what I mean is that > Reading math however does not guarantee ideas or intuition. is true, but the converse, having the mind for good mathematical ideas or intuition, almost surely means that you'll have very little trouble picking up mathematical notation (not just notation, but the reasoning and ability to write a proof, be it in natural language or some formal proof assistant language). Like yeah, before the written language there were great storytellers who couldn't write. But now that humanity does have standardized languages, it's way more rare to come across such a person.
- strideashort 13d ago[flagged]