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There's really no reason to feel stupid just because you don't know what the terminology means, if that is indeed the problem. Would you feel stupid if you were
by jordigh 12y ago
There's really no reason to feel stupid just because you don't know what the terminology means, if that is indeed the problem. Would you feel stupid if you were to walk into a Scientology meeting and you didn't know what SP, Xenu, or fair game meant? I wouldn't. It's just a bunch of jargon that I would have to pick up if I were really interested in knowing the underlying concepts being discussed (and I'm not, which makes me feel even less stupid for not wanting to learn this).
And even if you know what all the words mean, it can take some time and effort to put them together, even for practitioners.
- westoncb 12y agoThe situation is even trickier than that because you can keep on looking up these terms, one after another, but it's going to take a lot more than their particular definitions before things begin 'coming together' for someone. I think this largely comes down to the fact that there's no place people can go to learn what it is mathematics is, what it's about, how it works, etc.—and consequently, what mathematicians are interested in and why they have their particular quirks of formulation, and why certain points (which can seem utterly uninteresting to an outsider) are emphasized. Of course you can get this by doing a math degree (and maybe graduate work), but I'm just trying to describe the difficulty in teaching oneself. At least in the U.S., our exposure to mathematics in formal education (pre-university), gives exactly all of the wrong answers to those questions above, so that when you try to start teaching yourself you never know what direction to search in in order to resolve ambiguities.