if your reaction to someone saying “what’s a math topic I should get experts to explain to me in this format, to test whether the format is useful for explaining math?” is “oh my god keep rationalists away from math fucking forever.” then I think you are doing something wrong.
It’s sort of the same objection I had to that post a few days ago about essay editing. If you think someone’s approach to learning is counterproductive, you can make suggestions or you can ignore them. I do not think it’s appropriate to laugh at them, declare that they deserve to fail, or tell them to stop trying because they don’t deserve success and them touching your Serious Field taints it somehow.
Which is exactly what happened when someone says “for the first test of our explanatory format, it’d be best to test with a concept that is relatively not homework-intensive”: people go “rationalists need to stop talking about math altogether” and “you’re not mature enough…” and “Okay, nevermind, keep rationalists away from math fucking forever”.
I don’t think this is because all math concepts require the same amount of homework to grasp, and I definitely don’t think it’s because anyone is harmed by asking “is there a topic you could teach me that is not homework-intensive?” I think it is because people regard homework as virtuous, and asking this question is saying “I don’t want to work hard”, and not working hard is contemptible, so the question must be responded to with contempt. That’s how you get the otherwise baffling phenomenon of “hey, what’s a good relatively self-contained math concept to test our explanatory format” getting a response of “you don’t deserve to be allowed near math!”
But, like, it’s okay to both be proud of the work you put in to understand something and to be decent to people who aren’t willing to do that work, or can’t, or are in the early stages of a project and want to test it on something simple and maybe build up to the hard stuff. Telling people who ask questions that the fact they’d ask proves they’re not hardworking enough to deserve to understand your subject is cruel. You don’t have to keep people away from math. They aren’t going to accidentally put the numbers back in the wrong order while you’re not looking. If someone asks a question that they’d know was stupid if they knew more, you can tell them more or you can ignore them. You really, seriously, don’t have to point and laugh.
(via metagorgon)
2 months ago · 69 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
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worldoptimization said: (also I was looking for his comment about having the math knowledge of an advanced undergrad and came across his ResearchGate profile which says he has “expertise in logic and foundations of mathematics and probability theory” so I guess he has explicitly claimed expertise in math at least once :P)- worldoptimization said: I think a while ago he said something like “I have some great results, I just need to hire a writer to write them up for me” and math tumblr was like “???” and I remember kinda sharing their attitude because writing up your results is like half of the process of doing math at least and separating those parts of the process doesn’t really make sense to me
- worldoptimization said: @theunitofcaring okay that makes sense. I know Eliezer is self-taught, so I certainly wouldn’t expect him to have an understanding of math as deep and broad as that of an academic mathematician, but the research he does is v mathy, so I think it’s reasonable for math tumblr to be like “wow he has v different fundamental attitudes about math from normal math people”
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theunitofcaring said: I understand how if people thought of Eliezer as a math expert it would make sense to be bothered by him asking a question that revealed ignorance of math. It just hadn’t occurred to me that anyone thought EY was a math expert, because he’s very obviously not.- theunitofcaring said: @worldoptimization maybe that’s the driver of the disagreement? Eliezer has said he has the math knowledge of an advanced undergraduate, and that he’s considered an intensive program to get him up to speed in math but he doesn’t have time currently. I don’t think he’s ever called himself a math expert and I certainly never thought of him as one.
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