[dfabulich]

> While content like this and that from 3blue1brown are commendable and useful, it simply would not have lodged the ideas into my head.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you just saying that this blog post isn't an adequate substitute for taking a course in linear algebra? (Of course it isn't. But who said it was?)

[abdullahkhalids]

Unfortunately, for a lot of people, including undergraduates, the dopamine hit they get from watching a video or passively reading a textbook makes them believe that these are adequate substitutes for doing thousands of exercises.

In my university, undergraduates have admitted that they have done fewer than 50 questions throughout the entirety of my math course. Their grades obviously reflect that, but they will do the same next semester.

[mattkrause]

Can I press you to explain what you think dopamine is/does?

I'm curious because I'm a neuroscientist who occasionally works on dopaminergic stuff and "passively reading a textbook" is so far from the canonical examples we use for dopamine activity, but the idea of dopamine/dopamine 'hits' has taken on a life of its own that seems quite different from the neurotransmitter.

[abdullahkhalids]

I am a physicist, so I will dare not make any technical neuroscience claims. I meant "dopamine" in the causal sense of people feeling pleasure from passively reading a book because they think it is useful work.

[id_ris]

There is a lot of excitement around machine learning and AI and there is not a proportional excitement for the math that underlies the theory.

In a lot of content that teaches machine learning/AI, the linear algebra substrate of it is given short shrift.

The consumers of that content infer that the backing mathematics is easy or unimportant, while the creators of the content are not actually implying that, but just want to move on to what the audience came for.

I'm not an expert in machine learning so I can't say whether you can get by without a strong understanding of linear algebra, but my intuition answer is no you can't. Beside that, I enjoy the math for its own sake so I'm happy to trudge through the textbooks.

And no, I don't think the blog post makes any claims that it is a subsitute for taking a course in linear algebra.