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by smhost 1748 days ago
HN crowd doesn't think twice about people who try to run DOOM on a stack of pennies, but are ready to give up before trying to get algebra to run on someone with less working memory. It's weird how different the attitude is.
5 comments

Have you ever been a teacher? Even a teaching assistant?

I have. Some people are dumb.

You try teaching these people (anecdotally they're less than 1% of the population, with no obvious markers, so you have to actually find one first) and then come back and tell me how it's like "getting algebra to run on someone with less working memory". If I wanted to continue that analogy, I might say that the task is like getting algebra to run on someone whose brain has a power supply that randomly shorts out and spends half its time browned out.

Because some people out there are just not easy to teach.

Saying "HN crowd" is so broad (and wrong) that you can invent any irony you like.
I'm not sure I understand your comment, this is exactly what I spent hundreds of hours of my life trying to do. Was I unclear that my entire educational career was being the person who got through to students that traditional education was giving up on?
Many orders of magnitude more effort has been spent on the latter to little avail.
I disagree - we have excellent tooling avaliable to cram and compile code into smallest CPUs, but our teaching methods are still the same as they were in 1800's
I think this reveals a lot of ignorance on the huge amounts of different teaching methodologies and techniques that have risen and fallen over the last 100 years.
I have spent 15 years in the educatuonal system and I feel I am qualified to state that the methods are very obsolete.

A week of playing Kerbal Space programm gave me better understanding of orbits than years studying calculus, physics, general and special relativity.

It has poor applicability in everyday life - we learn all the biology of a cell but kid's don't know the difference between aspirin and ibuprophene.

Afaik Kerbal's simulation is non-relativistic, so you shouldn't have learnt anything about relativity from Kerbal...
What if it's possible, but only using an intensity of operant conditioning that would be considered inhumane?