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by connectsnk 1594 days ago
>If you want to solve hard problems that haven't been solved before, pay attention to that math and those proofs.

You are right that these people will have a hard time later. What also needs to be understood is that paying attention to something in which you have no curiosity is hard. I never paid attention to Maths / Stats / Probability and now I am having a hard time trying to learn machine learning / AI. But now my curiosity for these technologies is dialled up all the way to 9 and in my free time, I am relearning all these concepts I missed.

And what I have discovered is that these concepts were easy. The university presentation of it was done without any motivation. It took a useful and easy subject of math and made it hard.

1 comments

> the university presentation of it was done without any motivation. It took a useful and easy subject of math and made it hard.

Amen!

I like the way you have worded this. In particular for first-year math courses, they are super useful and should be seen as "basic science literacy" and much more people should have access to this knowledge (not just people who take 3-4 years of courses in a STEM major). I've been working on products to make this happen. Links in profile.

The "basic science literacy" I can see everyone benefitting from (in particular devs): (1) math modelling skills from high school math functions, (2) vectors because EVERYTHING, (3) PHYS101 (mechanics) for the predictions-using-models skills, (4) CALC for understanding concepts of rates of change and accumulations, (5) PROB because important building blocks for modelling data, and (6) STATS so you learn how to infer model parameters from data.

It's not a coincidence the above list of 6 are part of most UGRAD degrees (either in first or second year). These are the basic tools that everyone benefits form knowing. I am really enjoying the "unbundling" that is happening of the basic science literacy teaching and the credentialism.