[a-dub]

i mean... integrals are weird. there's a whole slew of ways of doing them and usually there's a handful of techniques that are taught for a handful of integrals of specific forms and then those show up on tests with the forms sometimes slightly hidden.

how do you know it wasn't just forms and techniques you were unfamiliar with? any math you're unfamiliar with can appear as complexity for the sake of complexity.

[lupire]

Part of the point is that pointless trivia is on the curriculum. Math is usually the most immune of all subjects.

[a-dub]

yeah... my point is the whole mythology around solving "difficult" problems. "difficult" is often conflated with "not previously exposed to."

similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?

[a-dub]

but if we're getting at the point... like the real point..

everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.