/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17699071]

>His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German; a 2a in Greek and Latin; a 2b in French, History, and Physics; and a "lackluster" 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics

Confirmed brainlet or does this prove that genius =/= excelling at everything academically?

[Anonymous No.17699076]

>>17699071
Polymathic genius is not the only type of genius, but perhaps it is the most superior type.

[Anonymous No.17699084]

>>17699071
>and a "lackluster" 3 in Hebrew
Good. His Aryan blood was instinctively repulsed by the desert language yahkkkkhhhhwe

[Anonymous No.17699088]

>judging by high school grades

[Anonymous No.17699098]

>>17699088
yes.

[Anonymous No.17699107]

>>17699084
>1 in Religion and German
Pretty sure they weren't honoring Odin in that religion class

[Anonymous No.17699147]

>>17699071
>lackluster 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics
okay maybe nihilism was coopted by jews instead being their nvention

[Anonymous No.17699244]

>>17699071
>Confirmed brainlet or does this prove that genius =/= excelling at everything academically?
Nietzsche's scores, Americanized, essentially just say he got a perfect in English and did horrible in Math. That is not at all uncommon for writer types.
Also keep in mind he was learning 5 languages, only two of which were in any way related to one another.
And who knows what sort of "History" he was being graded on---probably propaganda curated by God's chosen.
And needless to say Physics is in the same boat as math, more or less.

Anyway, Nietzsche was a seminary, a philologist, and a philosopher. For every subject which pertained to these, he did very well. That is all.

[Anonymous No.17699253]

Pforta was an autistic and repressive boarding school. I would take everything from there with a huge grain of salt. Also 3 is okay for Maths subjects in Germany.

[Anonymous No.17699265]

>>17699071
Wow, he's literally me!

[Anonymous No.17699268]

>>17699244
>probably propaganda curated by God's chosen.
What era do you think this is from anon?

[Anonymous No.17699271]

>>17699071
School just isn’t important, especially by his time.

[Anonymous No.17699288]

>>17699268
>What era do you think this is from anon?
The era where their political suppression was being relaxed and The First International was founded, with you-know-who being an early member.

[Anonymous No.17699291]

>some retard who struggles to count to ten without using his fingers starts telling me about his weird goku "ubermensch" bullshit and how things only mean something if you feel it really really deeply man

[Anonymous No.17699300]

>>17699088
How well you do on the ACT/SAT, for example, from ages 16--18 will be fairly indicative of your ability to succeed in academic settings afterward, which many don't even get as far, so you wouldn't be able to measure them at all if you did not do it earlier.

[Anonymous No.17699316]

>>17699300
We are not talking about American bugmen tests for the job pipeline, though. In Germany in particular, grades did not mean jack shit up until maybe 10-15 years ago.

[Anonymous No.17699321]

>>17699291
It's not that math is hard, it's that the system that has been haphazardly and ugily cobbled together over several centuries / millennia requires a profound amount of mental gymnastics in order to properly indoctrinate yourself into it. It is very similar to religion like Christianity in that respect, where the easier it is for you to adapt to the system, the more likely a conformist in thinking you are.

If math was re-designed from the ground up by an architect with an eye toward aesthetic logic and structure, there would be a lot less resistance to learning "mathematics". It is 100% the current way it is written that is to blame.

[Anonymous No.17699322]

>>17699300
>will be fairly indicative of your ability to succeed in academic settings afterward
How is this relevant to someone who acquired a professorship as Basel?

[Anonymous No.17699332]

>>17699321
>It's not that math is hard, it's that the system that has been haphazardly and ugily cobbled together over several centuries / millennia requires a profound amount of mental gymnastics in order to properly indoctrinate yourself into it. It is very similar to religion like Christianity in that respect, where the easier it is for you to adapt to the system, the more likely a conformist in thinking you are.
I understand where you're coming from anon, but it is also pretty obvious you have zero understanding (mark me not, understanding of what you believe to be stupidity, but you believe without understanding) of either mathematics or religion.

[Anonymous No.17699334]

>>17699071
What is wrong about not caring for maths? He was a philosopher not a mathematician.

[Anonymous No.17699342]

>>17699332
yeah, okay bub

[Anonymous No.17699355]

>>17699334
OH NO NO NONO NIETZSCHE BTFOED AGAIN BY THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE ETERNAL FORMS

[Anonymous No.17699357]

>>17699332
What is your understanding? Not that anon btw. I also see Maths as largely a language system you adopt. To do well in it you will have to speak the language of the grader or the one that reads the paper you write. I had to deal with a lot of proof writing in different countries in my life and this has been consistently my experience. The hardest part has always been trying to figure what dialect of Maths and logic you are dealing with.

[Anonymous No.17699359]

>>17699321
If you are qualified to identify this as a problem, you are qualified to prescribe a solution beyond "if someone else did it." To re-structure the way mathematics is taught in a way which made it much easier to digest would be of great use and presumably profit. What's stopping you? Seems more like a cope, my dude.

[Anonymous No.17699368]

>>17699321
I never would have thought /lit/ would be arguing for Common Core.

[Anonymous No.17699396]

>>17699342
>>17699357
>he thinks addition is subjective

[Anonymous No.17699408]

>>17699359
>If you are qualified to identify this as a problem, you are qualified to prescribe a solution beyond "if someone else did it."
People propose ways to reform math all the time. That doesn't mean the public education system or universities are going to switch to them (at least not overnight).
>What's stopping you?
It isn't about "what's stopping me". This attempt at "gotcha" is always pathetic.
Even if I or someone else did come up with a comprehensive system that at least went up to High School Senior level mathematics, we'd have to find people to teach it to. Homeschooling is the easiest, private schools a little less so. This project is obscure and not discussed very much, so it's unlikely that most students or parents of students would seek it out on their own if it was just thrown up online. The fact remains that the power to institutionalize the new system would be far beyond reach even if the system was already fully crafted.
And furthermore, you would need to have things established which allows the knowledge to be useable outside of that education. Just about everything in the world currently employing mathematics is based on the system we're already familiar with, and presumably the new system would be radically and drastically distinct such that they'd be mutually incomprehensible, even if they arrive at the same conclusions when properly done.

So in short, you haven't thought this through well enough, and it's irrelevant to the original point anyway, which is that not ingratiating oneself to the current system of math doesn't make you stupid---and in fact, to the contrary, probably indicates that you're something of a freethinker, as Nietzsche was.

[Anonymous No.17699415]

>>17699396
>he thinks math is just addition

[Anonymous No.17699448]

I got curious so I read fragments of this book, which describes his time at Pforta.
https://books.google.de/books?id=hsbly3ZZXrwC&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false

There are a couple of points in there.
a) apparently the teacher was shit so a lot of students had bad grades around that period
b) Nietzsche mentioned that he does not care about maths and in his last two years he was reprimanded several times for being out drinking with peers
c) he was about to fail his maths exam but they decided to still pass him because of his excellence in other subjects

Personal point: This is high school and boys hit puberty. It's fairly common to fuck up in those years. In fact I am deeply suspicious of any person that has perfect grades in that time period.

[Anonymous No.17699458]

>>17699415
What else are you going to be doing? All mathematics is merely addition and subtraction to varying degrees through varying complex processes and patterns.

[Anonymous No.17699459]

>>17699408
Which part of maths is it you think is so haphazardly and ugily cobbled together? Arithmetic? Algebra? Geometry? Calculus? These different branches function as they do on a utilitarian basis. If something can be made to work better, the improved version must, eventually, be supplant the less worse, slowly but surely, since it accomplishes the task better and anyone who uses it has an advantage. Math is a tool, and claiming Nietzche was a bigbrain because he was too clever to use that tool is a cope.

[Anonymous No.17699581]

>>17699459
The easiest way to see what I'm talking about is to think about the variety of programming languages. Most have the same amount of power and can accomplish the same ends, but some are easier or more difficult to learn and understand than others.

As far as standard mathematics goes, consider some things:
>Infix operators
Our system uses infix, but there's also prefix and postfix. 1 + 1 = 2; it could have been instead that all operators precede their operands, so that we rewrite it + 1 1 = 2, which means 1 and 1 are added and their result is 2; this makes the plus sign here consistent with the equals sign, since they now follow the same principle, whereas before a novice at math may think of that equals sign as being an operation involving the second 1 and the 2, when in fact it is an operation involving both 1's taken together.
>Base-10
Supposedly a common sense approach, considering that the human body has a very convenient set of members based on 10, it nevertheless encounters issues when it comes to fractions and decimals. This is because 10 can only be divided cleanly in two ways: via 2 & 5. What is 1/3 of 10? 0.333333333333. What is 1/4 of 10? 0.25.
If, for example, standard math assumed Base-12, then there would be more to work with, and thus fewer perplexing situations as the examples above. 1/3 of 12 is the whole number 4, and 1/4 is 3; and 1/6 is 2, while 1/2 is 6. We have double the number of whole numbers that can divide the base, thus making, at least, fractions & "decimals" easier to deal with.
>Arabic Numerals
The system of Arabic Numerals, though superior in most respects to something like Roman Numerals, nevertheless has its share of drawbacks. It is very abstract, with no rhyme nor reason as to why the symbols used were chosen---none of their shapes mean anything. When you get to really unwieldy operations like multiplication or division, it requires far more brainpower to perform than should be necessary---it is basically required that one memorize the outcomes of the most common (i.e., low-level) operations. For example, 7x7 is 49, and you know this because you've drilled it into your head, not because it is quick and easy to deduce.
If instead there was a more visual system of numerals, or at least one where the numerals actually mean something in terms of their design, then hypothetically, someone who understood that system would be able to quickly arrive at any answer to a problem without needing to resort to something as outrageous as long division, or a memorized answer. The numerals would follow clear rules that allow for all operations to take place in a very clear theater of mind (without autism).

These are just a few examples of how standard math is a system that is built more of historical contingency than rational planning or optimization. It is not the best system by any means, just the one that happens to exist.

[Anonymous No.17699614]

>>17699459
>Algebra?
Considering that we use letters, some of which aren't even from the Latin alphabet, for no actual reason other than that they existed, is yes, an example of haphazard design, as opposed to rational design. There is no reason why 'x' and 'y' are the standard variables other than they are. They don't mean anything, they don't stand for something, they are just symbols and you are told to accept that at face value, don't question it, and continue using them forever after.

[Anonymous No.17699626]

>>17699396
The concept of a 1 is subjective, so addition must necessarily also be subjective.

[Anonymous No.17699641]

>>17699581
Another thing: the order in which the digits are arranged.
The system as it is places highest digits on the left and lowest digits on the right. Why? A case could easily be made for the reversal of this order being superior for human thought.
You know, 134 being instead rendered 431.