/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15405242
>are most people just stupid
That should be obvious, but yet you are one of them and oblivious to that fact.

>>15405242
If everyone was smarter, math would get harder, but if math somehow got easier, that wouldn't make anyone smarter.

In other words, the only reason math is as hard as it is is because of how non-stupid people are. Monkeys, for example, are stupider than us and so have to deal with easier math (how many fruit is on that tree? How large is that other group of monkeys)

Most people are not stupid but instead decide they don't want to put the cognitive effort into understanding something as ill-practical as math. They are too busy fucking women, working fun jobs and drinking. I wish I derived pleasure from these activities. Here I am taking calc 3, not because I don't enjoy it but because I don't enjoy being a normie.

I think it hard to teach people things that most of them will never use. For example I took business calculus in college. Never in any place I've worked have I used calculus. I haven't even used algebra. Built in excel functions is it. And I'm an accountant.

>>15405242
Yes

>>15405242
math is hard but also most mathematicians have absolutely terrible verbal and social skills and therefore suck at teaching, leading people to think mathematics is harder than it is
also you have the eternal conundrum of "will i ever use this bullshit in my life?" which for about 7/8s of the general population is "absolutely not"
the only reason high school math exists is to filter people in college admission exams/the SAT and help colleges save time by not having to teach basic algebra and trigonometry to freshmen

if we were actually interested in teaching people useful math we'd literally only teach them basic statistics and how compound interest works
but if

>>15405264
>but if
ignore this last part i don't know how it got there

>>15405242
you jack off to child pornography

>>15405264
>we'd literally only teach them basic statistics and how compound interest works
You can add probability and intermediate statistics too. Being able to critique shoddy research is 1,000,000 times more useful than being able to churn out a derivative that mathematica can do in a fraction of a second

>>15405264
>also you have the eternal conundrum of "will i ever use this bullshit in my life?" which for about 7/8s of the general population is "absolutely not"
Braindead take. Every single piece of technology on the planet from phones to cars to air conditioning can only be created by understanding math. If you want to be anything more than a useless eater, you learn math.

>>15405242
Math isn't difficult. It's just symbol manipulation according to rules. It's no more complicated than board games like chess.

>>15405290
>Every single piece of technology on the planet from phones to cars to air conditioning can only be created by understanding math
But only a tiny fraction of the population needs to be able to make them. The rest can specialize in actually using them.

>>15405242
Most people instinctively know that math is bullshit when they start encountering absurdities like imaginary numbers and irrationals. They realize its just conjured up out of thin air by two faced arrogant twats who will say " its a system of logic" and then in the next breathe spit out obvious tripe such as asymptotes.
How can anyone respect such blatant shysters?
A few enlightened geniuses have questioned the foundations of mathematics as being conceptually flawed, which then leads to the whole rotten structure we have today. But rather than sparking investigative introspection they get quashed and dismissed by legions of midget brains whose only talent is to endlessly regurgitate the nonsense they were taught, without any true understanding.
If Humanity is to progress we must silence the worthless parrots and begin a formal undertaking to investigate the nature of reality, our interface with it as biological creatures, and thence to develop a new conceptual framework which describes our Universe with a stable internal logic, one that needs no recourse to conjured-up fantasies to paper over logical weaknesses.

>>15405242
Well, if we take stupidity to mean one’s naturalborn intelligence, then yeah, I do believe that there is an inherent cap on how much math some people will ever be able to understand due to some unfortunate inborn factors.

That said, I do think that most people’s ‘stupidity’ comes down to education at its earlier stages, and this stupidity obviously determines how difficult math would be for each person. But I do not believe that Math ever starts off hard, everyone can count. And if Math was taught properly, then those with functional brains would then progress to easily understand arithmetic, and then algebra etc.

I say this from experience because throughout Elementary arithmetic was some pretty basic shit to understand due to some good teachers. Yet the next few years with algebra were difficult for me purely because my teachers at that point could hardly speak English, much less teach Math. This naturally caused me to struggle in most subjects that built on algebra, I.E, a whole fucking lot.

I was literally at a point where I was being taught Calculus and yet lacked the fundamental ability to rearrange an equation, and was under the impression that everyone merely memorised every permutation of an equation whenever they needed to solve for a particular value. And since we were already at such an advanced stage, the fundamentals were glossed over and assumed knowledge.

Years later when I had been going back through to unfuck my fundamentals did I only just learn how simple it was to rearrange an equation (and in the process learn how equalities and algebra ACTUALLY works) and like that, I easily blazed my way through the rest of mathematics, thinking to myself why I didn’t just teach myself all this shit earlier.

The entire time I had thought the equations we were given to solve were arbitrary, without knowing why they were the way they were, and once I understood that, Math actually became enjoyable and interesting to me (cont)

>>15405276
>sees animu
>immediately thinks about cp
back to >>>/l/

>>15405276
you're on the wrong website, pedo

>>15405242
maths is hard because it's extremely boring and the way it's taught makes anything beyond arithmetic/algebra/calculus appear utterly useless

>>15405346
And this is exactly why Math will always be hard at some stages to some people. At every point that math is taught there will be people that will fall through and fail to understand at that juncture, and a lot of the time, it’s simply due to teaching.
Through the bias of people in which I associated, I was under the impression that most people were capable of math, and that I was the idiot for not understanding the content in class at the time (and to some extent I do agree, I didn’t take the agency at that time to go back and understand why I couldn’t understand), and yet later on when I had become an all ages tutor, it was simply astounding to see how early some people had been filtered.
I was teaching kids that didn’t even know how fractions worked when they were already in high school, and that entire time they were under the belief they must have been some idiot for not knowing and that’s why they needed tutoring. Imagine the surprise when I had actually gone back to fundamentals and taught these dumb kids that they weren’t actually stupid. Although I’m pretty adamant on not becoming a teacher now, that sense of satisfaction when a student thanks you for clarifying something they had failed to understand all this time/were embarrassed to ask about is something that I will never forget. Especially when you see how easily they progress through problems later on that they had struggled on before due to that previous lack of fundamentals.
It irks me that there are so many people worldwide that get filtered by math at such an early stage and dismiss it because of that, and I believe it is one of the biggest failings of the education system and society as apart of that.

>>15405264
Agreed.

>did you know a donut is a coffee cup
who gives as fuck, bruh

>did you know a donut is a coffee cup
who gives a fuck, bruh

>>15405304
Yeah, genius. Computing that
[eqn] \sum _{n=1} ^\infty \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}[/eqn] was just symbol manipulation.

Anything that interests you is easy or becomes easy
If you are not interested in math that doesn't mean you are stupid because you might know how to speak 15languages etc.

>>15405375
back in the 1700s and shit they didn't have anything to do and probably just sat there all day trying to find relationships via exhausting all possible things they could think of. I would probably have sat there enumerating through formulas one number at a time and plotting them by hand if I had nothing else to do

>>15405388
You sound very ignorant and arrogant. It wasn't brute forced like you think it was.

>>15405242
It's very easy to teach math extremely poorly. Many teachers and books do so. I don't believe most Mathematicians can even recognize when a resource fails to convey how to calculate. I have many ideas on how to improve it, but I don't know how to get the people who wrote textbooks to listen to me.

>>15405399
how was the search for primes carried out back in the day? They didn't even have a need for cryptography so they just randomly tried stuff for fun until they found primes. I'm sure the process of elimination was used a lot. Even these days they try to discover things using computers by iterating through things until patterns are found, it's the same thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_exhaustion

>>15405242
This anon has the right of it >>15405254. By extension so do >>15405346 and >>15405369
Difficulty is relative, and if we assume etraneous factors such as poorly adapted teaching methods are accounted for it would remain so. The facility for abstract thinking would vary and, therefore, relative difficulty must.

Although in objective terms of computation it is possible to get some idea. Such as the whole field of complexity theory. It may be possible to take abstract general measures of ability, e.g. properly done IQ testing, and combine it with measures of computational complexity and information complexity to loosely construct a kind of "complexity score" relative to standard deviations absent extraneous factors such as poor teaching methods.

Something like that has been published concerning analysis of IQ test difficulty https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370215001538
However, I could not easily discover similar notions as applied to objectively ranking and then relatively ranking within that measure the degrees of complexity of mathematical problems. It's reasonable to infer it scales with computational difficulty, but it's hard to say by how much when abstractions and conceptual understanding need not involve computing to some arbitrary precision.

>>15405432
>shifts goalpost to computing primes
>how were primes computed?
>all math is done by brute force
>im so smart for linking to wikipedia

>>15405290
you only need 1 engineer for every 1.000 people to achieve a perfectly functional industrialised society

>>15405290
You could very easily argue against the usefulness of those things. If they are useful they would likely increase the amount of useless eaters for one.

>>15405308
Only in a stable, high-trust society. Ironically, once enough people adopt your view, exploitation increases, stability wanes, and then everyone needs to understand how stuff works again.

>>15405242
Most people's brains are not wired for (rigorous) maths. When I was a young undergrad I associated this with intelligence but now my take is that having 'math-brain' is a mental disability that gives you a positive benefit (you are better at math) at the expense of a huge social cost as being wired for maths means you are NOT wired for complex socialization structures.

I don't think so. I think the issue really just comes down to motivation to learn it and quite frankly most people are not motivated to learn it unless they seem some kind of practical application in mind with it. It's easier to teach children to learn things because for the most part they don't question why they just do it. With adults there has to be some kind of tangible benefit for them or they aren't going to care. The vast majority of people don't care about model theory, functional analysis, or algebraic topology. They might think it's kind of cool if you tell them something about it but their attention span is pretty short and nuerotypicals in general struggle to grasp why you would learn something as mathematics solely for its own sake.

>>15407096
That's not right. Human beings are almost literally wired for abstract thought and predictive, logical problem solving. It's the entire evolutionary basis of our intelligence.
The problem with mathematics becomes one where the behemoth of its modern face is built on hundreds of years of intellectual hubris taking the form of an almost impenetrable level of complexity (not in foundations, but expression and application), all for essentially no reward, and built on top of a flawed and paradoxical foundation whose very abstract representations vary in real-world application (mathematics for an electrical engineer is not the same as mathematics for a computer scientist, or for a physicist, etc.). It's all a huge mess and the only ones who have time to wade through this bullshit are the type of losers with nothing better to do and a lot to compensate for.

>>15407050
No I gave an example and there's more examples on that page. I don't know every discovery that was done by process of elimination off the top of my head, just like you don't know the ones that weren't done that way. And I have an example of using computers to do it. You might be aware that they didn't have computers in hundreds of years ago, so how else do you think they did it other than by hand? I never said all math is done by brute force. You have no argument and you think everything is done from first principles without any trial and error and that's just retarded

>>15405264
>>15405284

>if we were actually interested in teaching people useful math we'd literally only teach them basic statistics and how compound interest works

im gonna try to study this stuff on my own because i usually feel like a retard and i was wanting to self study anything math or science related just so i don't feel so stupid and i was wondering of everything what could be and since you anons stay its useful i guess ill look into this, thanks