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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

To this day it has always been my biggest beef that textbooks don't reflect reality.

If we look back to our school days in maths classes with Sir getting all excited about teaching the class how to do y = 2x - 2, solve for x.

All your average kid does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the **ing point, I'll never use this junk in real life".

Then decades later, people like me occasionally find myself (trying to) understand interesting sounding papers on machine learning, but the maths just flies right over my head.

I'm all for a practical approach to teaching. Its more interesting to learn and as a result it leaves you with a higher chance of the theory sticking in the student's head.

Its better than the alternative approach of just whacking students over the head with dry theory books in the hope that some of it sticks.

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The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session.

All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the *ing point, I'll never do a pushup in a real game".

The purpose of mathematics is to train your mental muscles in a very specific way. Irrespective of whether you use those particular calculations in your later life, doing mathematics generally makes you a better quantitative and formal reasoner. That's the point. And I think a lot of students who are good at mathematics intuitively get this idea. And therefore are excited about studying just math for the sake of math.

No, the point is to produce constant stream of mediocre workers that support power.

The way they teach math in highschool and most colleges is retarded. People succeed despite it and not because of it

Don't you think it would be much easier to teach e.g. astrology or medieval scholastics if you want to produce a stream of mediocre workers that support power? Dictatorships relied on those kind of methods to keep the people in line.

We teach math just in case someone gets it, not to make everybody understand it deeply. And we don't only teach maths, but also languages, geography, biology, physics and all the rest.

The system is far from perfect, but there are not enough people to teach everybody well. Yet here we are: people are fairly well educated, we can create mRNA vaccins, build tiny supercomputers, and huge vertically landing rockets, and today we read about the relation between one-way functions and Kolgomorov complexity. I think the situation is not that bleak, although the golden age of education might indeed be behind us.

I'm not sure what your beef is. If you run a 10 minute mile in gym class, you shouldn't expect to be able to show up to the city marathon and finish. Getting to the level of running marathons, or reading complicated mathematics papers and understanding them, requires years of training and preparation, and an ability to place results in context which requires you having read and understood most of the existing context already. And it all starts with running that stupid 7 minute mile in gym class and understanding how to solve algebraic formulas quickly. Just because you skipped the intermediary training, doesn't mean the basics are junk because you can't grasp the expert level content.

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