Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book.

What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”

View on HN

The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.

>The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not

The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.

> most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.

Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying.

Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.

To be fair, the "you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it" hides a very complex process.

Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".

I agree with your point but I think playing a musical instrument is a bad analogy because of one fundamental difference:

In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.

Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.

Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.

> Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn).

Quoted sentence does a lot of heavy lifting in your reasoning. Being intrinsically interested in something is integral part of learning. And, yes, obviously for people who have zero interest in subject it will act as "specific learning disability". I know this because I tend to be interested in programming-related subjects and, consecutively, capable of learning them, but I could never muster any interest trigonometry or calculus homework. I've also known multiple people who felt the same way about debugging their software development homework - they weren't interested and hated every second of it.

I don't think you can count "zero interest" as being a learning disability. I hated drawing and still do (and other things too), but I could probably still learn the basics of it if, say, my life depended on it.

Exactly! And another person in your class that is interested in painting could become world class in it while you will be struggling to learn basics.

I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else.

Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.

I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent.

I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.

Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong.

Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.

I don't think your offense was warranted. You've got a chip on your shoulder. Other people may be able to tell but either haven't confronted you about it, because it wasn't worth it to them, or you haven't responded well to feedback.

Either way I recommend reflecting on it.

Yeah I experienced this firsthand. My roommate in college was a physics genius. He would grok concepts without really studying very intensely— often after a single reading or lecture.

He would intuit solutions to problems based on extrapolating from the textbook. The undergraduate stuff all clicked right away for him.

Even when we scored the same on an exam, the difference in effort expended was dramatic

You are confusing the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient one. The argument was that practicing was necessary to gain a deep understanding of math, not that it was sufficient.

Ironically, this is one of the first things they teach you in college level math (or at least they did in my case).

I’ve tutored many students in math and it’s really common for people to feel the way you do. They’ve had bad experiences at some point or another, whether it’s with teachers or classmates.

There are a lot of different reasons why students feel the way you do and (unfortunately) give up on math. It’s a shame because I believe most of those reasons are specific to the high school setting and from what I’ve seen, students have a much better time if they come back to math later in life and study without that environment.

Interest also plays a role, of course. And not everyone will have the interest to go back and study again, later in life.

I did come back to it as an adult. Spent a while doing 2d and 3d graphics. It was much easier as an adult but rendering involves too much of this math stuff and I gave up. Definitely not for equipped to shine as graphics programmer.

Which brings us to my original point - not everyone can do it (well).

I bet they said this back in the day when illiteracy was a widespread thing. Some people just weren't "cut out to read".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com