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Comment by marshallp | Hacker News Reader

Hate to do this (but will have to anyway because you're misrepresenting that authors article),

- you've mixed in with nonlinear phenomena (most physical processes) with linear, and there's less and less reason to pretend linearity with increasing computer speeds (although in fairness you alluded to models being wrong)

- poo pooed spreadsheets without explaining why (you alluded to QM etc. but they don't care about useless proofs in linear algebra unless they're pencil pushing time wasters)

- implied infinite-dimensions is practically useful when it isn't (unless you're a mathematician/theoretical-somethingist seeking to extract tax-payer money)

There's little need to get linear algebra in you unless you want to waste time.

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You're underlying point throughout this discussion seems to be that you think there are folks who overestimate the importance of mathematics (especially the abstract parts of it), those people are often smug, and sometimes more prone to pontificating than productivity.

Those people may exist. But I don't see any of them here.

You've gone too far in the other direction by saying it's a stupid and complete waste of time to study math. There are real breakthroughs in insight there, even if sometimes obscured by pompous nonsense.

Your comments are fueled by anger, rather than a sincere effort to inform others, and this is why you've been downvoted.

I'm willing to bet you can be a constructive contributor here if you try. You're probably right that a simplified and more pragmatic approach to learning math might make it accessible to a larger group of people. If so, it would be better to go help make that happen than to blindly criticize everyone else.

I'm not angry at all. How can I add to the anti-math movement, I thought this might be a good venue, there's lots of thoughtful and productive people here. A lot of them might not be aware of the societal devastation caused by the current maths system (making most people not believe in their intellectual abilities and consequent destruction in wealth creation). Math anxiety news sometimes comes up and people like the Wolfram brothers make a case but on the whole people, including geeks, haven't realized how much computers have displaced mathematics.

You seem to have had a traumatic experience trying and failing to learn some mathematics. That sucks for you. Lots of people unfortunately go through that, but you seem to have developed a unique coping reaction. Rather than lay the blame on the school system, the curriculum, your specific teachers, or (perish the thought) partly on yourself, you have decided that mathematics is a vast conspiracy to keep lazy pinheads employed and make everyone else feel dumb and inferior. Your hostile way of demanding evidence for its utility (without defining what would constitute acceptable evidence) is a foolproof algorithm for rejecting anything whatsoever. I've seen hardheaded engineers deny the value of the field of physics using exactly the kind of arguments you've laid out in this thread. They seem to believe that every aspect of physics with engineering applications could just as easily have been discovered with common sense and simple-minded trial and error.

Not at all, I never tried getting education in it in the first place. I had hunch it's useless and the older I get the more I think that was correct, although I do look at it for practical utility and never find any (I'm not arguing from a position of not knowing anything). People, like on this thread, bring up stuff and it's comes across as religious dogma, they don't explain how in their daily work a specific example of where it worked (and they should include how there were no other alternatives).

There's a huge, huge range of frauds being committed in society. I think people should point them out when they see it.

edit: I also agree mostly with the hard-headed engineers you brought up. Physics is somewhat useful, but it's also vastly overtaught and overfunded relative to it's practical utility. I'm an AI guy and think we'll get the singularity before any of the fundamental research going on pays off (and that's only a small proportion of the world's wealth being spent on physics education for people who will never find practical use for it). And I think there's also a lot of mathemagic symbol throwing in there as well to extract tax-payer money (a lot of it caused by the mathemagicians's influence on physicists).

If you are genuinely interested in examples of its practical utility, I suggest you lay out clear criteria for what would constitute acceptable evidence to you. It might also help to give examples of which non-trivial parts of mathematics you do find useful, with reasons for why.

"Never argue with a fool, for they will bring you done to their level and beat you with experience." -- Somebody, somewhere

Also, don't feed the troll.

I looked at his posting history first before making an effort to communicate. He seems to have an extreme, hostile bias against theory but otherwise comes across as well-intentioned, if misguided.

Hate to do this, but it seems you just don't understand jack about linear algebra. I'm not even sure you read what I wrote.

1. Yes, I mixed in linear and non-linear processes. My point is that you use linear algebra even when working with non-linear processes.

2. Yes, I poo-pooed spreadsheets as a bad way to market linear algebra (I thought that was clear?)

3. Yes, I implied infinite dimensions is useful. Linear algebra in QM tends to be infinite-dimensional.

I'm reading a lot of hostility towards mathematics in general and linear algebra specifically (you've put a bunch of toxic comments all over this thread), and I'm not really sure why.

OK then, I'm sensing hostility and baseless accusations. Sincerely sorry if you got offended.

> Yes, I implied infinite dimensions is useful. Linear algebra in QM tends to be infinite-dimensional.

You don't have to appeal to QM for their usefulness. Function spaces are important in applied and computational mathematics because of their use in understanding integral equations (the theory of integral equations before Hilbert spaces was a giant mess), partial differential equations, calculus of variations, approximation theory, etc. No doubt marshallp will respond that this is all bullshit because it ultimately boils to finite processes running on finite state machines, where there are no infinite sets in sight, let alone infinite dimensions. The equivalent approach to physics would be an extreme form of empiricism, banning the use of concepts like electrons (as some logical positivists actually proposed to do in the early twentieth century) and requiring all physical laws to be stated in terms of directly observable phenomena, whatever that means.

Or put another way, I think infinity is a good approximation to "very large", and big things are everywhere.

Not only very large, but also to: Made of many small components.

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