Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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