71–80 of 157 posts
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
I read/listen to a lot of books and the only book on there I’ve read so far is The Managers Path, which is about the transition of the software engineer in his/her career. It’s a great book for any software engineer, it’s short too. Given that I haven’t heard of many of the other books on the list, I’d say this is a good list I’ll be checking out a few of the titles. One trick about “reading” (listening) to a good ch…
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> So, why would we want to write mathematics any differently? I think you're stretching the unit-test-to-mathematics analogy a little too far. I haven't looked at the book in question, but generally, you don't just "know if" your solution is correct, you prove it, or at least consider examples that can demonstrate if your solution works in some conceivable cases. That's how "unit tests" work in mathematics. If the bo…
The point isn’t we need to do formal verification to test correctness. It’s that you probably wouldn’t write a program first pass and assume it is but free. So, why would you assume beginners that don’t know how to write proofs would write correct proofs without feedback to check?
In any case, since the study of mathematics is cumulative. Even if the student can't prove or verify that their answer to a specific problem is correct they will eventually reach a point, often within the same problem-set, where inability to solve a problem will force them to encounter their gaps/misconceptions.
The most important thing in a mathematics text, as with any other text, is lucidity of writing and the preparation of the student.
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Mathematics is a very broad topic. Which part are you interested in?
Any books in: Introduction to proofs, Abstract algebra, Topology, Linear algebra
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
The same could generally be said about anyone under 25 and philosophy books. Read the literature classics, sure (they're about philosophy and politics too), but reading treatises on someone else's hard-won idiosyncratic view of the world without the emotional barriers and critical filter erected by years of trial and error may just turn the young person into a parrot, or worse, a nihilist without a cause.
Going all in on a philosopher at least once, especially when you're young, is the best way to really appreciate philosophy. It's the difference between understanding what the philosopher thought and understanding what it's like to truly think those thoughts and be immersed in the value system.
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
And some were politically inspiring: with the Challenger disaster, he was an outside mind investigating a systemic problem where people's incentives were en masse preventing them from seeing an ossified power structure. At least that's how he described it, and I'm convinced the lesson was valuable even if it was more complex than that.
Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.
The same could generally be said about anyone under 25 and philosophy books. Read the literature classics, sure (they're about philosophy and politics too), but reading treatises on someone else's hard-won idiosyncratic view of the world without the emotional barriers and critical filter erected by years of trial and error may just turn the young person into a parrot, or worse, a nihilist without a cause.
In general, you can bolster your defenses against unwitting influence if you have a good teacher guiding you and reminding you to be critical. This is more or less the point of dialectic.
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I disagree with the notion that if you question your solution then your solution isn’t correct. A beginner could easily fool herself onto thinking she has correct understanding, but actually her proof is buggy. Without feedback, she wouldn’t know.
I agree. Among other things, I'm pointing out the opposite risk: a beginner may come up with a correct solution to the exercise, check from the book's provided solutions that her solution is correct, and move on to the next section, fooling herself into thinking that she has sufficient understanding (hey, she solved the exercise correctly!), not realizing that “not needing to look at the solutions” and “coming up wit…