Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?

I'm working on an open source guide to exactly this, but it needs more peer review: https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

It's not actually a guide to learning math, it's a primer on what math does, how it's used and where, how it fits into culture, and how you can get by if you don't actually understand it, and why it's worth it to actually learn.

I don't actually have any understanding of math fundamentals at all myself, so there's nothing that would confuse an outsider, and all the stuff that math people fins obvious but I had to go spend a day searching for is there.

All the interesting stuff in math seems to be continuous and recursive and not at it's core, with multiple parts that touch each other at once.

Math people will tell you that it's like programming, and everything decomposes to simple steps, and you just need to memorize some rules.

They will also tell you that they like math because it teaches you "a whole new way of thinking".

It's a "Draw the rest of the owl" problem. Their idea of a "small simple step" is completely incomprehensible to those without the "new way of thinking".

Which you apparently learn by starting at the bottom, but you can't make any direct practical use of it till you really understand it.

Basic algebra doesn't unlock any new abilities you didn't have before, by using a CAS solver.

It lets you learn slightly less basic algebra, and THEN you can do something that isn't already a solved problem.

But since there's the legendary "new way of thinking", an outsider can't actually imagine how it's going to help them, just like I can't imagine what it's like to juggle three balls or drive a car, they're just... impossibilities I know nothing of.

I think people give up on math partly because only the next few steps are visible, the whole road to being able to do a Kalman filter is not. There's absolutely no instant gratification for a beginner not polluted by a sense of "A calculator could do that", so only the talented, or the disciplined usually learn it.

I've always had extreme trouble with things that are spatial, have multiple interacting parts, have abstractions beyond what we can describe in words easily, etc, so I can't help you actually learn the math itself, because... I'm still working on learning the very basic stuff.

But I think I have a fairly accurate record of what math is from a black box perspective, and how it works from a sociological perspective, and why people hate it and quit before they actually learn.

Math encompasses quite a lot of territory, so I think it's important to identify the parts that have most relevance to your specific areas of professional work.

Learning math can be very difficult and frustrating. It's very easy to be overly hard on oneself ("I suck at math", "I'll never learn this", "I must be stupid", etc.). As others have pointed out, it's something you have to grind away at it. I think the takeaway is that for most people it's not something you instantly pick up.

There are multiple ways of explaining the same concepts. If the book you're reading isn't connecting the dots for you, it might be helpful to read about the same topic in another book or two. A different author may provide one or two sentences that make the concept click for you.

If you're taking an in-person class, the instructor might make the class really pleasant and insightful or really nasty and painful (or anywhere in between). I remember entering a Calculus II class in college and the instructor was an ass. He was nasty, bitter, smart-ass, etc. always. I believe he was hating his life and his attitude brought some misery to those around him. I dropped the class. It was toxic for my ability to learn the material. I think it's always best to quickly reject toxic instructors and find one that's not toxic.

Lastly, get a tutor. I've done this when trying to learn (or re-learn) some math when I was in graduate school. It made a huge difference.

Perfect accuracy is an insane goal. Much better is to develop the skill of finding and correcting your mistakes. Part of this is doing frequent "sanity checks" - for instance, if you are computing an area, and you get the answer -3, probably you made an algebra mistake somewhere earlier, and you should find and fix it before going on (some ways of checking your work also help you pinpoint where the mistake occurred, others are less helpful for that). Another way to check your work is to try plugging in numerical values for all of the variables and going through the arithmetic to check all of the steps (if you need to check your arithmetic, try something like "casting out 9s").

Learning to find and correct your mistakes will at first make it take ten times as long to solve any problem as just scribbling your way to an answer. But if you practice it, you will discover two things:

- with practice, the overhead of finding and correcting mistakes drops significantly,

- the feedback you get from noticing your mistakes helps you avoid making those mistakes in the future. Eventually mistakes become extremely rare, and you can go through a very long computation without making a mistake, even if you don't bother checking for them any more!

> Are you checking Bayesian priors in your interpretation of the news or other risk?

Pretty much my day-to-day existence right there

> maybe we should start with, "how does anyone math" first.

Dijkstra & friends sought answer to that question.