21–30 of 447 posts
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing.
You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one."
Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.
Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
Why aren't we working on drugs to make people smart?
I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ? For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.