191–200 of 465 posts
I just started reading this. Only 42 people in this study and only 36 completed the activity. I am a bit skeptical about the findings with such a small sample size.
It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain." I'll also claim that most people don't know what math is, and that their evidence supports a "math brain". Math isn't about calculations/computations, it is about patterns. You get to algebra and think "what are these letters doing in my math" but once you get further you think "what are the…
Finland tried teaching maths to children using Group Theory in the 70s [1], but the results weren't that good; it proved to be too abstract for young kids. Ultimately, I believe basic algebra and geometry are the most important takeaways from math classes for most people. [1]: https://www.hs.fi/tiede/art-2000004823594.html (sorry, it's in Finnish and behind a paywall)
As it was explained to me, one wouldn't take a "Calculus I" class as a prerequisite for say an entry-level engineering course. One typically had such a strong foundation of algebra, that when encountering a problem that required calculus, the student would just learn the necessary calculus at that point in time. In other words, with such a strong algebraic background, other aspects of math, within reason, were much easier to grok.
It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain." I'll also claim that most people don't know what math is, and that their evidence supports a "math brain". Math isn't about calculations/computations, it is about patterns. You get to algebra and think "what are these letters doing in my math" but once you get further you think "what are the…
> I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain. Did you even read beyond the silly headline? The article itself is about pre-testing subjects on a range of capabilities from problem solving ability to second (foreign) language learning ability, and then seeing how these correlated to the ability of the test subjects to learn to code. The results were basically exactly what might be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "looks shiny but is lacking in any real creativity or artistic expression." My experience with that is that artistic milieus now sometimes even explicitly admit that the difference is who created the art. "Human that suffered and created something" => high quality art "The exact same thing but by a machine" => soulless claptrap It's not about the end result. A lot could be written about this but it's completely soc…
Truly great art, the kind that expands the field of artistry and makes people think, requires creativity; if you make something that's just a rehashing of existing art, that's not truly creative, it's boring and derivative. This has nothing to do with whether a human or AI created the art, and I don't think it's controversial to say that AI-generated art is derivative; the models are literally trained to mimic existi…
Your "creativity" is just "high temperature" novel art done by the right person/entity.
This was something already obvious to anyone paying attention. Innovation from the "wrong people" was just "sophomoric", derivative or another euphemism, but the same thing from the right person would be a work of genius.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That problem solving skills are relevant is pretty obvious, but language less so. To me, problem solving ability is precisely the same as the ability to articulate the problem and a solution. I don't see a major difference. If you can solve a problem but you can't articulate what the problem is or why the solution will address it, I wouldn't call you a good problem solver. If you can articulate the problem well but…
There are different ways of solving a problem though, some which require more critical thinking than others. Trial and error (in industry you can sound fancy by calling it “choosing parameters empirically”) requires no understanding of the underlying process, only the ability to measure the outcome. If you’re debugging, you can get by for a long time by trying things until the compiler shuts up. It’s not efficient or…
I have a very difficult time trying to extract the difference between "linguistic ability" and "critical thinking", though:
1. The core difference between "critical thinking" and "uncritical thinking" is the ability to discern incoherency from coherency.
2. Coherency is evaluated at the linguistic level: do the terms bind in meaningful ways to the problem? Do any statements contradict each other?
3. The remaining aspect is "creativity": can you come up with novel ways of approaching the problem? This is the hardest to tie to linguistic ability because it sort of exists outside our ability to operate within an agreed context.
So while I agree these are distinct skills, I still have difficulty identifying what remains in "critical thinking" after linguistic ability is addressed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me a long time to realize math consisted of abstractions. I was never told, for example, that matrices are a useful abstraction (shorthand?) for representing linear equations. Or that imaginary numbers were an invented abstraction that made certain calculations easier. It would have been nice to learn it from the perspective of how those abstractions came into being and why they're useful.
Numbers are an abstraction, not just "imaginary" numbers, all numbers are imaginary they don't exist in reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me a long time to realize math consisted of abstractions. I was never told, for example, that matrices are a useful abstraction (shorthand?) for representing linear equations. Or that imaginary numbers were an invented abstraction that made certain calculations easier. It would have been nice to learn it from the perspective of how those abstractions came into being and why they're useful.
> I was never told, for example, that matrices are a useful abstraction (shorthand?) for representing linear equations. Congratulations on overcoming the (very weird) choice of whoever taught your intro to linear algebra class.
Regardless, it's a shockingly common occurrence. I'd agree it's not the right way, but it is also a common way. That perspective might define those priors
Well yes, my high school maths were in the high 90s - more than my language scores in French, German and Latin with some off curricular Russian. I guess being a polymath helps.
Unless you are doing an engineering or mathematical application you don't need much math, especially as you can just call a function in the vast majority of the time.
I did a number of software products and operating system modifications without using any math beyond arithmetic operations.
I was a resource for other programmers including the odd math PhD.
It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain." I'll also claim that most people don't know what math is, and that their evidence supports a "math brain". Math isn't about calculations/computations, it is about patterns. You get to algebra and think "what are these letters doing in my math" but once you get further you think "what are the…
“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular. I think the problem-solving part of coding requires math skills, while the organization part requires writing skills. The organization part affects the problem-solving part, because if you write messy code (that you can’t reread once you forget or extend without rewriting) you’ll quickly get overwhelmed. Writing large math proo…
Usually even deciding what the problem is is in part an art, requires an act of narrativization, to shape and form concepts of origin, movement, and destination.
A good problem solver has a very wide range of abstract ideas and concepts and concrete tools they can use to model and explain problem, solution, & destination. Sometimes raw computational intellect can arrive at stunningly good proposals, can see brilliant paths through. But more often, my gut tells me it's about having a breadth of exposure, to different techniques and tools, and being someone who can both see a vast number of ways to tackle a situation, and being able to see tradeoffs in approaches, being able to weight long and short term impacts.