Dan PiponiDec 2

It's a blessing and a curse.

I don't feel I understand some mathematics until I think I could have invented it myself and I often work hard to reach that stage. Well that's an illusion so I should qualify it a lot - I need to feel like if I was suitably "primed" I could have invented it. There's no way I could have explicitly invented monads, say, without lots of clues from all the papers I tried to read.

I feel like a good textbook or paper should lead you to a point where you can see what the main "trick" is going to be just before the big reveal. It allows you to develop pattern recognition for the type of problem.

But it does mean I waste a lot of time on stuff people may think is trivial. Machine learning papers are full of derivations like "log(A) = log(A/B) + log(B), now apply Jensen's equality" where B has magically appeared out of a hat. I can easily follow the argument but unless I know why this B was chosen I haven't learnt a reusable skill.

Show threadChrisDec 2
@dpiponi I feel you! It's the same for me... I always feel kind of stupid if everyone during class nods along and I am just sitting there, questioning basically every other statement of a proof and wondering why that's supposed to be true.
Show threadMark Dominus

@climbingVectorspace @dpiponi If everyone else is nodding along, it's often that they don't understand either, and they are just too ashamed to speak up.

A big turning point in my life was when I decided to sit in on a graduate category theory seminar. I was baffled by everything and held everyone up by asking a lot of clueless questions. I was going to drop out, but one day after class, one of the grad students thanked me for asking the questions he had been to shy to ask, and then several others said the same.

And that's when I realized that that's part of my job in life, to be the person who admits to being baffled in those settings, because as a white man I am much less vulnerable to other people's contempt for it.

I keep the book from that seminar on the shelf, so I can take it down every few years and marvel at how it manages to make even the simplest things obscure.

Dec 2 at 9:55pmWeb
Show threadChrisDec 2
@mjd @dpiponi That sounds like really good advice; thanks! Maybe I just have to start asking more questions!