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wedrifid comments on Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help - Less Wrong
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What do you mean? Are you saying that everyone with an average IQ is supposed to be able to understand what it means to minimize the within-cluster sum of squared differences, regardless of education? I don't know what a standard deviation is either. I am able to read Wikipedia, understand what to do and use it. I know what squared means and I know what differences means. I just expected the sentence to mean more than the sum of its parts. Also I do not call the ability to use tools comprehension. What I value is to know when to use a particular tool, how to use it effectively and how it works.
You could teach stone-age people to drive a car. It would still seem like magic to them. Yet if you cloned them and exposed them to the right circumstance they might actually understand the internal combustion engine once grown up. Same IQ. Same as the server WolframAlpha is running on do possess a certain potential. Yet what enables the potential are the five million lines of Mathematica.
I'd be really surprised if one was able to understand the sentence the first time with a self-taught 1-year educational background in mathematics. That doesn't mean that there are exceptions, I'm not a prodigy.
No, approximately the opposite of that. Are you sure you didn't intend this to be a reply to Peter? It seems to be quite an odd reply to me in the context.
You said that you have been polite in what you previously wrote. I parsed that the way that you agree with Peter de Blanc but that you have chosen to communicate this fact in a way that makes it possible to arrive at the conclusion without stating it. In other words, I should have been able to understand the sentence.
I didn't reply to Peter de Blanc because I don't know him and he doesn't know me and so his statement that he would have understood Y without X doesn't give me much information regarding my own intelligence. But you have actually read a lot of my comments and addressed me directly in the discussion above.
Interestingly I'm having a discussion (see my previous comments) with Roko if one should tell people directly if they are dumb or try to communicate such a truth differently.
Note polite enough to lie but polite enough to leave off all the caveats and exceptions. Some here could, understand the sentence even with no education in mathematics. Even so, the essentials of what I said was sincere. Piecing together that kind of jargon from the scraps of information available in the context is a far harder task than just understanding the article itself.