= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
KPier comments on Why do people commit mathematical mistakes? What are the mechanisms behind them? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (37)
As someone who's often struggled with this, I'd disagree. "I listened to the lecture but I just can't understand how this works" is a different category of math mistake than "I added 36 and 9 and got 43." (I made this mistake on a test recently). I think math mistakes in schools break down to two categories:
Not understanding the concepts (or understanding them as magic, and blindly applying rules even where they don't fit).
Making stupid arithmetic mistakes (which seems to come from going too quickly or being tired or distracted).
More like not bothering to actively think about how to optimize reliability of problem-solving, as opposed to thinking about how to solve the problem. "Try harder" or "be more careful" is advice of very limited power, while there are many creative ways of ensuring reliability of results (for any given problem) that are much more powerful.
"Be more careful" is meta-advice, most people don't actually start trying to be careful until they recognize the need. Worse, and I don't understand why, but they often need to be reminded of it again in different situations, that is the need to be careful or to pay close attention seems to be context dependent.
+1 for admitting a mistake.