fburnaby comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Swimmer963 23 January 2012 11:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (237)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: David_Gerard 22 January 2012 07:12:13PM *  9 points [-]

Oh, man. The fatal event in my failed study of engineering was getting 99% on a first-year dynamics exam. I'd reduced the semester to a page of notes, then the page to a quarter page, then the quarter page to four equations [which of course I can't remember now - this was 1988], which it seems had been the point of the entire semester. I then proceeded to ace it. (Got a sign wrong in one problem, hence 99%.) This was absolutely fatal to doing well henceforth, since I had no idea how I'd managed to do that well except showing up at lectures and usually doing my homework.

Comment author: fburnaby 23 January 2012 01:35:26AM *  4 points [-]

I found this was a common theme in good engineering courses. The whole course would boiled down to three or four new concepts. By the time the final came around, it just felt like thinking hard about common sense even though at the beginning of the term, everything had seemed counter-intuitive.