SeanReilly comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 July 2007 05:45PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 July 2007 02:21:36AM 4 points [-]

As you say Joshua, ad hominem. Since you ask, it's from providing therapy to friends who were damaged by the school system. But nobody here has alleged that I'm off-base in my description (as opposed to suggestions and conclusions), and therefore it doesn't matter how I got an accurate description, only that I did. As I recently told a schooled friend who was taught silly rules, "The first rule of math is that it doesn't matter how you get the correct answer, so long as it is correct."

(I also explained that "Math is what you do when you don't know what to do next. If you already know exactly how to solve a problem, it's not math, it's computation.")