= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
IlyaShpitser comments on The Truth About Mathematical Ability - 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 (138)
Causal stories in particular.
I actually disagree that having a good intuitive grasp of "stories" of this type is not a math thing, or a part of the descriptive statistics magisterium (unless you think graphical models are descriptive statistics). "Oh but maybe there is confounder X" quickly becomes a maze of twisty passages where it is easy to get lost.
"Math things" is thinking carefully.
I think equating lots of derivation mistakes or whatever with poor math ability is: (a) toxic and (b) wrong. I think the innate ability/genius model of successful mathematicians is (a) toxic and (b) wrong. I further think that a better model for a successful mathematician is someone who is past a certain innate ability threshold who has the drive to keep going and the morale to not give up. To reiterate, I believe for most folks who post here the dominating term is drive and morale, not ability (of course drive and morale are also partly hereditary).
I have the sort of math skills that Scott claims to lack. I lack his skill at writing, and I stand in awe (and envy) at how far Scott's variety of intelligence takes him down the path of rationality. I currently believe that the sort of reasoning he does (which does require careful thinking) does not cluster with mathy things in intelligence-space.
Look at his latest post: "hey wait a second, there is bias by censoring!" The "hard/conceptual part" is structuring the problem in the right way to notice something is wrong, the "bookkeeping" part is e.g. Kaplan-Meier / censoring-adjustment-via-truncation.
I don't disagree with this. A lot of the kind of math Scott lacks is just rather complicated bookkeeping.
(Apropos of nothing, the work "bookkeeping" has the unusual property of containing three consecutive sets of doubled letters: oo,kk,ee.)