DeVliegendeHollander comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong

31 Post author: JonahSinick 04 May 2015 05:11AM

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Comment author: SolveIt 08 May 2015 05:33:32PM 11 points [-]

Math notation is optimized for doing math, not learning math. Once you've internalized what P(A|B) is, you know what it means at a glance, and when you look at a large equation, you're more interested in the structure of the whole thing than the identities of it's constituents (Because abstracting the details away getting results based only on structure is what algebra is).

Comment author: [deleted] 11 May 2015 07:51:32AM 5 points [-]

Math notation is optimized for doing math, not learning math.

Perhaps math really needs multiple "programming languages". One for teaching, one for higher level stuff...

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 11 May 2015 08:50:55AM *  2 points [-]

People that do novel math often invent their own notation -- it's sort of like domain-specific languages written on top of LISP.

Teaching programming languages haven't proven to be a popular idea, e.g. MIT and Berkeley moved their famous introductory CS class from scheme to python (because python is actually used, even though it is a much less elegant language).