gwern comments on The Failures of Eld Science - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 May 2008 10:32AM

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Comment author: gwern 07 September 2012 11:19:23PM 15 points [-]

From John D. Cook:

The main difficulty I’ve seen in tutoring math is that many students panic if they don’t see what to do within five seconds of reading a problem, maybe two seconds for some. A good high school math student may be able to stare at a problem for fifteen seconds without panicking. I suppose students have been trained implicitly to expect to see the next step immediately. Years of rote drill will do that to you.

A good undergraduate math student can think about a problem for a few minutes before getting nervous. A grad student may be able to think about a problem for an hour at a time. Before Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, he thought about the problem for seven years.