army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong

8 Post author: elharo 07 April 2014 05:25PM

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Comment author: hydkyll 02 April 2014 01:04:20AM 1 point [-]

Me: But sir, can you explain why it gets the right answer?

So you wanted to know not how to derive the solution but how to derive the derivation?

I wouldn't blame the teacher for not going there. There's not enough time in class to do something like that. Bringing the students to understand the presented math is hard enough. Describing the process of how this math was found, would take too long. Because especially for harder problems there were probably dozens of mathematicians who studied the problem for centuries in order to find those derivations that your teacher presents to you.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 April 2014 05:12:19PM *  9 points [-]

I wouldn't blame the teacher for not going there. There's not enough time in class to do something like that. 

What's wrong with saying something to the effect of "There's a theorem -- it's not really within the scope of this course, but if you're really interested it's called the fixed-point theorem, you can look it up on Wikipedia or somewhere"?