Comment on Is Scott Alexander bad at math?

Mon, 11 May 2015 14:51:39 GMT

Most of the notation was developed for people doing math rather than learning it. If you're doing a lengthy calculation, you probably want to cut down on the amount of unnecessary symbols. With something like conditional probability, "P(A|B)" makes perfect sense if you're going to be writing some variant of it many times over the course of many pages.

Or let's take the Einstein summation convention. Mathematics already had a compact notation for writing sums, but even this proved to be too cumbersome for the tastes of people doing differential geometry in coordinates. This led Einstein to introduce a convention wherein a repeated index denoted summation.

As you pointed out, this tendency toward brevity leads to some very dense writing that can be difficult to interpret if you're not already used to it. It's good for working, bad for pedagogy.

Compare shorthand writing. It's great for writing faster, but I can't imagine reading a novel written in shorthand.

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