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Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

Hard and scary carry differently meanings in those contexts though, surely?

Video games are safe e.g you can always try again, you can do incrementally well.

Video games are scary in an exhilarating way, you blood will pump and your pupils will dilate but at the end you can put it down, turn the lights on and watch funny cat videos to recover.

Math (at school) is hard because you get one shot. Finite lives. After enough retries society says "nope, you're done". It's hard because you can't test yourself when ever you want and your study is not directly related to your tests.

Math is scary like anxious scary. Like stay up at night dreading your exam or don't sleep for a weekend to finish your report scary. You can't watch cat videos and hope it goes away because it won't. You can't buy a new math or try it again in a few years.

You get one shot. You get little to no feed back.

That's hard and scary.

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Nicely illustrated. As you imply, the scariness is a property of schooling rather than of mathematics itself. And where game play is scary, it's at a level chosen by and controlled by the player, for optimal learning I suspect.

Not only that, but with "GPA" provides a running historical average that serves as a sign that:

"No matter how good the student is now, they sucked at one time and they can never escape this eventuality".

Imagine a game that's tough, full of oft-used rules, failure potentialities everywhere, limited lives, and punishes failure/learning cycle. That's School.

And you succinctly put why I despise "School".

I love learning new areas and new techniques. And when Im teaching myself, I can fail and I go back a step or 2. Not the end of the world.

If I do similar in a class, then I set myself further back with a slowly growing chance of doing badly (D or F). And in College, then its another 1-4 credit hours to pay for the privilege. They not only fail me, but demand more money.

Edit: misspelling that looked bad (dong=>doing)

I think this also explains why driving tests aren't as bad as school: they are pass/fail and one can re-take as many times as wanted.

I must have attempted to implement a lisp many times before I got it "right", or a "simple" perceptron etc.

Without the pressure I'm not scared of revisiting hard things, I'm driven to actually.

Edit: to indicate that a "simple" perceptron isn't actually that simple.

> I must have attempted to implement a lisp many times before I got it "right"

How did you know it wasn't right? Did you run into a problem trying to implement requirements which you knew all along and accepted? (As in, you started coding without planning for some of these requirements ahead of time, then got stuck?)

Or did you learn about and adopt new requirements which weren't easy to retrofit into the existing work in progress?

Good question. I guess by "right" here I mean an implementation that I was happy with. Not nessesarily standards compliant or complete.

In my early attempts it was things like parsing which tripped me up. I'd implement something that broke the bracketed lists up into a list of tokens and then get stuck nesting those lists into an ast. Abandon an implementation for a while and then try again at the problem, often with a fresh implementation.

Then is was evaluating expressions, when to evaluate the arguments and exploring different approaches (fexprs).

I'd do these iterations across months and with different languages. First python then JavaScript, Ruby, C.

My favourite was the JavaScript implementation. Lisp code is literate and I bootstrapped most of the built in functions by exposing the environment as a cons tree (and working with cons trees internally in the interpreter).

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