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Comment by kortex | Hacker News Reader

Why is there always this pushback against "popsci explanations" in these threads? Do people not realize every brain is unique and people have different learning styles? A few hours of 3blue1brown videos gave me a useful intuition about FT, FFT, quaternions, and other mathematical things that years of courses with equations and homework failed to do.

I'm talking real, useful intuition that improved my work in signals processing, using wavelets, filters, convolutions etc.

And yes I can visualize 3.5D pretty easily in my head: a 3D volume with layers and colors that overlap. Though usually it's easier to picture two 2D frames side-by-side.

I don't fault people when they grok words/equations but visual diagrams do nothing for them (blueprints/CAD are an enigma to my partner). Don't fault people for needing visualization to grok equations.

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I didn't mean to imply that there is anything wrong with visualization. I feel they're easier to understand than equations for the vast majority of people. But as a concrete example, to understand the Fourier transform it probably took me a couple of weeks of reading different textbooks in my spare time to really grok how the math works here.. it took some effort and I'm not some autistic savant that sees things in equations - so it has nothing to do with learning styles.

Looking at some diagrams and videos for certain topics is a lazy and harmful approach to learning because some problems are just not conducive to visualization. Efforts to force a visualization ends up being actively bad and give viewers the wrong idea. My comment was a point by point explanation of how this ends up happening. At least in this particular case, with the Fourier Transform, the visualizations in effect made it harder for me personally to understand how the math works b/c they are so sloppy and emphasis all the wrong points.

In the grand scheme of things, having a half-assed popsci understanding is generally worse than not know anything. You can get a sense of overconfidence and then go on to apply these techniques incorrectly and make broken/fragile systems that make no mathematical sense (or publish insane papers)

If you really work with signal processing and don't understand the mathematics of the fourier transform then that's frankly a little scary. I'd really recommend taking the time to understand it b/c I think it really pays off - but yes, it takes a bit more effort than watching a youtube video..

>Looking at some diagrams and videos for certain topics is a lazy and harmful approach to learning

god my eyes can't roll farther back in my head. your point would be less absurd if it weren't for the fact that algebraic geometry is an enormously powerful and productive area of math whose whole ass founding principle is that geometric interpretations of algebraic objects are extremely useful.

AND

spectral theory (what fourier analysis is called today) is an extremely geometric area owing to the dependence of convergence on the metric.

>In the grand scheme of things, having a half-assed popsci understanding is generally worse than not know anything

yes because this is a resource for rocket scientists and not interested people (probably high school and college students)?

>If you really work with signal processing and don't understand the mathematics of the fourier transform then that's frankly a little scary.

bro this isn't oppenheim. it's just a nice intro for people that might be curious or are learning for the first time.

>But as a concrete example, to understand the Fourier transform it probably took me a couple of weeks of reading different textbooks in my spare time to really grok how the math works here.. it took some effort and I'm not some autistic savant that sees things in equations - so it has nothing to do with learning styles.

So you're still claiming your experience covers all.

When did I say anything about not understanding the math of the FT? I took a whole semester of classes in signals, control theory, comms, etc. Derived FT, FFT, and friends, from scratch. I understand the math. But I have limited intuition about what I can do with the math. I can look it up in a book, or plug and chug, but it's not very fluid. The amount of times I've needed to manipulate equations since that class is zero.

Yikes.

>Why is there always this pushback against "popsci explanations" in these threads?

because underneath all of the rhetoric about entrepreneurialism and "disrupting" thing tech (and by extension HN) is one of the most conservative and elitest communities that has ever existed. think about what people used to say about dynamic languages vs statically typed, about frontend vs backend, about sql vs nosql, etc etc etc. stodgy old engineers have always (and will always) resist the bar being lowered and newcomers being admitted.

edit:

what's funny is that the opposite response shows up, invariably, on posts that are very precise and technical. i.e. something like "this is too technical i wish mathematicians would accommodate us lay folk".

> stodgy old engineers have always (and will always) resist the bar being lowered and newcomers being admitted.

I try not be elitist or unwelcoming to newcomers, but yeah uh why should we lower the bar? Are the newcomers somehow incapable of learning engineering at the same level that the old ones did? Its no fun to work with people who aren't as motivated and cry for a lower bar instead of rising to the challenge. Its easy to work with someone more motivated than you but it sucks to work with someone less motivated.

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