Hacker News Reader

Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

IME (as a math-degree-haver) the value of mathematics is in improving one's ability to mentally model and reason about complicated real-world phenomena. A lot of folks lose sight of the reality and get lost in the mysticism, especially within the academic regime.

> [Mathematics] is the purest and most beautiful of all the intellectual disciplines. It is the universal language, both of human beings and of the universe itself. [...] That doesn’t mean it’s easy — no, mathematics is an incredibly challenging discipline, and there is nothing easy or straightforward about it

I am always, always going to condemn this unnecessary mystification and idealization of mathematics. It's exclusive and misleading.

View on HN

On the mysticism note, I want to add that math is perhaps the only subject that forces one to engage the upper "abstract" mind. The lower mind is concerned with modeling real world phenomenas, while the upper mind works with purely abstract things, aka the "true reality" in mysticism.

Natural language is very abstract too

You cut out the middle of that paragraph, which says:

"Sadly, there is all sorts of baggage around learning it (at least in the US educational system) that is completely unnecessary and awful and prevents many people from experiencing the pure joy of mathematics. One of the lies I have heard so many people repeat is that everyone is either a “math person” or a "language person” — such a profoundly ignorant and damaging statement. Here is the truth: if you can understand the structure of literature, if you can understand the basic grammar of the English language or any other language, then you can understand the basics of the language of the universe."

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you implying that you are not contributing to the mystification and idealization of mathematics?

In other words, I do not see how you are dealing with the "baggage" of learning mathematics beyond name-dropping it. In my opinion, the mysticism is the baggage. And then the rest of the blogpost reads like a conventional curriculum within the conventional academic regime with which we associate that baggage.

Please don't post in the cross-examining style. We want curious conversation here.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I don't follow. The author dismissively ctrl-V'd a paragraph with no further explanation, and my response asking for elaboration gets shadow-buried by a mod. What?

Your post wasn't simply asking for elaboration—it was written in the cross-examining style that we particularly want to avoid here because it kills curious conversation.

If you didn't intend to come across like an interrogator trying to back an opponent into the corner, then your comment needed to be written quite differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com