Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>I have taught these kind of undergraduate subjects and, in the context of a course, the Fourier transform never struck me as something very complicated.

It's great that it was "never complicated" for you. In contrast, the author (David Smith) of this blog post admits that he initially struggled with the Fourier Transform -- and wants to share some insights he gained after he understood it.

He has already graduated with a degree in statistics and computer science and also developed add-on software packages for R so he presumably first got exposed to FT within the _context_ of a college course. So he actually did what you suggested. Nevertheless, he wants to share why some supplementary material he didn't initially have might be helpful to others.

Alternative presentations of topics can sometimes flip the "light bulb" in some brains. I don't think it's a useless blog post.

> It's great that it was "never complicated" for you.

I don't think they meant "not complicated to learn", but "never complicated to teach, once its time had arrived in the natural progression of the course".

>but "never complicated to teach, once its time had arrived in the natural progression of the course"

Which is, of course, true for give or take all subjects out there

Indeed: the original comment was not at all implying anything special about FTT. Rather that, perhaps whether we like it or not, knowledge is not very flat; you really should honor (as in: recognize and treat appropriately-nothing magical or moral intended) the difficulty of many topics by doing prerequisite study, or, if you can’t, just accepting that you will never have a good understanding.

I don’t think it’s at loggerheads with just-in-time learning or the real opportunity cost of more extensive study. I think it’s just true that hard things are hard whether you like it or not.

> It's great that it was "never complicated" for you.

Please stop making it sound like the commenter was bragging. That's just having bad faith in HN users.

The comment was about how the context and prior understanding of the underlying topics is a necessary prerequisite for understanding complex topics built on those and how blog learning is a necessarily contrived method of teaching.

It does not mean it won't work for some. If you happen to have the prior understanding of the prerequisites then it'd be a way to learn some additional insight, but you shouldn't assume the Venn diagram for that audience is much larger than a small % of the readers.

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