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Comment by matheme | Hacker News Reader

I was calling you a gatekeeper rather than notation, but feel free to keep stuffing that man with your straw.

The sentence I called out, independent of the article's content: "You expect the players of the game to learn the rules before they play."

Is you explicitly stating your goal is gatekeeping.

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The only thing that sentence says is that it’s impossible to understand math without understanding the language of math and how it is constructed. Not sure how that is controversial or gatekeeping. If you are annoyed at that comment saying “learn” instead of “be taught”, I think that’s a pedantic argument because the argument wasn’t about that at all.

"Can I enter your gate?"

"In order to enter this gate you must know what this symbol means."

"I am unfamiliar with that symbol."

"Well, I expect you to learn what it means before I allow you to enter this gate. Now go away."

That’s a very good gate to keep. Some things are just meant to be gatekept so that the cranks and dilettantes that wastes everyone’s time can stay far outside.

Every good mathematical textbook introduces the notation it’s using.

Again, learning notation is part of the process of learning math. No one is gatekeeping anything, at no point you need to do an exam or magically be aware of notation that you never saw. Every book and every class will define new notation at the beginning, in most cases they will do so even when there’s no new notation. I am not sure what your argument is.

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