scott's a smart guy and some of his work is timeless. he's gotten dumber. he used to be much much more subtle about inserting his more unpleasant opinions
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Do you believe his story about being completely unable to understand Calc 2? It’s really incongruous with all the fawning admiration of his genius.
aug 31, 2025, 10:40 pm • 1 0 • view
having been on both ends of calc 2, i think it really just means he had a bad math background. if you're good at math and understand you're going to be memorizing chunks of formulas, you're fine. if you're not, you may die. traditional weeder course
aug 31, 2025, 11:12 pm • 2 0 • view
tbh i am surprised anyone who struggled for real in calc 2 made it into medical school though
aug 31, 2025, 11:13 pm • 3 0 • view
But also it’s a really strong data point that his IQ gang should look at and say: not a genius. (I’m not in the IQ gang.). That’s what I don’t get.
sep 1, 2025, 1:02 am • 1 0 • view
the beauty of iq is that as long as you cling to your iq your actual, proximate failures in the real world aren't real. and if your actual tested iq isn't high maybe it's measurement error because you clearly have the right genes. it's the ultimate cope
sep 1, 2025, 1:18 am • 2 0 • view
i'm sorry if you can't derive that shit on the fly, ngmi :P
aug 31, 2025, 11:21 pm • 2 0 • view
that's just memorizing fewer, better formulae imho
aug 31, 2025, 11:27 pm • 1 0 • view
(I'm actually kinda surprised scott struggled there; he never struck me as exactly a "good at math" person but certainly as "bright enough in general to handle basic shit")
aug 31, 2025, 11:29 pm • 2 0 • view
I wonder if it's related to the mental block you run into with some programmer types on *continuous* math
aug 31, 2025, 11:30 pm • 2 0 • view
it could be that but imho if you're tolerably-bright and, like, awake in school, calc 2 may be the first time you actually had to exert any effort in math whatsoever. like. you may technically have been an A math student but have never done anything deliberately before then
aug 31, 2025, 11:32 pm • 2 0 • view
This was very much me. I was "good at math" in that I have a good memory and could do mental math kind of fast. Calc 2, and especially linear algebra and dif eq, absolutely murdered me (not least because I was an incredibly lazy college student my first two years as well).
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm not the person to ask here, I hit it for the first time around age 10 and found it effortless
aug 31, 2025, 11:33 pm • 2 0 • view
i had essentially no formal mathematics education until i was an adult, which may explain some things
aug 31, 2025, 11:35 pm • 1 0 • view
imho i still haven't had any, i have never taken a math class i did not already know the content to still
aug 31, 2025, 11:35 pm • 1 0 • view
oh, I was pretty substantially self-taught from what textbooks I could get hold of too, except I independently reinvented/reverse-engineered a chunk of differential calculus around age 8-9 and then went looking for real materials
aug 31, 2025, 11:38 pm • 1 0 • view
someone turning out to be a massive asshat does taint the less suspect takes too (common problem for sure)
aug 25, 2025, 6:30 pm • 9 0 • view
I somehow think this is worse for online stuff. Might be in part a fallacy but feels like it is easier to separate something published as a book from whatever bad takes the author produces in other media or even later books (for example NN Taleb)
aug 25, 2025, 6:37 pm • 7 0 • view