Upvoted for the useful comment, but my mind works completely the opposite to this—only through seeing the math does the formalism make sense to me. I suspect many lesswrongers are similar in that respect, but it’s interesting to see that not all are.
(also, yes, I could make my posts easier to follow, I admit that; one day, when I have more time, I will work on that)
FWIW I bounced off the post the first couple times I looked at it and was glad for Chris’ comment doing a good distillation of it, and am now more likely to read through the whole thing at some point.
Hmm, interesting. Now that you’re stating the opposite, it’s pretty clear to me that there are very particular assumptions underlying my claim that, “the valuable contribution here is not the formalisation, but the generator behind the formalisation” and maybe I should be more cautious about generalising to other people.
One of my underlying assumptions was my model of becoming good at maths—focusing on what ideas might allow you to generate the proof yourself, rather than trying to remember the exact steps. Of course, it is a bit parochial for me to act as though this is the “one true path”.
Upvoted for the useful comment, but my mind works completely the opposite to this—only through seeing the math does the formalism make sense to me. I suspect many lesswrongers are similar in that respect, but it’s interesting to see that not all are.
(also, yes, I could make my posts easier to follow, I admit that; one day, when I have more time, I will work on that)
FWIW I bounced off the post the first couple times I looked at it and was glad for Chris’ comment doing a good distillation of it, and am now more likely to read through the whole thing at some point.
Thanks for commenting that!
Hmm, interesting. Now that you’re stating the opposite, it’s pretty clear to me that there are very particular assumptions underlying my claim that, “the valuable contribution here is not the formalisation, but the generator behind the formalisation” and maybe I should be more cautious about generalising to other people.
One of my underlying assumptions was my model of becoming good at maths—focusing on what ideas might allow you to generate the proof yourself, rather than trying to remember the exact steps. Of course, it is a bit parochial for me to act as though this is the “one true path”.