To rephrase, if the information gained by knowing the history of something can be screened off by
a more compact or abstract model, I prefer the latter.
That’s fine if you are trying to do economics with your time. But it sounded to me from the comment that you didn’t care as well. Actually the economics is nontrivial here, because different bits of the brain engage with the formal material vs the historic context.
I think an argument for learning a field (even a formal/mathematical field) as a living process evolving through time, rather than the current snapshot really deserves a separate top level post, not a thread reply.
My personal experience trying to learn math the historic way and the snapshot way is that I vastly prefer the former. Perhaps I don’t have a young, mathematically inclined brain. History provides context for notational and conceptual choices, good examples, standard motivating problems that propelled the field forward, lessons about dead ends and stubborn old men, and suggests a theory of concepts as organically evolving and dying, rather than static. Knowledge rooted in historic context is much less brittle.
For example, I wrote a paper with someone about what a “confounder” is. * People have been using that word probably for 70 years without a clear idea of what it means, and the concept behind it for maybe 250 more (http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/4/297.full.pdf+html). In the course of writing the paper we went through maybe half a dozen historic definitions people actually put forth (in textbooks and such), all but one of them “wrong.” Probably our paper is not the last word on this. Actually “confounder” as a concept is mostly dying, to be replaced by “confounding” (much clearer, oddly). Even if we agree that our paper happens to be the latest on the subject, how much would you gain by reading it, and ignoring the rest? What if you read one of the earlier “wrong” definitions and nothing else?
You can’t screen off, because history does not obey the Markov property.
This is “analytic philosophy,” I suppose, and in danger of running afoul of Luke’s wrath!
That’s fine if you are trying to do economics with your time. But it sounded to me from the comment that you didn’t care as well. Actually the economics is nontrivial here, because different bits of the brain engage with the formal material vs the historic context.
I think an argument for learning a field (even a formal/mathematical field) as a living process evolving through time, rather than the current snapshot really deserves a separate top level post, not a thread reply.
My personal experience trying to learn math the historic way and the snapshot way is that I vastly prefer the former. Perhaps I don’t have a young, mathematically inclined brain. History provides context for notational and conceptual choices, good examples, standard motivating problems that propelled the field forward, lessons about dead ends and stubborn old men, and suggests a theory of concepts as organically evolving and dying, rather than static. Knowledge rooted in historic context is much less brittle.
For example, I wrote a paper with someone about what a “confounder” is. * People have been using that word probably for 70 years without a clear idea of what it means, and the concept behind it for maybe 250 more (http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/4/297.full.pdf+html). In the course of writing the paper we went through maybe half a dozen historic definitions people actually put forth (in textbooks and such), all but one of them “wrong.” Probably our paper is not the last word on this. Actually “confounder” as a concept is mostly dying, to be replaced by “confounding” (much clearer, oddly). Even if we agree that our paper happens to be the latest on the subject, how much would you gain by reading it, and ignoring the rest? What if you read one of the earlier “wrong” definitions and nothing else?
You can’t screen off, because history does not obey the Markov property.
This is “analytic philosophy,” I suppose, and in danger of running afoul of Luke’s wrath!