I thought it might be, and if I’d read it elsewhere, I’d have been sure of it—but this is LessWrong, which is chock-full of hyperintelligent people whose abilities to do math, reason and visualize are close to superpowers from where I am. You people seriously intimidate me, you know. (Just because I feel you’re so much out of my league, not for any other reason.)
It’s a standard joke about mathematicians vs everybody else, and I intended it as such. I can do limited visualization in the 4th dimension (hypercubes and 5-cells (hypertetrahedra), not something as complicated as the 120-cell or even the 24-cell), but it’s by extending from a 3-d visualization with math knowledge, rather than specializing n to 4.
For what it’s worth, my ability to reason is fairly good in a very specific way—sometimes I see the relevant thing quickly (and after LWers have been chewing on a problem and haven’t seen it (sorry, no examples handy, I just remember the process)), but I’m not good at long chains of reasoning. Math and visualizing aren’t my strong points.
You might as well tell me to ‘just’ grow wings and fly away...
I believe wnoise was making a joke—one that I thought was moderately funny.
I thought it might be, and if I’d read it elsewhere, I’d have been sure of it—but this is LessWrong, which is chock-full of hyperintelligent people whose abilities to do math, reason and visualize are close to superpowers from where I am. You people seriously intimidate me, you know. (Just because I feel you’re so much out of my league, not for any other reason.)
It’s a standard joke about mathematicians vs everybody else, and I intended it as such. I can do limited visualization in the 4th dimension (hypercubes and 5-cells (hypertetrahedra), not something as complicated as the 120-cell or even the 24-cell), but it’s by extending from a 3-d visualization with math knowledge, rather than specializing n to 4.
For what it’s worth, my ability to reason is fairly good in a very specific way—sometimes I see the relevant thing quickly (and after LWers have been chewing on a problem and haven’t seen it (sorry, no examples handy, I just remember the process)), but I’m not good at long chains of reasoning. Math and visualizing aren’t my strong points.