Well, I pretty much told them I planned on spending all day surfing the Internet and playing video games until they stopped supporting me. You seemed to have a better excuse.
You also probably weren’t shoved into special education after second grade. I spent third through seventh grade learning basically nothing from my actual schoolwork while the rest of my native school district caught up to me.
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
Well, I pretty much told them I planned on spending all day surfing the Internet and playing video games until they stopped supporting me. [Eliezer] seemed to have a better excuse.
It may sound like a better excuse to people in this community, but I assure you that to my parents both “excuses” would have sounded one and the same:
“It’s great that you want to work on ‘artificial intelligence’ or whatever when you grow up, but right now, young man, your schoolwork comes first. You’re not going to sit around on the computer all day while you’re living under our roof.” (etc.)
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I second this jealousy! Though in my case, I had the access to higher math (at least enough to get started). What I didn’t have was anyone who cared about the rather remarkable fact that I was interested in it. I mean really, truly cared—to the point of taking some kind of action. Whenever I did something that showed what might be called exceptional ability, whether it was learning calculus or writing symphonies, the reaction of my parents and the school authorities was always “that’s great, but...”
(Incidentally, I don’t want to unfairly condemn my parents. They would have been just fine for 99% of the children they might have had, and it could have been much worse for me. But never underestimate the stupidity of the U.S. public school system.)
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I’m sure we’d all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart—that’s some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies—if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula—this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it’s not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
Do you do advanced math now? If not, why not, and why would it be different at a younger age?
Well, I pretty much told them I planned on spending all day surfing the Internet and playing video games until they stopped supporting me. You seemed to have a better excuse.
You also probably weren’t shoved into special education after second grade. I spent third through seventh grade learning basically nothing from my actual schoolwork while the rest of my native school district caught up to me.
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
It may sound like a better excuse to people in this community, but I assure you that to my parents both “excuses” would have sounded one and the same:
“It’s great that you want to work on ‘artificial intelligence’ or whatever when you grow up, but right now, young man, your schoolwork comes first. You’re not going to sit around on the computer all day while you’re living under our roof.” (etc.)
I second this jealousy! Though in my case, I had the access to higher math (at least enough to get started). What I didn’t have was anyone who cared about the rather remarkable fact that I was interested in it. I mean really, truly cared—to the point of taking some kind of action. Whenever I did something that showed what might be called exceptional ability, whether it was learning calculus or writing symphonies, the reaction of my parents and the school authorities was always “that’s great, but...”
(Incidentally, I don’t want to unfairly condemn my parents. They would have been just fine for 99% of the children they might have had, and it could have been much worse for me. But never underestimate the stupidity of the U.S. public school system.)
To use the internet term… I know that feel.
I’m sure we’d all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart—that’s some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies—if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula—this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it’s not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
At the time, I didn’t know my public library had such textbooks. :(
Do you do advanced math now? If not, why not, and why would it be different at a younger age?
Well, I haven’t done much advanced math recently, but I did do quite a bit in college. (“Advanced” math seems to start with calculus...)