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Meaningness's profile
David Chapman
David Chapman
David Chapman
@Meaningness

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David Chapman

@Meaningness

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

meaningness.com/about-my-sites
Joined September 2010

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    1. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 1 Nov 2019
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      David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman

      Many fascinating reply threads! “How to actually do math” is taboo for some reason; there’s almost nothing written about it. You have to get the secret oral transmission. Can we use the interwebs to break that code of silence?https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1190039312794079234 …

      David Chapman added,

      David Chapman @Meaningness
      Are your math visualizations in color? Mine are all black-and-white, presumably in imitation of diagrams in textbooks. Just realized from this @St_Rev tweet that I may be missing an important tool. (Does synesthesia play a role here?) https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1189949262307766272?s=20 …
      8 replies 13 retweets 54 likes
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    2. Jay Daigle‏ @ProfJayDaigle 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness

      I don't think it's quite "taboo", but there are a few things going on. First, communicating tacit knowledge is _hard_. And this specific tacit knowledge is about nonverbal reasoning, which is hard to talk about verbally words—Wittgensteinian "Whereof one cannot speak" problems.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Jay Daigle‏ @ProfJayDaigle 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @ProfJayDaigle @Meaningness

      But moreover, as you observe elsewhere, this knowledge does get communicated in person, through advising and conferences and conversations over drinks. And it's easier to communicate this stuff in person, which is one reason the communication happens there.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    4. Jay Daigle‏ @ProfJayDaigle 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @ProfJayDaigle @Meaningness

      But another is that the audience for many of these communications is quite small. You're talking about how to "do math", but the techniques in different fields of math are radically different! My cognitive tools work well in algebra, and much less well in analysis, for instance.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    5. Jay Daigle‏ @ProfJayDaigle 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @ProfJayDaigle @Meaningness

      So if you want to communicate how to do, say, homological algebra, the audience of people who are interested is pretty small, maybe a couple hundred. And you'll meet nearly all of them at conferences. So it's not as useful to find ways to communicate that knowledge at scale.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    6. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @ProfJayDaigle

      Thank you very much for your reply. Your points are all excellent and appreciated and I basically accept all of them. I can't help wanting to push back partially against some.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    7. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      By way of context, I think I may have had an unusually unhelpful math education (MIT SB math & PhD theoretical CS with a lot of graduate-level math courses).

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    8. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      Partly my fault, for various reasons, but I do think in retrospect the department’s professors were great mathematicians but in many/most cases terrible educators. From memory, but also I’ve recently watched a bunch of their lectures on the MIT MOOC, and they are objectively bad.

      1 reply 2 retweets 2 likes
    9. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      I may be overgeneralizing from my personal experience. I wish I had had you as a mentor instead! I’m confident that your students’ experience is very different. That said, whenever I gripe about this, many people say “yes that’s how it is” and nearly never “not my experience!”

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      So… yes, communicating tacit knowledge is hard, and best done one-on-one through apprenticeship. (As it happens I’ve written a lot about that in other contexts here and there on the web!)

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      But the fact that so many people find the explanations of Rota, Thurston, and Tao massively helpful suggests that it’s possible and worth attempting. Those guys are all exceptional but they can’t be the only ones capable of communicating SOME of it.

      11:16 PM - 2 Nov 2019
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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          Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

          I did a graduate seminar with Rota and mostly he just taught stuff straight, but the rare times he’d take five minutes to go meta and explain principles and how to think about things were SO valuable. All obvious in retrospect and not esoteric. Would be easy to put in writing.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        3. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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          Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

          “My cognitive tools work well in algebra, and much less well in analysis”— Just saying THIS might be hugely helpful at about the sophomore level. I figured out then, on my own, that my roommate could integrate by seeing/feeling the surface and the shape under it, and bam.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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