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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 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
    2. 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
    3. 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
    4. 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
    5. 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
    6. 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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    7. 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
    8. 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
    9. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 2 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

      I couldn’t do that; I had to integrate syntactically. So I’m also much better with algebra. However, I did eventually develop visualization abilities (for abstract algebra and such). In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I could have learned to visualize surfaces much more.

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

      If someone had said “These are fundamentally different ways of doing math, and some people seem to be naturally better at one or the other, but if you work at it you can manage both, and here’s how to develop your visualization ability” that might have been revelatory.

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

      There’s stuff that applies only to broader or narrower subdomains of math, but the more general stuff doesn’t seem to get taught either.

      11:29 PM - 2 Nov 2019
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        2. krowney‏ @krowney 4 Nov 2019
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          Replying to @Meaningness @ProfJayDaigle

          Didn’t know until recently that many Math teachers & faculty are aware of big debates on pedagogical methods in mathematics. Called “The Math Wars” by some, the central contested point is how much Math ed should be simple Darwinianian struggle or something otherwise.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 4 Nov 2019
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          Replying to @krowney @ProfJayDaigle

          Does this controversy extend to the university level, or is it only up to that point?

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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