this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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We weren't verifying things with our own eyes before AI came along either, we were reading Wikipedia, text books, journals, attending lectures, etc, and accepting what we were told as facts (through the lens of critical thinking and applying what we're told as best we can against other hopefully true facts, etc etc).
I'm a Relaxed Empiricist, I suppose :P Bill Bailey knew what he was talking about.
You never took a lab science course? Or wrote a proof in math?
In my experience, "writing a proof in math" was an exercise in rote memorization. They didn't try to teach us how any of it worked, just "Write this down. You will have to write it down just like this on the test." Might as well have been a recipe for custard.
That sounds like a problem in the actual course.
One of my course exams in first year Physics involved mathematically deriving a well known theorem (forgot which, it was decades ago) from other theorems and they definitelly hadn't taught us that derivation - the only real help you got was that they told you where you could start from.
Mind you, in different courses I've had that experience of one being expected to do rote memorization of mathematical proofs in order to be able to regurgitate them on the exam.
Anyways, the point I'm making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
I think the problem is that experience is pretty common (at leat for my experience in the US). I only learned to love math later in life because I started getting interested in physics, and then I realized that math wasn't rote memorization.
In all fairness, I think it's common just about everywhere.
It depends a lot on the quality of the teachers and the level of Maths one is learning.
Calculus was literally invented to describe physics. If you learn physics without learning basic derivative calculus along side it you're only getting a part of the picture, so I'm guessing you derived something like y position in a 2 dimensional projectile motion problem cause that's a fuckin classic. Sounds like you had a good physics teacher 👍
If I remember it correctly it was something about electromagnetism and you started from the rules for Black Body radiation.
It was University level Physics, so projectile motion in 2D without taking in account attrition would have made for an exceedingly simple exam question 🙃
Haha fair enough I guess I took first year to mean high school level physics but I took calculus in high school so that made sense to me.