How do I address my aversion (ie fear) of mathematics? I'm quite good at simple mental arithmetic, but worry the act of learning more will dilute and compromise my longstanding finely tuned spatial / intuitive reasoning, which has proven to be very fast and relatively accurate. The mental overhead of consciously controlling for this while learning is just too high, and I don't trust I can make any heuristic good enough to do it fluidly. Part of me just isn't willing to do something metacognitive, like keep all in its own framework, and slowly integrate, etc etc. It shouldn't have to be so hard, there is some other problem here.
What should I do? I think my issue was partly faulty teaching of order of operations, and that almost everyone I've ever known who was very into math came up with fairly dumb ideas and assessments of situations. They then hung their myopic conclusion on "mathematics" or "probability theory", or whatever the fuck. And of course they're wrong. Of course their little model wasn't exact because their perspective on reality is finite, skewed, and highly incomplete. Mathematicians seem to ignore quantization error like mad and make up bullshit to justify it, when they should understand what they're doing better than I do.
Etc, insert further anecdotes here. I want the system for its utility and the perspectives it affords, but the other part of what holds me back is longstanding associative disgust I just can't nullify.
Does anyone else have this problem, and any advice? I'm afraid of change.
>I'm quite good at simple mental arithmetic, but worry the act of learning more will dilute and compromise my longstanding finely tuned spatial / intuitive reasoning, which has proven to be very fast and relatively accurate.
huehuehuehuehue
>>7740856
Please help anon.
>>7740760
Sounds like you fooled yourself into believing some bullshit about how math skills and "street smarts" are mutually exclusive. If anything, getting better at maths will complement your worldview and give you another lens to see the world through.
>>7740760
You address it by learning a little math so you don't have to sound like a humanities fag bowing and scraping, speaking only in noise.
Your whole post reeks of a 19 year old trying to sound smart, but I'll be nice with an observation from personal experience: a solid knowledge of math has the EXACT OPPOSITE effect of what you claim to fear in your first few sentences. That is, when you have a good spatial/number sense, and then actually learn some theory which gels with these, you can explain why you know what you know on multiple levels, adapting your language to a given audience. This is rhetorically effective - not only can you know that you are you right, but you can convince multiple other people that you are right.
See, the nice thing about the sciences relative to other areas of human thought and endeavor is, that you can't get away with bullshit forever-you have to either prove your thing logically, or verify it by reproducible experiment. Some parties on this board would distance math from (physical) science, but only a little when the two are compared to your word salad.
>>7740939
I believe that the real problem with OP's thought process is that he's worried that "learning too much theory" will lead him away from common-sense. And for that reason, he's half trying to talk himself out of something that he really doesn't personally want to git gud at.
The thing is, that "theory", as I assume he understands it from a non-STEM perspective of things, is quite different from STEM "theory". It's easy to tip fedoras and nice meme at the following statement, but anyone who isn't daft will agree with some very closely worded form of the following: on some level, STEM theory /has to actually work/, and this isn't the case for non-STEM-theory. Non-STEM theory (and now I want to speak in more neutral terms, please don't get me wrong and lump me in with non-STEM-bashing autists) is more /speculative/ and doesn't /have to actually work/; it is frequently a wish for an ideal world, or an accepted idea of what is beautiful, and so on. I am not dismissing non-STEM theory, I've read too many helpful and well-written histories and philosophies for that. It's just a basically different strain of human thought.
If a scientific theory leads you away from simple observable facts, then it's a bogus and has to be modified or rejected.
>>7740939
No. I realize it's all intertwined and that's what bothers me. I'm 22, and for my entire life, I've had no real mathematical knowledge. Barely algebra. I'm afraid of losing access to the people I've been, and the ways I've perceived, thought, and conceptualized up until this point. When I learn something, I can't keep it separate. I have to become it to some extent.
Chronic pain and health problems when I was a teenager taught me to avoid thinking in certain ways and build structures and tendencies that allowed learning while maintaining a sense of functionality. One fuck up was the difference between getting something done and being useless and miserable for days or weeks. Failure was the expected. These habits are getting in the way but it's like shedding some sort of source of security, this is the shit that allowed me to keep going and kept me alive. Rapid unchecked change leads to instability, which can worsen pain through a number of means that are hard to describe but can be resolved down to a mechanical basis. I learned to change in a very controlled sense, to avoid vulnerability.
I don't know. It's a lot at once. It doesn't help that every instance of higher mathematics I've seen people employ led to delusion in some capacity. And I can recognize this, but I'm afraid of little things slipping through until I'm stupid in the same ways and have lost an awareness of the other tools I've built, or inadvertently abandoned or replaced them.
I'm not old, but I'm not exactly getting younger. Every time I try to learn something it goes well enough, but I feel something in me holding back. And I feel tired before I've even begun. There's little in my life that isn't shit, and I just feel trapped. Defusing whatever is holding me back is throwing away what is proven to work, and it might be awful, but it can get a lot worse.
I know it isn't my blog. I'm just wondering if anyone has experienced something similar.
>>7740997
>I hear nothing, therefore, there is nothing to be heard.
>I see nothing, therefore, there is nothing to be seen.
There's some word salad noise for you. Don't take it the wrong way though, I read all of what you said and will think about the parts that matter. I'm not in the most grand mental state at the moment, making sentences isn't easy so naturally unnecessary verbosity increases. Your interpretation doesn't mean much of anything.
>>7741025
This is kind of accurate. I see mathematics more as a means to an end. A tool, a thing of utility. A language. This makes it easy to assume the language I already know (verbal and nonverbal) is adequate, and why not just try to cram everything into it, or forcibly expand it. It's a pretty dim thought.
I hear dumb shit all the time, especially centered around cognitive biases / heuristics. "Statistically you're far more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. Your aversion to flying is actually your dumb ol' brain trickin' ya! You're wired to prefer situations where you perceive yourself as having control, or direct familiarity of one who does. In actuality it's safer to fly! Statistics proves it!"
Nonsense. For one thing, that bias exists for a very logical reason. It isn't an evolutionary holdover, or some old world relic you're dragging around that's become harmful in new ecological conditions. For another, how were these numbers gathered? What were they sampling? How would you possibly hope to control for all the possible factors you'd need to? You can't. You can't even weight your data properly to account for that as best as possible. It's gibberish, but people's faith in mathematics allows them to see this kind of crap whoever puts out as valid.
That's a very polarized example, but it illustrates what I mean. Gotta get passed negative associations.
I also feel so far behind I don't even want to bother trying. I don't even remember algebra. I don't know what the proper order of operations is because I was taught that PEMDAS garbage, and being told my answers were incorrect set it all in motion.
My problems are foolish. You cannot create without destroying, and you cannot destroy without creating. You can't change without both at once.
I'm just going to have to get passed it. If I lose something important, I'll either grieve it or jump off the bridge. I need the lens. Maybe it isn't all so bad.
>>7741104
more 19-year old noise and not /sci/. Do this instead. Learn how to complete the square, and understand why it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square
>>7741115
i mean, what's stoping you from just doing it right now? go on amazon and buy an algebra book right now.
>>7741142
I worked for ~26 hours straight until I got home and laid down on the floor, thinking I'd take a short rest. Passed out, and woke up feeling like an amnesiac that got clubbed over the head a few times and doesn't quite understand where they are. Now the pain I'd meticulously kept under control is back and terrible. I can't do shit like this. It's like being back in my childhood. Get me out of here.
Anon above isn't helping. Everything that comes out of my head looks and feels wrong. I've been here before. I'll probably be here again. My capacity to verbalize thoughts is just plain foreign. I already feel wrong and more broken than usual, and am trying to use this to address and break patterns I might otherwise reason away.
I'm better off just going to sleep. I've already failed at everything I've ever tried to do. I've already been stopped so many times, wasted my time waiting. Why give a fuck if it's suddenly me in the way, I'm half dead already.
Thanks. I think I have the answer.
>>7741198
I will learn these things when my mind clears. I have realized I will understand [ ] and { } as well.
I think your understanding of mathematics is based off observation and not experience, you haven't gone through the process of actually doing the thing, so you're missing the most crucial and pertinent information, and so you're coming to a conclusion on shaky grounds.
Never in my personal experience has a conceptual understanding equaled understanding gained from experience. You don't watch videos on chess to become good at chess.
And of your "longstanding finely tuned spatial/intuitive reasoning"? If it is based on solid ground, it will survive and enhance learning mathematics. If its comfortable delusion? It'll fall and you'll be glad it did.
Happy holidays and all that.
>>7741214
>Happy holidays and all that.
Thanks I guess.
