FFS, we were just at the part where Dave makes up a BS explanation for how he taught calc without knowing differential equations and you clowns are ruining it with this unreadable diarrhea.

Oh, that was just you misreading the situation - he was never going to go into details about that. Also it's not as good a gotcha as you seem to imply it is - you can teach introductory calculus without knowing what a differential equation is. I'm decades removed from any sort of calculus instruction but my recollection is that differential equations are introduced fairly early on, but they are not called differential equations at that point in time.

Troll on Trolly.

This is usual forum type circle jerk clique stuff where the ONLY people you want silenced in this discussion is the people not on your 'side'. you guys are on a mission to both provoke a defense and then mock him for defending while telling Chez or myself or anyone not singing from the same hymn sheet why they need to step out of the conversation, if not on the same side, and let you guys do your usual thing. A 'thing' that is not based on good reasoning of logic or arguments as much as self and mutual validation.

Nothing could be clearer as anyone objective can see by who is called to 'silence' while others, no matter how specious the arguments get nodding acceptance or quiet acquiescence.

The amount of denial of this aspect on this forum is both astounding but also, sadly, predictable.

e_d thinks he has found a singular area that DS might not score well. That is then his gotcha. I can hand wave away everything else you say, no matter how impressive unless you take my test. Oh and if you take the test and achieve the results don't think I will then switch to acknowledging you as smart overall as I won't. You see it was a test you could only 'fail' and there was no real 'pass' available. Just as provoking out your bonafides was a test you could only fail. Don't do so and we will assume and label you as dumb and not having any. Do provide them and we will mock it as braggadocios and not worthy of the merit you give them.

Checkmate DS! Now take the test!!!

Sure. Because the only other option is that there might be more than 5 high school students in all of New Jersey that have as much mathematical talent as a grown man who doesn’t know what a differential equation is and struggles to follow logic routinely taught in intro undergrad classes.

I am not on any sort of mission to provoke anyone to defend his or her intelligence.

My personal view is that most (not all, but most) posters in this forum, including DS, are reasonably smart, certainly smart enough to discuss politics. On the flip side, I am not persuaded that any geniuses walk among the posters in this forum.

I am happy enough to think of myself as reasonably smart. I am long reconciled to the fact that I am not a genius. It is important to me that people see me as reasonably smart. Beyond that, I don't really care where people rank me in the universe of reasonably smart people.

I imagine that most posters feel the same way.

Since David didn't fall for my requests for his self-assessment either, I'll provide my thoughts here. David's posts grate on people in part because the real barriers most people face in making rational decisions are what David exhibits in these discussions: the emotional needs overriding a rational understanding of the real world and the consequent lack of self-awareness. Emotional maturity matters far more than intellectual abilities and the point of almost everything he talks about ultimately boils down to him trying to demonstrate how smart he truly is, which speaks volumes about his level of emotional maturity. In real life, making rational decisions is more about managing your own emotions than excelling at math puzzles. Raw reasoning skills don't matter if they are used to rationalize your existing biases and even real expertise can be used as a pretext to shield your analysis from criticism, rather than a tool for honestly exploring the problem space in order to come to the correct conclusion.

I will add that emotional maturity is likely strongly positive correlated with perceived intelligence and academic achievements, which strengthens the correlation between academic performance and real-world success. But bragging about how good you're at logic puzzles is no better than bragging about how great an athlete you were in middle school and how you're actually more talented than top professional athletes. But at 74, you are who you are and potential doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong - David's a fairly accomplished person in an obscure field, but for some reason for David, this isn't enough.

To be fair, differentials are pretty counter-intuitive. I still struggle with why one wheel spins one way while the other wheel spins the other.

sure, and you are less political than most here. Take that as you will.

But still if i was the one calling out e_d as if dumb and he recited a list of bonafides similar to what DS did, and I hand waved them away while mocking him as dumb, and pushing for other measures to substantiate, I absolutely think you and others would be coming out of the wood work to point out my ridiculousness, and rightly so.

that certain people (sides) here can do that regularly is just proof of how divided America (/world/ forumland) is via 'sides' and how people take sides in different ways. One of the most common being what they choose NOT to comment on.

Imagine this, if you will. What I am saying here is being labelled as the derail of this thread and NOT this call for DS to both supply his bonafides and then the ridicule of them. Nope, that is not the derail and my or Chez response to it is the derail. We are told to shut up so the real topic (attacking DS) can go on despite it being a complete derail from the OP.


Do you think anyone but me will cite and acknowledge that?

True, I sort of more "traipse" than walk.

I suspect that "genius" in the sense you're talking about doesn't exist. Most people most of the time on most things don't apply themselves fully, so most perceived gaps in mental abilities likely come down to how hard you're trying to learn (which itself is a combination of interest and drive). Which means tests of intelligence (as well as our subjective measures of who's smart) may very well be measuring some combination of executive function, interest in certain things, emotional stability, grit, ambition, etc, rather than some kind of mystical raw brain power or cleverness or ability to solve really difficult problems or whatever.

I know people that are familiar with the psychometric literature would instantly realize that this isn't supported by evidence - people have tried to measure those other things have generally found that the correlation between g factor and those others (grit, conscientiousness, emotional intelligence, etc) to be low. My suspicion is that this is due to the latter measures not being tests, but simply self-assessments that take your word for how you think you are. Which is problematic since higher-achieving folks also have higher-achieving peers that they are implicitly comparing themselves to when they're answering these questions. My personal experience from having worked and lived in all sorts of environments is that there's an extremely strong bias among high-achieving folks to consider themselves to be less gritty, less conscientious, less ambitious and less driven, because their benchmark is the high-achieving cohort that they've always been compared to, rather than the general population.

I thought you were some genius savant at being able to convey ideas to people so they understand? Well I for one am very curious what you meant by being a top 5% "practitioner" in teaching calculus despite not knowing what a differential equation is because you once helped a beautiful stripper with division?

Exactly, so the real topics are, who is the best mathematician? DS, D2, or andi bloch?

And how good is that pinker book? (Thread topic)

What are sat tests good for?

What has math to do with the universe?

Only a few miles closer to the sun and we get baked, a few miles farther and we have ice age.

I have no idea whether this is a compliment, an insult, or neither.

If someone is challenging whether you know what you are talking about on an internet forum, I think it's fine to explain why you have knowledge or expertise. If someone is challenging your intelligence on an internet forum, I think it's almost always best to ignore it.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't always follow my own advice.

You saunter more than you traipse.

Preach water, drink wine, you hypocrates!

It is a statement without judgement so take it as you will.

If I say Person x is less political than Person Y it does not intonate any value on the comment. You may want to be more or less political, or not care. All are fine.

I say it as I think most are in denial of that aspect which is the over riding aspect here most times.



I don't know the DS history here. I just had a brief glimpse, recently and can see he is generally not liked.

I am not taking sides on that, people can like, or not, whom they want.

But when it spills into specious arguments and attacks, based on 'sides' more than content and the pile on follows, I see that as fair to call out.

Not because I care if people pile on, but do so honestly. If your position is 'we hate and thus will attack you gleefully' and are upfront about it, I have no issue with that. d2 is pretty open and honest about that and I think his criticisms then are fair game for him to cast. But when others play this game of trying to pretend they are 'correct', 'accurate', just offering honest criticism', etc when that is not true, they just want any excuse to troll and attack then expect to get called on that BS.

Trolly is the perfect example. He is pretends he is looking for honest engagement and answers when his only intent is to troll regardless of answer.

Btw, I'm pretty sure David's incorrect with respect to this self-assessment but he phrased it in a confusing enough way:

That it's hard to disprove this and I don't think this differential equations gotcha is the way to go - obviously it'd be odd for some who teaches calculus to be unaware of what they are, but if you had to teach someone who stopped studying math around high school algebra and has shaky foundations all the way, well solving differential equations isn't going to be the deal breaker.

I think what he meant was something like: if you take a random set of adults who did not complete at least an introductory calculus course (so this sample is going to be heavily skewed towards people who don't even have a solid grasp of algebra), exclude anyone who happens to be "talented" in math and he had to compete with every math teacher in the world who can teach at least introductory calculus and the goal was to get each of those people to finish introductory calculus (I assume to a point where they'd be able to pass that course at an average school), he'd finish in the top 5%.

I mean I filled in a lot of details but it's still super-vague - are you teaching a group of people or one at a time, how much time are you given for this endeavor (both your personal time as well as the actual time over which the students are expected to learn the material), how high is the bar, how do you aggregate the outcome, who counts as a teacher, how motivated are the students, etc - and it's obviously an absurd hypothetical designed to stroke his ego. I think his point here is that most people who end up teaching even high school math can't really come up with brilliant analogies like he did with the stripper that one time and he can digest the material for ordinary people in a way that few other math teachers can.

Obviously the way to prove this is for him to design an alternative math curriculum but I suspect he'll have excuses as to why he's not interested.

If I claimed you couldn’t find 5 better high school golfers than me in New Jersey, it’s not really an insult to point out that I’m clearly fos if I’m not even a scratch golfer.

Solving a differential equation and knowing what a differential is are two very separate things. Sorry, I’d love to see the calc 101 curriculum where they never mention what the little dx symbol is for, seems like you’d have to be extremely incurious to miss that.

The simplest explanation is that he’s FOS.

DS's claim is to be able to teach basic calculus to the mathematically uneducated.

This does not require being anything like best at calculas and could also be true about a nowehere near scratch golfer being best able to teach me to shoot under 100.

Go babble somewhere else, chez.

David's 74 and he probably learned calculus in high school. That's over 55 years ago. I learned calculus in the 90's, which isn't nearly as long ago and honestly do not recall whether the term "differential" was introduced in the first calculus class or they just went with "deltas" and have absolutely no recollection of when the term "differential equations" was introduced (I think it was either DiffEQ class proper or Calc 3 but not 100% sure). So I totally buy that David may understand the concept of a differential or a differential equation without having been exposed to these terms or having forgotten those terms. And this simply isn't the most obvious gotcha here - it's that David doesn't even understand the difference between tutoring and teaching a class.

You're sort of proving David's point here (however misguided) by focusing on this - his implicit point is that most people who know a lot of math don't understand how to dumb things down in a way that would make sense to ordinary people because their understanding is intrinsically tied to the use of jargons in a self-referential way, whereas he is one of the few who truly understand the concepts, so can explain those in plain language. This idea that jargons are intrinsically important to understanding the concepts, when the concepts can be explained without the use of specific jargons, almost certainly reinforces in his head how right he is, however perverse that might sound to you.

I dont recall 'differential' being used at school age except when talking about gear boxes or wages

I'm sure he does but this difference has been lacking. Anyone shoul xpect to do far better with the studfent when it's 1-1 or a very small (preferably fairly equal) group

I took differential equations. Dropped it when the teacher (Dr. Cooperman) gave me a 92 instead of a 100 when he didn't like that I did most of the problems in my head. I haven't tutored any math but gambling math for thirty years (except for Pat Callahan's granddaughter. She not only went from F to A in calculus but Callahan mentioned it in a video about me.) Perhaps "know" isn't a great synonym for "barely remember". but I used that word to enhance my point.

lol, changed his story rather dramatically.