I was pretty good at calculus in high school. Took one advanced math class in college and instantly realized I was way out of my league. Smart math people are way smarter than regular smart people. Humbling.
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Wow, not making me feel good about doctors……
My microbiology lab partner tested out of some med school biochemistry class. We biochem together, nfw. He knew he just got lucky.
J/k. As long as you can do medicine dosing.
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To some extent, yes. But there are limits.
We had a college student in our lab (No, I don’t know why a math major was in a biochem lab). He was apparently absolutely brilliant at math, but completely oblivious in pretty much all aspects of living real life.
The funniest story I heard from him was that on Election Night 2008 his roommates or friends or whatever had the TV on and he said “Oh, that’s what Obama looks like”.
It was Kevin Garnett on the screen.
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I topped out at math physics - tensors, ugh. Didn’t help that my teacher was terrible.
Once I can’t visualize it, I’m lost.
This is the Sklanksyiest of takes.
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I mentioned this before but in high school I went through h.s. calc and trig. I had them 1st period and didn’t do well because I slept a lot my senior year. I somehow crammed for the finals and got high B low A on each final.
Fast forward to 6 years later after phish tour and I was so bad at college pre calc I had to get a tutor. I knew just enough to end up with like -1 when the answer was 1 or 5/8 instead of 8/5 so just dumb fuck ups in the steps of it which was even more frustrating.
The only class I regret taking time off from was math. I did great at everything else including all finance and accounting class math I took for bachelor degree.
I probably could have won a Nobel prize, but instead dropped out of high school to fry donuts.
I got a minor in math and I can’t even remember why. I smoked a lot of weed back then.
I think it was like I had to take a bunch of math anyway and the minor only required 2-3 additional classes so I took a probability & stats class and learned how to calculate the odds of drawing a full house and stuff.
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Not really?
I mean, emotional intelligence is obviously far more valuable than IQ in the real world, and sociopathy is the ultimate cheat code, but in terms of raw “this shit is really fucking hard and 99.9% of people have no chance” intelligence the math nerds win.
As long as you can set up the formula and follow the logic steps for any already solved math that they make you memorize, it’s damn easy yeah? Probably talking out my ass here.
???
Bolded is basically Sklansky’s world view in a nutshell. I’m not saying he agrees with the other stuff, though.
i double majored in math. in retrospect, classes were too easy in the beginning and by the time they got hard i had no work ethic to speak of and grind through it. i finished the major having failed at least two classes. probably for the best. professional mathematicians in academia have awful lives, and the other major paid really well.
Skalansky basically believes that he’s a mathematical genius and that math is supremely important, but also he’s never really done anything beyond high school math because writing poker books was more important than winning the Fields medal.
If I could do it over again, I’d major in math. I’m not even sure why I didn’t do it the first time around. It was always my favorite subject. I guess my parents would have been opposed as they didn’t really see professional mathematician as a viable career path.
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I would have been better prepared for grad school if I had taken more math in college.
Like taking a course in probability from the math department (as opposed to the extremely dumbed down version from the economics department) would have made my first year so much better.
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Remember the Iowa Basic tests? In 5-6 grade I was college level reading and math. I can barely do either properly now. I can read well but writing properly is fucked for me lol.
I was gonna minor in something easy, but then I got high
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Yeah we had to take those. I was always 99.99x percentile - which I gather there weren’t a lot of kids in Kansas City public schools scoring that high.
One time I got in a fight with this kid at recess on a day we were taking the ITBS. The teacher completely sided with me and was only worried that I might be too upset to test well. When really the fight was probably more my fault than anything. Apparently the test scores factored into the schools overall grade or something. Incentives matter.
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I got As in English in high school but we never did much writing that I remember other than papers. The stupid vocab trees if you remember those were middle school for me.
My English 101 teacher in college had written a few novels and just ripped any paper most of us did actual grammar wise. I was embarrassed and by end of semester had it down better but now I don’t read enough books vs forum posts and forgot it all again.
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I can’t find a photo but do you olds remember when like you laid out a sentence on a line and it was:
noun/verb/blah blah blah with downward lines for adverbs and adjectives and shit?
Do they still do that?