ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
Eh, most diffEQ classes are taught at a super introductory level, and if there is much difficulty, it's actually because they're taught at a super introductory level, in the style of, "You just need to memorize these various magic tricks," which is supremely unhelpful to building intuition. There's a more significant jump when going to something like differentiable manifolds, because that's generally only targeted at math grad students, so they often go into the other ditch in terms of rigor.
Understanding diffEQ is nearly essential for the sciences. Honestly, I don't know how one would survive physics for physics majors without it; generally it's the super introductory versions of physics that skip the differential equations and again require you to just memorize a bunch of magical formulas that seem to come from magic. It's the physics for physics majors that show how all the typical super simplified problems are just pretty easy differential equations. It even came up in some neuroscience classes I took (scared the pants off the bio majors, but was unsurprisingly the easiest part of the material for me). One can't hide even in CS, at least not today. I mean, even just the extremely rudimentary concept of gradient descent. Even manifold stuff; I still see manifold learning stuff popping up here and there. I guess if you want CS for web design, sure, but if you're thinking CS for cutting edge tech, you need a pretty large chunk of math these days.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
What "counts" is a difficult problem, and I don't think almost anyone has meaningfully consistent lines. I recall looking at some work long ago that found a neat correlation between particular physical signals and infidelity behavior (with a nice theoretical mechanism explanation and an animal model to boot). I remembered it mostly because it was a surprising contrast to the complete lack of results that were anywhere near that quality in the raging public discussion concerning sexual orientation. I doubted that any of the people who wanted to take a strong stance on sexual orientation would take a similar stance on infidelity, and well, yeah, I kind of doubt that most people would be willing to compare the types of evidence available for gender dysphoria stuff and have a consistent view on what "counts".
Yep, sometimes you really can tell exactly what's going on by reversing the valence. We don't have access to the TA here to ask some clarifying questions, but I have little doubt that they would end up a stammering mess and contradicting themself when trying to explain why they gave the grade they gave.
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