See your mistake was starting with advanced calculus when they don't even know basic calculus yet
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Advanced calculus? In this house, we use numerical methods!
in a nut shell
A former coworker was a mathematician in an engineering position and he was so happy when he got to use his calculus skills once.
Kurzgesagt hentai? Like with the birds?
Sounds sexycational
Science has a really nice butt though, ngl
gatekeeping loser shit tbh
it might technically be gatekeeping, but it's not arbitrary, or even a very high bar. Science just involves doing the scientific method, which anyone, even the guy in the comic, can do. What he's actually doing, and what a lot of "pop science" stuff is, is trivia. Trivia is awesome, but not really science.
Calling science loser shit is a bold stance. Aren't you a fellow believer and practitioner in the "immortal science"?
I like looking at paintings but I’m no Michelangelo
AITA ?
I like race cars. I've never designed a race car.
You don't need to study 5+ years full time to like the scientific method.
"Loving everything about something even the boring parts" isn't even how love works so i don't feel the need to address the rest of the gatekeeping
The cyanide comic is shit, but that isn't the point. What makes the "I love science" crowd annoying is that they aren't trying to engage with the topic at all. You can't gatekeep when nobody is attempting to pass the gate.
It's like people who claim they love books, when all they do is stack them in their shelves to appear intelligent.
I appreciate moves and TV without wanting to be an actor.
I appreciate science and what it does without wanting to be a scientist.
I love science. But like the way catholics don't know anything real about god (obviously), I don't know anything real about science. I just know (or believe) that science can provide real answers and if it does something wrong, it will be corrected. I cannot provide those answers, but I trust in the people who can.
Science is like my religion. I am a simple believer, scientists are the monks and scribes, science communicators are the pastors and preachers.
Idk at least the scientific method includes some kind of testing process that religion just doesn't
My take on their comment was that they know this but consider it their 'religion' anyways because they don't understand the process and so, in the absence of true understanding, take it on faith alone that the process actually works out
But the evidence is all around us even if you don't understand the processes themselves: Science built us a moon landing, religion built us the dark ages
I know it is a hard comparison to make, but if you don'thave faith in the scientific method, you get idiots like... populists. And they can just call "fake news" and be done with it.
Truth is not an absolute value. The science can be clear as day, but if it is not supported by the people, it will simply be rejected. You gotta have people believe in science for it to be valuable.
I guess it depends on how much faith you have in empirical evidence, then?
This is actually one of the better takes that I've seen on the image. Usually the top post is something to the effect of "don't tell me what to like!"
But the truth is considerably more nuanced. Science is slow-moving, often boring, and can be incredibly frustrating to do long-term. People get the benefit of summarized very old results complete with diagrams and images and animations and whatever have you.
You can go on YouTube and learn quite a bit about quantum physics and black holes without really needing to have a deep understanding of what's going on. I do this as my PhD is in a completely different area from physics.
But ultimately for most people what you're liking isn't the science but the results once they're cleaned up. They're fundamentally two different things. But there is absolutely no reason you can't be a fan of the idea of science.
You sound learn advanced calculus, there’s a small set of rules to follow and personally I think it’s fun.
Then you can choose to never do it by hand, but understand the principals that govern so much of our world.
How would one do this if they were say, someone that took algebra 20 years ago and didn’t do particularly well and then white knuckled “statistics for non STEM majors” as a requirement for something else and had no other maths background?
What are the steps?
Try something like Khan Academy and some YouTube lessons
start with “functions”, refresh yourself on polynomials, skip trig to start with, and then look for calculus and derivatives.
Functions are the foundation of modelling change, then calculus is the tip of the iceberg. When you understand derivatives, the next course would be anti-derivatives and integration. For calculating integrals just focus on the concept, there’s a whole world of methods to calculate them that’s less important than understanding the idea.
It’s a good idea to do lots of excercises on paper and most frontier AI will be able to make you problem sets and evaluate your work.
I'm officially triggered. There's no such thing as "advanced calculus". Yes, I'm aware of Loomis and Sternberg. That book was literally written to stroke the authors' ego.
Differential geometry along with complex, real and functional analysis could perhaps be considered advanced calculus?
I like to watch PBS spacetime on Youtube. It keeps me humble.
I understand 10% of it on a good day.
Same, I just like his soothing voice though
"I love Lemmy" mfers when they're not self housing their own instance so they can test charges before submitting a PR to the repo.
Or the heavy statistics….
:yea:
me: "I would have job stability if I studied a harder physical science, but there's no way I could do all that maths. I should study plants. I can touch them, so surely they aren't just maths."
plants: exist in fucking calculus
I unironically wanted to do chemistry or biology back in the day, but couldn't make the grades in maths and had trouble with the calculations. Hell, even I took Stats 101 3x in college... but any time I used it in hands on applied science I was a wizard... Then, after 30 I realised I had dyscalculia. 🤦♀️ You have talents to contribute, but the hard part is figuring out where you belong. That kind of thing takes a little luck, though, not merit.
I've suspected a dyscalculia diagnosis for a while. Everything up to elementary algebra clicks with me in some fundamental way where I can intuitively do a four digit multiplication table in my head or a pharmacological weight calculation in an ambulance. It's just like any other knowledge base to me. But then everything after that, at least through the high-level trigonometry and general calculus classes I took along with the sciences that are equation-heavy like chemistry/physics, feels like I'm illiterate no matter how much I read. Meanwhile classmates in those labs were doing the same work as intuitively as the practical side of medicine comes to me.
Applied science is definitely the route for me to take either way. I like doing anti-Cartesian science with a sense of praxis to it. I'd be shitty at the level of programming or biochemistry it takes to be a good research horticulturist, but I can interpret those studies and use them as best practices while turning my city into a living lab for my politics.
Oh man, do I have some books for you. I haven't forgotten about you. I defend my thesis next week so my brain is crazy rn, but I have your message pinned. In the meantime, find Seeing Like A State by James Scott. Then if you Iike that one, check out his other one called Against the Grain. One of my besties does the biochem side of things and I am the mapper, computer person.
No worries at all! I like Scott's work a lot. Weapons of The Weak is one of the books that got me into peasant studies and changed my whole urbanism outlook.
Oh hell yes. :) He just came out with a new one about Rivers too. His outlook, well that's the thing we joke about having any type of anthropology in your background, it's like having secret power levels. Perspective is everything, especially in geographical contexts.
Kurgehazh hentai?
Bet there is rule34 of those bird. Never looked it up but the rule does not lie.
rule 35 covers for it after all
*birbs
(quietly goes back to looking at stamps)
What exactly is advanced calculus? Abstract algebra, functional analysis or something else?
Nothing. It's a meaningless term. Some people use it to say "hard calculus" (multivariate, pdes, etc) and I suspect that's how it's being used here but, historically, it has mostly been used to refer to the introduction to real analysis courses found in books spike Spivak and Apostol.
Gnarly PDEs aren't exactly the same beast as differentiating single variable polynomials.
Gauchy theorem and so
Probably infinite series? Maybe differential equations, but I guess that's usually its own subject.
I would think at most institutions it would be calc 3 and beyond, or pretty close to?
A lot of majors don't take beyond 1 or 2.
I love engineering motherfuckers when the engineering is actually watching and talking shit and not actually advanced calculus
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