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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
You're allowed to not like math, but the assertion that you're bad at it for any reason aside from practice is not true for most people. I agree that some people need less practice than others. I can't agree with a cop-out being used by intelligent people to avoid learning.
This is different from my own admittedly small sample conclusion, and I suspect may reflect the fact that if you can't do math you are not going to try physics. In psychology, I have encountered many people who can do logic, language, and analytical thinking but no matter how you try to explain it cannot do math much further than 2+2=4. The problem i feel in my field is such people aren't being weeded out because the math we do is sufficiently complicated that it is rare for any of them to be evaluated by anyone who is capable of understanding why what they are doing is wrong.
A simple example might illustrate my point: i recently reviewed a paper in which the authors analysed their data in a silly way. When I pointed that out, their counter was that they agreed with me but that someone had recently published a paper using the same silly analysis, so therefore it was ok. I don't even know what to say at this point....
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