![]() ![]() "You didn't do that for me, you did that for you, you just wanted to feel useful, you wanted me to appreciate you for how thoughtful you were, you didn't actually care whether I wanted it or not-" "-fucking inconsiderate asshole," she is saying. "Trust me, give it twenty years, you're going to be sorry you were petulant about this."įor nineteen years, I have waited to tell him he was wrong. "Walking across the stage, being with your peers." "You're going to regret not having this memory," my father warns. I put forth substantial effort to ensure that the yearbook would contain absolutely zero pictures of me. I am boycotting the graduation ceremony at my high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. I've snuck peeks at what he's signing in everyone else's books ("To, a friend of Ender"), and I get a nonstandard, unique message, unlike the ten people before me.īut the "no one does that" cuts deeper than I would have predicted. He says it with an undertone of awe, and I can tell he's more pleased than displeased. It takes a few more stuttered sentences to make clear what I mean. "It's –0.378861," I blurt out-awkwardly, with no preamble. I'm worried Orson Scott Card will tease me for imprecision, since clearly the whole point of Bean's challenge was that n is irrational, and –0.378861 is just an approximation. I have scribbled –0.378861 on a scrap of paper. He snarks: "When you know the value of n, I'll finish this test." On page 242, the character Bean has written an equation, as a challenge to his teachers: 2 + 2 = π √ 2 + n There is a book signing in Greensboro, North Carolina-Orson Scott Card will be there, signing copies of Ender's Shadow. Five seconds pass, and it has not yet begun to fade. The pain is bright and hot, feeling halfway between a cut and a burn. "Ow!" I shout, rolling away from him and clutching my head. My father tosses my brother back into the cushions a second time, grabs me in a gentle headlock, digs his knuckles into my scalp in a painful noogie. He throws us both onto the couch, where we recover and launch ourselves back at him like pouncing tigers. We clamber over top of him, laughing, pummeling him with tiny fists. I am seven years old, roughhousing with my older brother and my father on the living room carpet. If you were the kind of person who was good at math, my explanation would have been sufficient, and you would now understand. I have given you an adequate explanation. Instead, he looks at me, and says more words, and the message lurking behind the words-the message implicit in his tone and posture and air of tolerant patience-is: He doesn't say a function is when you set up a rule for dealing with numbers, and this rule is, whatever number you put in, you're going to square it, and add seven. He doesn't tell me the equals sign here is more like telling you the definition of this thing, F of X-what F of X is is the thing on the other side of the equals sign. He doesn't tell me this isn't really an equation at all, not the way you're thinking of it. Looking back from a distance of twenty-five years, I see (one of) his mistake(s). "F is five-point-three-repeating," I say, trying to inject a measure of confidence I do not feel into my tone. If the right side of the equation is sixteen, and X is three. ""F of X"" (okay, whatever, that's nonsense, but whatever) is sixteen. I say the words again in my mind, more slowly. "X is three? So F of X is three squared plus seven, which is sixteen." "So, like, if X is three, right?" he continues. No one has said f is a thing that eats xs, and what the right side is showing you is how it eats them-what it does to them. ![]() ![]() No one has said today, parentheses don't mean the thing you're expecting them to mean. No one has grounded me in the activity of the day no one has oriented me no one has told me today you are learning what a function is, and you will learn by looking at a bunch of examples. I have never heard the word "function" used in this way before. "F is a function, so what this is saying is to take X, and square it, and add seven." I know that I can divide both sides of the equation by x, leaving me with: f = x + 7 / x In front of me there is a sheet of paper, upon which are written a dozen or so lines of math. Any clear, analytical essay would be the result of me trying to make sense of the thing that I'm going to try to directly convey, below. This is an experimental essay, not in the typical LessWrong or Duncan Sabien style.ĭepending on how this goes, I might try writing a companion piece in the typical style, laying out the model clearly and explicitly and deriving concrete and specific recommendations from it.īut it seemed worth it to try communicating at a lower and more emotional/visceral level, not least because that is the level at which I actually experience The Problem. ![]()
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