Math education grad student and former teacher behind ProvocaTeachย โ€“ a spicy little blog about making education better.

San Jose, CA
Joined May 2020
Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
In math, though, it feels like there was a town that genuinely did not have much traffic, and a group of people larger than the town five times over brought their expensive cars in and declared that they were building highways for their own use
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Transphobes in a nutshell:
I've never seen somebody be so obviously ignorant and wrong so defiantly and rudely. "2 PLUS 2 EQUALS 8 YOU FUCKING DIPSHIT!!"
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Jon Ossoff chats with longtime morning radio host Frank Ski: I spoke to a group of young people yesterday and some of them told me they were feeling despair. And I was very blunt with them that despair is an indulgence. Despair is a luxury that we can't afford.
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
โ€œWhat if we just-โ€œ
What if instead of Capitalism we just shared resources and took care of each other.
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
everyone on this fucking app is just horny or evil
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Last night, when I was on @WhickTv, I said I was partly drawn to learning more about the liberal political debating circuit because we know from child developmental psych that inferential learning outpaces didactic learning. Just think about the nature of "debate" between two people vs. someone delivering you a lecture. With debate, there's greater sustained attention + cognitive tracking of information, etc. Other factors, too, but I won't get into the weeds. So I did some brief poking around today and it turns out there is research on similar effects w/r/t adults & civics. (which is not at all surprising). For example, in this article, people who were exposed to "deliberative discussions" instead of traditional (didactic) teaching methods scored higher on critical thinking measures AND measures of democratic values, like political tolerance and civic engagement. As an aside, I have personally heard from younger men who credit @TheOmniLiberal, specifically, with deradicalizing them and/or preventing them from being radicalized. Anecdotal evidence in line with all of the above. Before I went on the @WhickTv stream, some people asked me, "Why are you making contact with the streamers?" Lots of reasons! But one of them is I'm trying to solve our problems. Never assume I'm not up to something ๐Ÿ˜‚. Overall, I am more and more convinced that the liberal debaters are absolutely an "asset," particularly given new media. Democrats should identify the "good" debaters and/or streamers and support them!
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
You may prefer to read Po's post on his own website โ€“ it's more dynamic and navigable there than on Terry's site poshenloh.com/posts/20260919โ€ฆ poshenloh.com/posts/20260919โ€ฆ
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
You are so gleeful about my life as a mathematician crumbling. Why? Did I do something to you? Did I ever do something to you beyond the crime of learning and thinking about things?
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Great mathematicians and explainers took the time to explain difficult theories in a manner consistent with their own thought processes. You can read how @stevenstrogatz thinks of chaos, Shurmanโ€™s unique take on calculus, Abbotโ€™s careful exposition of infinite sums. Youโ€™re like โ€œNah, Iโ€™ll take the bootleg stolen version. And by the way, if you donโ€™t use it, youโ€™re an IDIOT!โ€ Why not be thankful for the written word? For the libraries that held mathematiciansโ€™ body of knowledge for hundreds of years? The very source of the thing you are currently enjoying, for which they were never credited?
Talented math students don't read textbooks. Talented math students treat textbooks as problem sets. You read a theorem in the book, and you try to prove it yourself instead of looking at the proof. Then you try to derive the rest of the chapter
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
The secret left wing majority that never gets polled and never shows up to elections is just a myth Americans donโ€™t like leftist politics! If you really want radical Republicans out of power: support moderate Democrats
Americans view ICE (-12) more favorably than the DSA (-28).
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
the internet rn
Man y'all really hate mathematicians huh. Seen some wild stuff on the timeline this past week. Including a 1M+ follower academic calling them "retards" and saying "Let AI wipe them out."
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Protect Terence Tao
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
I said "auto-regressive LLMs, in and of themselves, will not lead human-level AI" That statement is still totally true. First, the reasoning abilities of current AI systems are based non-auto-regressive search (which is what I have always advocated for). But AFAICT, they do it in token space, which is limited and inefficient. I have claimed that human-like reasoning must be a search in continuous representation space. It looks like the industry is moving towards that. Second, the self-improvement methods, as currently practiced, only work for domains where the quality of outputs can be scored without human intervention, such as mathematics, code, and scenarios that can be simulated accurately. Not anything else. Humans and animals learn new skills way more efficiently than current RL methods. Third, the multimodal capabilities of current AI assistants generally use separately-trained encoders (that are not LLMs). This is also what I've been advocating. Except that I think the best way to do this is with JEPA trained with self-supervised learning. The research community is clearly moving towards that (3000 papers on JEPA in just 4 years). Fourth, if LLMs were a path to human-level AI, we would have domestic robots and Level-4 or Level-5 self-driving cars for consumers by now. And we don't. We certainly don't have cars that can learn to drive in 20 hours or practice like any teenager. We're still missing something pretty huge to claim human-level intelligence (let alone superhuman). Sure, we now have computer systems that are impressive, very useful, and whose performance is superhuman in an increasing number of domains (coding being one of them). But that's true of the entire history of progress in computer technology. Lastly, there is a basic confusion about what intelligence actually is. It is not the mere accumulation and regurgitation of existing declarative knowledge (which is essentially what LLMs do). As Jean Piaget famously said, "intelligence is not what you know, it is what you do when you don't know." It is your ability to solve new problem without any prior training, to act in previously-unknown scenarios, and to adapt very quickly to new situations with minimal training. We're still far from that.
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Symone was NOT going to get away with him saying Black people protesting the police is violent. Like sir we are not going out and murdering cops and their families during our protests.
"I think endorsing violence is no different when people say that Israel has a right to defend itself. That Israel is the most moral country in the Middle East, that it's a democracy." -- Hasan Piker's answer when asked if he endorses violence
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Noah from ProvocaTeach ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ retweeted
Sorry but this is just old-school bullying at this stage. Sydney has done what many, many other women have done, which is sexualise herself to sell a product. Not something I would ever do and personally the nudity in the video is a bit much for me. But objectively nothing Sydney has done is any more damning than what has been done by the countless other woman who have sexualised themselves also, including in the sporting domain. The level of scrutiny is unwarranted and the reason she is subjected to it is her mass appeal to men and how that makes women feel about themselves. If we want to critique the sexualisation of women then we should do so. We do this by critiquing the system and culture, not the individual. I absolutely disagree with targeting Sydney specifically and framing her as the cause of womenโ€™s problem in this regard. This is bullying behaviour stemming from intrasexual competition. Itโ€™s so obvious.
Has Sydney Sweeney gone too far with her new Novig advert? The White Lotus star โ€” who is known online by her detractors as โ€œMAGA Barbieโ€ โ€” has sparked fresh controversy by appearing naked in a suggestive series of adverts for the sports betting app Novig." โœ๏ธHarriet Walker ๐Ÿ”— Tap here to read more: thetimes.com/life-style/celeโ€ฆ
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In 2015, Ben Orlin (the blogger behind Math With Bad Drawings) wrote a post called โ€œThe Church of the Right Answerโ€. Itโ€™s about why students seek shortcuts to the right answer while avoiding the underlying mathematical concepts.
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The main place where most people encounter mathematics is school. And school rewards right answers. Orlin writes, โ€œGrades are a bona fide currency. When I write a score on a test, I might as well be signing a paycheck.โ€
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But Orlin (and I) are not satisfied with the Church of the Right Answer. We want a Church of Learning. A place where the value is placed squarely where it belongs: on the ideas themselves. I highly recommend you read his post. It is evergreen: mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015โ€ฆ
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Correct. Environmental impact, while important, does not override every other concern. The most environmentally conscious thing one can do is die and donate one's body to be used as fertilizer. Cities are, by definition, designed for human comfort. How they look matters.
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Conversely, if you put some effort into making your solution beautiful, people will want to use it. It's often easier than you think. Try turning it into a pond or fountain, for example ๐Ÿ˜‰
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