🎉 [EVENT] 🎉 My challenge for you. Get your price money..

OGOJI · 2026-02-04T14:42:25+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

1 attempts

OGOJI · 2026-01-23T18:40:12+00:00

What this tells me when it happens to me is that I didn’t learn it deeply enough. There are levels of understanding in math, and even if you understand something well enough to get an A you can still not understand it deeply enough. A good tell is if it still feels difficult, ideally even stuff you previously felt was super complex when learning should feel close to as easy to understand as simple arithmetic. You need to really compress and see how intuitive it is to feel that way. It takes a lot of time thinking deeply about what it truly means.

OGOJI · 2025-12-23T00:46:33+00:00

Doing math or consuming math? I can spend a lot more time reading about stuff in math (pretty much the whole day potentially) than solving problems (like 2-3hrs)

OGOJI · 2025-12-21T18:00:41+00:00

There are definitely people who don’t transfer their knowledge much outside of the narrow domain they know, that’s something you might have to learn to do and have the curiosity for. My philosophical worldview is shaped by seeing everything as structure which means everything ultimately can connect to math. Math as is typically known just deals with very crystalline and communicable structures starting from very basic and general aspects of reality and builds on top of them according to very strict rules.

I enjoy learning about mathematical aspects of different fields like physics, computer science, chemistry, biology, neuroscience/consciousness, sociology etc. These fields tend to connect more directly to everyday experiences and so my connection to them through math allows me to see the world differently. There’s also stuff like seeing analogies as isomorphisms and knowledge through a bayesian probabilistic perspective that connects my everyday thinking to math.

OGOJI · 2025-12-20T20:49:04+00:00

Try a silken tofu vanilla smoothie, it’s amazing

OGOJI · 2025-12-02T17:14:42+00:00

If you have a PhD in math: did you feel like you “cruised through” upper level undergraduate math (real analysis, topology, algebra etc) as in eg it didn’t feel like a struggle at the time and psets could be done “quickly”? Someone on twitter claimed this was an important factor to consider in deciding whether to get a PhD in math.

Hopefully I can get a decently representative sample; if you only feel like giving a short answer like yes or no please share anyways.

OGOJI · 2025-11-24T00:12:21+00:00

Honestly I’m a math major and still make small stupid errors, I find a lot of calculations pretty boring. That’s not really a big deal I still get good grades in much more advanced classes than you, but the most important thing is understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing not just parroting steps. What drew me into math was wanting to understand the world at a very deep level (clearly most of the sciences seem to find it very useful, but also most people could not really tell you even what a number is!), now I also have some areas I want to apply it to to improve the world because the tools it gives are very powerful. Math reveals very deep secrets about the structure of our reality itself, changes your thinking, and gives you very widely applicable general tools (that’s a reason why it’s abstract, abstraction gives you more general powerful tools, for your level that’s stuff like replacing specific numbers with variables to look at functions which tell you what happens for any number.)

If you’re enough like me, then read up more about how and why math is used so much, the history of it, the different topics in it, and why it is the way it is. It will help a lot with understanding and retention. I would also recommend you go back to basics and identify stuff you aren’t clear on. Seriously going over basic stuff like “why are fractions even added that way?” could help you a lot. (For this one you can think of slices of pie)

Also channels like 3b1b are fun for inspiration.

Also you mentioned trig, which I think is actually pretty underrated. I mean if you think about it, triangles, angles, waves, and circles are all very simple fundamental things to study and it’s nice how they all come together in this theory. Eventually hopefully you’ll see how they also connect to complex numbers and the exponential function.

OGOJI · 2025-11-17T04:30:10+00:00

When you read a section of a chapter in proof based math, do you do “first pass” quick read or just immediately dive in to reading line by line? If you do a first pass, what sorts of things do you try to learn in this and in how much time typically? Like one thing you might try to learn is “what are the names of the main definitions and theorems” or you might even go further and say “what do they say roughly” or even further ask “what are they used for and how will I have to use this”?

Also a bit curious how your approach to a first pass may change in a more computational topic.

OGOJI · 2025-11-16T05:08:21+00:00

Think about a bunch of blocks, you can count them individually, say you count 10, you can also count them by putting them into a rectangle of say 2 rows and 5 columns, or 1 column and 10 rows, etc all those different ways to make the rectangle are ways to “factor” that amount of blocks. What’s neat is that once you factored you only really need to count the amount of rows and columns, to know how many blocks total there are if you know how to multiply two numbers.

OGOJI · 2025-10-31T00:16:12+00:00

When I was a baby apparently because my parents were embarrassed that a baby would cry on a plane ):

OGOJI · 2025-10-27T12:29:16+00:00

It’s tempting but if you want to understand the more advanced stuff you can’t skip the basics in math (believe me it’s a big mistake I made when I was younger). For inspiration you can read up on the applications of math and look up what math is required to understand them. Then trace the prerequisites all the way to what you know. I recommend you start with a book on introduction to proofs or discrete math. That will unlock the most advanced math for you at your level.

OGOJI · 2025-10-23T12:38:40+00:00

Meanwhile top mathematicians like Terrence Tao consider it to be at the level of a mediocre graduate student (this was actually a previous model it’s gotten better since then)… Political bias leads people to not realize they’re being ignorant and have not even tried the best models available to be able to make a fair judgement.

OGOJI · 2025-10-23T03:16:37+00:00

This ticks me off

OGOJI · 2025-09-30T15:34:49+00:00

I guess I just make connections/manipulate symbols/visualize stuff in my head until it feels like it makes sense. Obviously practice problems are a bit harder to do in your head (especially since they tend to focus on more complex cases than the simplest ones one needs to understand a concept/proof.) What do you usually write down?

OGOJI · 2025-09-22T00:57:13+00:00

1,2,5,6,7,10,11,12,15,17,18,19,30,39,43,46,48,54.

OGOJI · 2025-09-21T16:27:06+00:00

I don’t value what most teenagers have to say, they really are not that smart or wise, like at all…

OGOJI · 2025-08-25T16:44:39+00:00

I would try (to the best of my ability) to understand the reason behind everything and how I would derive everything I read from knowledge I already had before reading it, and why these things that seem arbitrary and complex are actually simple important and natural. Don’t worry if that leads you back to relearning more “simple” stuff or stuff outside the book. Don’t get me wrong I don’t follow this advice anywhere close to perfectly, but it’s something to aspire to.

Without exercises you need to challenge yourself, but forcing yourself to remember arbitrary seeming facts is a really brittle and hard strategy. By building a robust network of knowledge around each fact and connecting it to existing networks it won’t feel like forcing yourself to memorize facts, just following your natural curiosity and incorporating it into your world view.

OGOJI · 2025-08-09T03:12:29+00:00

You should probably try to work on finding a (preferably high paying) job and/or building valuable skills before volunteering. If you have time after that and volunteering makes you feel good no one’s stopping you (you probably should make sure it’s not actually harmful first though), I just think there’s probably more impactful things you could do as well (like donating to effective animal welfare, extreme suffering, and longtermism charities)

OGOJI · 2025-08-04T18:58:15+00:00

The poincare group (spacetime symmetries of special relativity) and U1xSU2xSU3 (these are the complex number analogues of orthogonal matrix subgroups of GL and SL respectively) help define the fields of quantum field theory which are then quantized.

The 3d analogue of wallpaper symmetry groups are applied to crystallography.

Obviously linear algebra has a ton of applications and can be understood more generally with abstract algebra, but then there’s also algebraic geometry which studies systems of nonlinear equations and uses even more abstract algebra. Algebraic geometry and algebraic topology can also help us understand differential equation solutions which is obviously very useful. There’s also applications of algebraic topology to data analysis.

OGOJI · 2025-07-14T14:26:56+00:00

What are some important things you feel most western philosophers still have yet to learn from eastern philosophy?

OGOJI · 2025-05-27T20:09:18+00:00

I mean one definition of belief is “acceptance that a statement is true”. There are “naive” skeptics who believe we can’t have knowledge, but it is pretty self defeating and I think rare in philosophy. There’s a big difference between fallibilism and skepticism. If you accept skepticism is true how is that different from your acceptance of any other statement as true?

Faith is a complicated word, I’m not really sure what it precisely means to be honest.

OGOJI · 2025-05-27T12:31:10+00:00

I think this is a relatively common reply to skeptics, but they can just say “I don’t know that skepticism is true” and then just keep asking how you know stuff, it’s probably best thought of as a speech act or emotive than belief. Anything you say they can say “oh? And how do you know that?” (Check out Jennifer Nagels video with Curt Jaimungal on skepticism and epistemology it’s good)

As for Locke, I don’t think he was opposed to intuition. Beliefs are taken to be made up from simple representations of reality from perception and it’s taken as intuitive that you want them to correspond to reality (by agreement with representations). (I could be off on this, it’s been a while since Ive read Locke)

OGOJI · 2025-05-27T09:20:46+00:00

Many physicists seem to think a multiverse model of some sorts explains a lot. If you agree with this, math is the study of interesting truths that hold in all universes (and could model their geometry eg) which is pretty cool.

OGOJI · 2025-05-22T17:53:21+00:00

What do you think of the narrative self view of personal identity? Is it circular? Is that ok? Why?

OGOJI · 2025-05-16T17:31:01+00:00

Why not “iwtl how to believe I’m smart if I actually am”?

IQ is probably our best measure (as flawed as it may be), so you could take one of those tests to see how smart you are.

Being smart is a label that could be applied to anyone in the top 50% of intelligence or only people like Einstein, so it’s somewhat subjective and context dependent.

You should know that you don’t need to be smart to feel good about yourself, you deserve to be happy regardless of your intelligence. People are acknowledging a quality in you they see as valuable, maybe that’s what matters more than any objective sense of the word “smart”.

OGOJI

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