John D. Cook
39.9K posts
John D. Cook
@JohnDCook
Consultant in applied math and data privacy
- Harvard is denying admission to students with perfect SAT scores and AP calculus credit, while also admitting students who need remedial math.
- An AI chatbot is an echo chamber, repeating the data it was trained on. If you trained ChatGPT on all the text you could find before 1880, and asked it what causes malaria, it would tell you bad air.
Readers added context to this imageReaders added contextThe use of the phrase “vegetative electron microscopy” appears to come from a mistranslation caused by a typo in Farsi, not AI. retractionwatch.com/2025/03/04/veg…- Calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach dropped 80–90% between 1914 and 2018. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
- “You should turn that blog post into a journal article.” Translation: You should put in 20x the effort so you can reach 1000x fewer people.
- When I was a student, I was amazed to learn that mechanical and electrical systems satisfy the same differential equations. The fact that the systems are ANALOGOUS is why a circuit designed to model a physical system is called an ANALOG system.
- First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then you realize there are good reasons why your naive ideas weren’t immediately embraced, that the world is more complex than you thought.
- “What kind of math does your consulting involve?” “Sometimes fancy stuff, but often high school level math.” “Why would anyone hire a professional mathematician to do high school math?” “Because a professional mathematician can wield high school math like a professional.”
- “When you mix politics with science, you get politics.” — John Barry
