> Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts.
It's comments like these that in high school made me avoid calculus. Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. The youngsters reading this that are still developing their critical thinking skills are being scared away because of your projections. Frame it different, take responsibility for your inadequacies.
> Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging.
It didn't strike me as discouraging at all. Discouraging would be something like "QM is so hard that 80% of people reading this are too stupid to learn it" (which I don't think is true, FWIW, so don't be discouraged by that)
Just because youngsters don't have critical thinking skills does not mean they will read words that aren't even there. If anyone does that, it's on them, the reader, and no psycho-analytical word smithing will fix that.
People of the age you're talking about aren't stupid and they're not taken in by people giving them saccharine messages about how things aren't hard and anyone can do them.
OK. If you are a student reading this then, well, firstly I'm not at all sure you're feeling discouraged from learning about the nature of reality and potentially world-changing computing frontiers because someone on the internet said it was a hard subject! But if you were, please don't be. Here's why.
Firstly, a lot of incredibly valuable and interesting things do require a bit of concentration and effort. I'm sure you know this.
But there are reasons to be optimistic! Here are some things to do:
1. Stay calm! Don't give up.
2. It's not at all obvious how to read technical stuff to start off with. Basically, the secret is to read the same paragraph a LOT of times! Everyone does that. No-one can understand it by reading it through once like a novel. If you find yourself reading the same paragraph 100 times you're on the right path because it means that you KNOW you haven't quite grasped all the ideas yet, and so you are becoming your own teacher in a way; setting your own standards for yourself.
3. You've got to be, or become, the sort of person who can concentrate on reading something challenging, in a quiet room. Talking to others is going to help a lot also, but there's a private side to this. You can compare it to training to be on a sports team at a more competitive level. There are going to be times when you're doing fitness training or whatever, and you're on your own, and it hurts because you're exhausted. You know this was always part of the deal.
4. Don't listen to the people who tell you that it's "easy" and "anyone can do it". Yes, anyone can do it in in the sense that everyone has the biological potential to do it (they're human, they have a perfectly good brain). But you know perfectly well, just by looking around at your classmates that some people don't have, or at least don't currently have, the attitude that's going to let them do it. You don't have to be weird; you just need to let one side of your personality be a studious side, occupying some fraction of your time.
Would you please read and follow the site guidelines? I appreciate the positive intention behind your comments, but the way you're going about it is both against the rules here and guaranteed to make the discussion worse. That's no coincidence; the rules are the way they are because of what we've learned about discussion dynamics on the internet.
Hi dang, sorry, starting off with "What rubbish <username>" was a clear violation of a very reasonable guideline; I've edited my message to remove that.
Could you tell me if I violated any of the other guidelines / what else I have done that is likely to lower the quality of discussion?
Not sure if this is one that I might have violated here, but I don't think I agree with the guideline saying not to use HN for "ideological battle". That seems to need a clear definition of what "ideology" is, and even then it seems to risk ruling out many important contributions to HN, so I cannot promise to uphold that guideline unless it can be clarified, and possibly not even then.
The comment you edited is probably ok except for "taken in by people giving them saccharine messages", but I would say that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563745 breaks the site guidelines about calling names, shallow dismissals, and generic tangents.
You can't give precise definitions to any of the terms in the guidelines and it would be a huge mistake to try. All that an attempted formalization would do is create loopholes to be exploited, and then make moderation harder because people would excuse themselves with "it's technically not against the rules". The rules aren't technical. HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's a version of this point from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756
In practice there is an easily observable difference between how people use the site for curious conversation and how they use it for political/ideological battle. The former goes with openness, respect, and exchange of information. The latter goes with being aggressive and wanting to defeat, not hear, the other side. The former produces comments that are unpredictable and fresh; the latter produces comments that are repetitive and nasty.
It's comments like these that in high school made me avoid calculus. Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. The youngsters reading this that are still developing their critical thinking skills are being scared away because of your projections. Frame it different, take responsibility for your inadequacies.