I Took an Econ Class and It Halved My IQ

[@storytimewithjeff]

Be sure to check out Brilliant to learn math, science, engineering, and more at your own pace! brilliant.org/Storytime/

[@mr.badatgames7887]

Why did you like your own comment

[@joee-kp7qt]

No

[@illuminaticake4528]

How was this comment from 3 weeks ago

[@JET_LAGGD]

How is this so old

[@samuelyancey4605]

Bro missed an opportunity to say first 3 weeks before anyone else.

[@Name_23]

Data in a nutshell: “If it isn’t a line that follows the standard trend, then make it a line that follows the standard trend.”

[@nicholasgutin8577]

me when p val is .051

[@StrayChoom]

@@nicholasgutin8577that’s a bit high 💀

[@anarchosnowflakist786]

stalinsort but for data

[@elliewheezer]

@@nicholasgutin8577 that's fucking painful

[@lambdasun4520]

this is why there is a replication crisis going on in academia right now.

[@kagakai7729]

As an Econ student this actually puts 90% of economic research into context because it makes sense in a field where people are such glue eaters that the people who actually managed to learn math and statistics are willing to show that they can use it at all times

[@chesspiece4257]

as a sociology student this explains why sociologists often have to pick up behind economists forgetting that people aren’t just numbers

[@kagakai7729]

@@chesspiece4257 The last thing I wanted to endorse with my comment was even less math-savvy Economists, but here we are

[@josephburchanowski4636]

@@chesspiece4257 Do they cover the Replication Crisis at all in sociology class? I know that psychology, economics, and political science have started addressing their replication crisis; but I don't hear too much about sociology tackling it.

[@rickastley7522]

Econ is brain dead easy until your professor tells you to download R. That’s when you get your real stats focused shit (and programming)

[@kagakai7729]

@@josephburchanowski4636 Econ's replication crisis stems from the lack of historical economic data- GDP as an indicator isn't even a century old, so we've always had to make do with things like grain wages and baskets of goods that we inference were historically considered essentials. This is in essence a problem that will resolve itself, as time goes on and we have much more year on year financial data

[@nicazer]

in the industry side of chemistry, we have a saying: "At least we arent academia". As an undergraduate I did research in a lab with a grad student who was working on a project in an area that had two or three published papers on the entire internet, and they were all from the same group who seemingly just made up numbers.

[@wind_doe]

Profile picture checks out.

[@nicazer]

@@wind_doe hehe. I set that in sixth grade when chemistry became my one personality trait. A friend’s mom is a chemist and she was working with vitamin B12 so thats what I made my newly acquired google account. Good times

[@GodplayGamerZulul]

@@nicazer based friend's mommy admirer

[@assortmentofpillsbutneverb3756]

That's a big thing in getting phd's hire Indians to peer review for a couple hundred bucks

[@Zer0Blizzard]

Yurp, 50+% of academic studies just make shit up or P hack the everliving crap out of it. Source: basically nobody double checks most "scientific" papers, and peer "review" is mostly a joke because everyone is in on it. Source2: retractionwatch

[@hasch5756]

In my time as a maths student, I helped some economics students (those studying actual economics that actual economists use) through their calc 2 classes in exchange for free lunches. It was all fun until one of them introduced me to his friends in _Business Economics_ and I had to explain to them what a logarithm was

[@benzemamumba]

What's wrong with explaining what a logarithm is?

[@hasch5756]

@@benzemamumba idk where you live but in my country school has 13 grades and you learn logarithms in 8th grade. You can barely do anything without them in the calculus portions of the five years of mandatory maths classes that follow before you can even begin to attend university, and it keeps coming up in physics and chemistry class as well. It's one of the most basic functions there are, and you should really, really at least know the derivative and the power rules before taking university classes in advanced calculus. It's like taking an astronomy elective and not knowing about the moon phases

[@superwaffle9312]

@@hasch5756 i probably know what you are talking about as i already passed mathsup but i just learn the math and forget everything in a year lmao

[@simonpugh3731]

Even in the US pretty much everyone is forced to learn logarithms because all high schools teach students through algebra 2 which goes over basic things like logarithms, rational functions, and many other very basic things so I really have to wonder how someone got into a university without knowing what a logarithm is.

[@kino_61]

I have a friend who studies something called "Epos" which is a conglomerate of business economics, sociology and other stuff (since I'm studying mech. eng. this is like holy water for my Satan self). He showed me an exam he did, titled "oriental culture" (as if Asia is one thing), and one of the questions was to make a toast before drinking in a work meeting with people from south Korea. One of his mates didn't understand so instead of writing a short speech, he devised a sandwich recipe. This happened on the last year of the course

[@rogermwilcox]

PROFESSOR: "When showing 2 or 3 significant digits, you must round off your answers." JEFF: "Three dots after a number means I don't have to round off, and I will DIE on this hill!!!"

[@enzoaugusto1577]

Yeah, his notation is wrong lol.

[@theeyehead3437]

The whole point of rounding is that you don't care what the exact figure is. So by definition rounding notation doesn't really matter

[@enzoaugusto1577]

@@theeyehead3437 i'm sorry, this is just wrong. Please educate yourself

[@theeyehead3437]

@@enzoaugusto1577 It really isn't. Sure, for an engineer that needs to build a part to specific specs, it matters, but this is a stats course, so it really, really doesn't.

[@enzoaugusto1577]

@@theeyehead3437 On the contrary, it's an econ class, and when you are talking about money it's important to not miscount even a little bit

[@armelfrancois7009]

as much as econ may be generally less mathematically demanding than physics, it's rather worrying to know that some colleges teach at this level for their econ degrees. not quite sure what econ they went on to do afterwards (one can only hope it wasn't enough to get them into a decent grad school), but jeez is that terrifying

[@ScansGMS]

its a business econ track, the actual economics track (especially for people looking to go to grad school) usually uses a proof based approach to stats and econometrics

[@philt2001]

@@ScansGMS Can confirm. I did my first year of bachelors in economics, while its maths was nowhere near the level I ended up doing when I went into physics it was definitely more rigorous than what is described here. Also you would never have points docked for a rounding choice.

[@ScansGMS]

@@philt2001 right, and at a grad school level real analysis is now an unwritten prerequisite to entry. in fact, most of the people looking to go to grad school in economics at jeff’s uni usually take more math than that (theory of ordinary/partial differential equations, functional/complex analysis, measure theory, abstract algebra, etc.)

[@onelazynoob15]

Idk, eat glue and do insider trading? If the VC scene is any indicator

[@WinterAyars]

I think undergraduate economics is widely regarded as a joke and only really a prep session for graduate economics, which most of the economics majors don't do. My brother has a Master's in economics and that was the sense i got from what i saw, too.

[@jackinzbox.]

I never understood the extent of Business majors idiocy until one day when I was in the library I watched 2 girls unironically sit and stare at a linear graph representing income for 45 minutes confused on how to find the rate at which the company was making money.

[@honkhonk8009]

Im a CS kid but took an econ class. I haven't read shit for supply/demand graphs and couldnt be bothered to figure out what they actually represent lmfao. I just memorized that if supply goes up, then the funny line goes one way instead of the other. Prolly my own incompetence but they way they word these econ textbooks genuinely gives me an aneursym. Its like they purposely try to make it as hard as possible to understand. Compared to a book on math proofs, math proofs are so much easier to understand cus they dont muddy the conversation with random bullshit lol

[@cumradej]

Funny as hell lmao

[@MinecraftPigSniper]

Yea as someone who graduated community college with a business admin degree and then a private college with a finance degree, the troglodytism is absurd in our field. People don’t understand the most basic concepts that are just fundamentally true like if you add 2 to a number it goes up by 2 and if you take x2 and subtract x1 and then divide by x1 you get growth rates. Legit knew people who couldn’t write a paragraph in even 60% readable English(as native speakers) about how advertising would increase potential customer base. These were all seniors in Finance.

[@aycoded7840]

@@MinecraftPigSniper " if you take x2 and subtract x1 and then divide by x1 you get growth rates"? What does the "x" mean. Edit: The numbers in x1 and x2 are subscripts, so x1 and x2, and just two different "x-coordinates". I just didn't realise they were subscripts. Also, in the context, it almost seemed like an operation (multiplication), since it's right after having spoken about addition of 2. Thanks for the clarification.

[@cuad0130]

@@aycoded7840 I think they mean the percentage change in growth. e.g a company makes $10k in month 1, and $12k in month 2. So ($20k - $10k)/$10k = 0.2 so the growth rate from month 1 to month 2 is 20%

[@nicholaslaun9372]

I took econ in HS, as an AP/Honors kid I had never seen so many absolute glue devourers in my life. Those mfs would get asked, "What is 10 million divided by 10?" and proceed to waste 90 seconds of everyone else's life just going "ummmm, ummm," and every time the TA tried to get one of them to do work, (because yes, they needed a TA,) they would scream in her face and have to go out into the hall as punishment.

[@emberthecatgirl8796]

Man, I so envy you guys who got to choose your classes in High School. I had the “profile” system, where I only got to choose the rough profile of my classes. Well, at least I didn’t choose Matex.

[@kekero540]

Bro it was me and my friends in geometry and everyone else I swore had a lead binky when they were an infant. Because the class average of 42 out of 26 people (5 of them my friends who all got 80s 90s) it was baffling. Same whenever I talked to most business majors.

[@Koyomix86]

Wow that’s very different from my hs Econ experience. I took AP Econ and it was actually a great class, there was a few idiots but a lot of people were smart and I had a great teacher who taught us a lot of valuable and interesting things.

[@ImDaRealBoi]

@@emberthecatgirl8796 ... The fuck is matex???

[@hassananwar9833]

Doing a level computer science gives the same vibes my guy, I've become the classes tech support atp

[@Hadar1991]

As someone who studied econometrics and then mathematics (albeit in Europe) on two different universities I must say two things: 1. Be aware than when you are laughing at mathematical fluency of economics students, in the same time mathematics students are laughing at mathematical fluency of physics students and, especially, engineers. 2. The problem with studying economy is that you are often ask to use mathematical tools that were never introduce during the course. The most radical example was that we had a mandatory class (I don't remember what it was called) that basically required fluency in ergodic theory from students, whereas anything beyond linear optimization was never introduced in previous courses. I think we did not have differential equations even introduced at the time. If not for the fact, that the professor was a sweetheart and she was also surprised that anybody though it was good idea even have this class in curriculum, nobody should have pass the class. Even today, as a maths graduate, I don't have any idea about optimization in dynamic systems.

[@redpanda7967]

It also rubs me the wrong way that he’s talking about people in introductory courses. The intro course was probably just as easy for many other people in the class - and the people who struggle will not end up with degrees in economics.

[@krkngd-wn6xj]

Maths students are up there in smugness, only behind law and medical in my experience. Also, the engineering students I know (I studied computer science, but it was the same campus) all had the joke that physicists are just engineers who can't do math or talk to women. Everyone makes fun of everyone, it's the law of academia.

[@mr.ballstone1914]

As a STEM major I dislike how smug STEM majors are. While there are certainly deadbeat business majors there are also plenty of chill ones because they aren’t smug a**holes who have a superiority complex over those that aren’t as smart as them. Like someone else mentioned, saying that students in introductory business courses are going to be running banks in a few years is ludicrous. Anyone not cut out for an introductory course isn’t making it through a major. I think these people would be suprised at the difficulty of more advanced econ courses (I have a brother who did Business Econ at a college that basically required regular econ courses.) Furthermore, many professions that Business leads into are very much work your way up the chain kind of jobs. It’s also important to note that many of those students are coming straight out of public highschools with extremely low standards for non-advanced classes. People need to notice the log in their own eye before seeing the speck in others, so to speak. On a side note, I found it funny how the video creator couldn’t fathom that a professor would want him to round in a pretty standard way😂.

[@Hadar1991]

@@krkngd-wn6xj As a maths graduate, when I hear somebody who never studied theoretical maths saying he knows maths I will always react with smug "ohh, that's cute". But maths students usually recognize the fact modern maths is so detached from all other science and material words, that there is still gratitude for those apply the maths, regardless how spotty their knowledge can be.

[@Hadar1991]

@@waxcutter9813 Depends. For an accountant it probably does not matter at all. But the more you go into finance and insurance the more maths heavy it gets. But accountant in itself is nice degree and decent income that does not require basically any maths and you can always later decide if you want go into maths heavy finance work or not. And not all finance is maths heavy (but anything concerning insurances and technical analysis will require decent knowledge of maths).

[@jakobbarger1260]

6:40 The professor was correct to round to 0.763. It's not "an inane rounding scheme" but the standard rules of significant figures. "0.763..." with an ellipsis is wrong though, but it's doubtful the professor actually wrote that.

[@iampfaff]

the title of the video is correct

[@foreigngodx6]

Yeah. Use "≈" and round the number. Never I have seen number being truncated in math. But I'm european, so it could be just one of those american things. Edit: Actually, I do remember using truncation in math, but that was in 3rd grade and we moved pretty fast over to rounding numbers and never truncating Edit 2: also "an inane rounding scheme", if you're truncating then you're not rounding so... huh? or are you saying rounding is too hard for you? Also truncating has the possibility to introduce bigger error than rounding

[@whydowehavethesehandles]

Yeah I would've rounded this way to

[@Sjoerd1993]

I’ve got a PhD in material physics, and I got the exact same reaction. Rounding to the appropriate amount of sig figs *is* the correct standard procedure, truncating the answer without rounding is wrong. I’d give some minor points off as well if a student handed it to me like that. Especially if they keep repeating the same truncating scheme in subsequent assignments.

[@Byssbod]

.763 and ".762..." Should both be valid answers though, as the ... implies additional digits in the answer. So there should have been no markdown.

[@johnwong2716]

You reminded me my social statistic class when I was a sociology student, it was an open book exam and I feel like I was the monkey in Chinese room experiment

[@amistrophy]

Bro is just navigating a library with the answers lol

[@JordiR243]

6:54 to be fair, rounding up things correctly and reporting the right amount of significant figures is one of the first things they (normally) teach in statistics. I know because they insisted A LOT on this for us (It's a mandatory class for our physics course)

[@redopal9796]

exactly! to say that it is a common sense thing taught in middle school and show his error of not knowing the simple concept of rounding, a concept taught in 3rd grade, does have me raising an eyebrow

[@sepro5135]

@@redopal9796 you didn’t understand him. The … means the number is truncated not rounded. If you don’t have a … at the end you don’t round. Rounding before a … doesn’t make sense. That’s the idea, not that he doesn’t understand rounding.

[@Xdgvy]

​@sepro5135 Yes, but sig figs *enforce* a rounding rule; which both business and science courses require. As in, your data will be thrown out if you do not follow the rule. Basically, Euclidean math is severely flawed and causes some jobs to require set rounding rules. It's one of my major gripes with modern mathematics.

[@HunsterMonter]

​@@Xdgvy wtf is euclidian math? If you are talking about euclidian geometry, it has nothing to do with rounding

[@Xdgvy]

@@HunsterMonter Euclid's elements, specifically five and 7-10 (if my memory is correct), do deal with numbers; including prime, rational, and irrational. They are the basis for our system.

[@m9mykolkaaa]

I once sniffed a glue stick as a joke in front of my friends and my maths teacher saw it and gave me a very weird look (this was in sixth form)

[@Fureccha]

Normalize using the human senses!

[@SpahGaming]

i did this but more then once and then

[@Blade.5786]

You have a sixth form? And it's not even your final form?

[@marshallschaefer9632]

how many forms do you have

[@SpahGaming]

@@marshallschaefer9632 ingerland

[@gatoctm]

>Complains about his classmates lack of basic math skills >doesn't understand rounding up >womp wom

[@axer1672]

7:04 I don't know if they don't teach this in US schools or something but if you're giving an answer to 3 decimal places (like this question) you need to round the third decimal place up or down depending on how large the 4th decimal place is. Your professor was in the right here.

[@broidk8291]

lol they definitely teach it and his teacher marking it wrong all semester was certainly evidence enough of how to do it. he’s just a narcissist who thinks he’s smarter than his professor

[@chrisxd146]

I was 1 of 3 engineers in an operations management class (I was told it was a good way to learn how bid packages are priced out), which I took as a senior. It was the most kind numbingly boring class, which I ended up skipping like half the semester and still receiving and A while other students struggled with adding two costs together (second week of lecture). I genuinely have no idea how business majors make 50% more money than I do... :(

[@amistrophy]

It's not the degree that gets them the money. Most ppl with a business administration bachelors make around 60k. The ppl that make way more simply need the degree to access the jobs that daddy or mommy had already "found" for them

[@AlbertCamus-r6i]

They fail up...

[@thedog5k]

@@amistrophygot it People keep talking about “ these business majors” making too much . Most of them don’t make that much, 60k ish… I did two years of businesses and decided to switch because the people in my class were so dumb I didn’t want to be lumped in with them.

[@softwetbread248]

Operations research is the cooler operations management

[@medanon7221]

Probably connections, simple as

[@254708cs]

as a former buiness major(left for a variaty of reasons) without watching the video I fully agree. Jesus christ yall got bent out of shape about this one. First off there was no grand point to my spelling it was just that I didn't care and my brain was on automatic. Second I made this comment within a few seconds of the video just to agree that "as a former business major" people are a bit on the dumb side. This is a youtube comment section for a creator who just vomits out his thoughts with poorly drawn images, it ain't that deep.

[@injeraenjoyer4570]

"variaty" yep, that's a fellow business major right there

[@thiscommentsdeleted]

@@injeraenjoyer4570 Funny that you've mastered criticism before punctuation. Next time use a dot and proper capitalization when making fun of some rando on KZbin.

[@Mango-vd1nn]

@@thiscommentsdeletedcool

[@injeraenjoyer4570]

@daveogfans413 the rejection of punctuation and capitalization in a casual setting is not only perfectly acceptable, but completely correct in its circumstance, business major. I'm right with you here in the dumb people boat. No infighting, only ribbing here

[@thiscommentsdeleted]

@@injeraenjoyer4570 Saying "rejection of punctuation" like you're making some kind of grand, insightful point about communication. There was a variaty of ways you could've said it without sounding cringe.

[@pigeon_9161]

Im doing a major in econ, and i have classes with a lot of business people. They genuinely scare me, I do not think they have souls behind their eyes. And Im studying a lot more administrative stuff than actual econ I want to put my arm in a meat grinder so I can focus on the physical pain instead of the much less bearable mental pain Im going through

[@FatherGoz]

If you're early on in the major don't worry, it does get better when you get into more applied topics. If you're more math minded try to get into a microecon class or econometrics. Any class on the IT side that will teach you how to use R or Python. Get into something like International Econ for less math but more "why does this happen" critical thinking. And for the love of god do an internship or two. You need that to get an actual job using your degree quickly.

[@pigeon_9161]

@@FatherGoz thx your comment is really reassuring

[@Koyomix86]

I’m glad that where I’m majoring in Econ doesn’t have a business school

[@sidd8257]

Like the other guy said the classes tend to get actual meat on their bones later on. There are some genuinely hard classes in Econ majors later on, especially if you have a somewhat tough econometrics prof. Money and Banking for example was ROUGH, or I'm stupid idk. There are still some baby easy electives at higher level though - game theory was baby easy for me but pretty much EVERYONE got bad grades on those tests somehow. Your peers will kinda get better too. Some who weren't ready for it select out and you will learn which ones are worth hanging around, either because they try even if they're not smart or they're smart and can help you with things too As a double major in Finance and Econ about to graduate, things are the same way on the Finance side too. I've had amazing classmates that I would want to be friends with if I wasn't busy with my own. Group projects are the worst though. I also had a guy who did literally nothing for a large chunk of the class in my 2-person group project based class last semester. It close to ruined my homecoming and semester because of the work that got shipped off to me. He later put on his resume that he put 40 hours a week into THAT ONE CLASS, and got into law school with that banger experience -.- Anyway try to take the non-business version of classes if your schedule allows, and diversify your classes. My program let me take a bunch of math (not enough for a minor though), stats, and some Python along the way. Your bosses will be impressed by the fact you know what an integral is (this really happened at an internship, it's not a theoretical), or you'll be a bit ahead of the curve for grad school if you go that route, if you know about Finance at all I'm doing CFA level II right now and really happy I did some of the "harder" electives before it Anyway I was bored and typed this hopefully you find some fulfilment in your major and make money

[@Ivory-f5b]

Omj nombinary najimi pfp hello sibling!!!!!

[@timseguine2]

Dude unironically called the actual standard way to round numbers that they teach everybody starting in grade school an "inane rounding scheme" like it is something esoteric.

[@Cibershadow2]

I was taught this method of rounding past 3 decimals as well but also think removing 5% for it is incredibly silly

[@ChevronTango]

The issue is the conflation of two different methods of reporting an answer. With the ... (ellipsis) then you aren't expected to round as you are reporting that more is to follow, whilst if you don't include that, then you are expected to round, though you often need to report it with a note to the effect of "to 3 decimal places" so it's clear what you've done. The professor seems to want him to do both.

[@ChristianConrad]

@@ChevronTango : For all we know, the professor's redpenning covered / was intended to cover the ellipsis too, not just the "2", but this doofus didn't notice / understand that.

[@maxwellsterling]

@@ChristianConrad If it was intended to cover the ellipsis, then it shouldn't have been corrected to "3..." and instead to "3".

[@ChristianConrad]

@@maxwellsterling : I don't think it was corrected to “3...” I think it was corrected to “3”, and the “..." were Jeff's original ones which either were sloppily crossed out, or not at all.

[@beetlejuice5416]

This video is kind of embarrassing... people make mistakes, integrating xf(x) isn't straightforward if you're not super familiar with analysis, and your responding to the professor correcting your obvious rounding error with "dumb econ professor went to middle school in chernobyl" doesn't shine the best light on you. Coming from a STEM grad.

[@WWFanatic0]

It's funny when physics majors (and it is ALWAYS physics majors) try to dunk on economics but end up revealing more about themselves and their own shortcomings...

[@iWrInstincts]

@@WWFanatic0 dude cried because he got a 3.78 and not a 3.8 in a previous video.

[@WWFanatic0]

@@iWrInstincts So he cares about precise numbers but only when it isn't against him? Odd but okay...

[@iWrInstincts]

@@WWFanatic0 It's the typical stem major. This comes from a stem major lol. I was like that when I was younger but then you know, I grew up and realized that people have different capabilities.

[@WWFanatic0]

@@iWrInstincts Also STEM (as much as some refuse to admit economics is a science, a math heavy one at that) and I know what you mean. I see it most common in physics and compsci people the most. Have a friend who assumes the only reason other STEM people don't work in fintech is because they aren't good enough.

[@loganseawright1173]

The most accurate part of this video is that he drinks Busch light and uses Zynjamin Franklins

[@musclechicken9036]

Not really related, but I was in a high school Chem class when the teacher asked “what’s 4/4” and half of the class proceeded to answer either 0 or 4. 😭

[@Zer0Blizzard]

modulus vs algebraic division war commencing

[@Ultrox007]

As the resident idiot who failed all these classes then self-taught statistics, probabilities, and permutations ENTIRELY to learn which games I could rig into my favor at casinos and carnivals. ...Wouldn't the answer be 1? Like, you split 4, four times... I have four apples and four friends, I give each friend one apple... how many does each friend have... WHAT?!

[@exotic1405]

​@@Ultrox007 nope, apparently all the friends phase out of existence

[@Mowdlin]

It’s a time signature : )

[@ombricshalazar3869]

it's called HIGH school for a reason

[@thatpataterguy9432]

In my econ course last year (Im a social studies education major, not business) we had it run by a sweet old lady who should probably have retired. I once had my final project drop a letter grade because i didnt submit something tgat was aready linked in the powerpoint I submitted. Her lectures were getting so boring so i started drawing soyjaks and dumbass corny memes on the whiteboard table

[@jamesgudgeon453]

same major got a D in macro econ

[@trevorsklar]

As a Math grad student, physicists play SO FAST AND LOOSE with axioms and assumptions when writing what they call proofs, that I’m not at all surprised to hear there’s widespread disdain for good statistical practices too.

[@hotyounglad7301]

“I took an economics class” >you took a business economics class “Economics students are all stupid” >you don’t know how rounding numbers works

[@APaleDot]

lmao

[@apotatoman4862]

truncation could allow you to quickly check with your calculator without rounding that the given decimal is actually the same as the fraction

[@grumpykitten4566]

Yeah like he could have added like the equivalent sign and rounded the number to 3 s.f.

[@brettweiland8362]

Found the econ major

[@Bookofshavings]

Its insane how delusional the video creator is; salted sour grapes, truly a cope and seethe experience.

[@EumenesOCardia]

Business Econ is not Econ. The problem wasn't that it was an econ class, the problem is it was a business class.

[@bennoarchimboldi6245]

Nope Econ is absolute crap too

[@buzzmast3r546]

@@hickoryst.6961 I can confirm economics jokes only go down well with other economists

[@martinfiedler4317]

@@hickoryst.6961 Not my experience (did the first 2 years of an Economics PhD, before I was fed up and left with only the Masters) Economists like to (ab)use math to show the world and themselves how clever they are. But generally they neither have a deeper understanding of the math they are using not or the real-life phenomena they describe with it. Next life, I'd rather learn plumbing than spend time on Economics. With plumbing, at least, you get actual sh*t done...

[@mmmar7317]

Yeah but let these labcoats keep their superiority.

[@Karl_der_Genosse]

Exactly. Macro is the only Econ that is repsectable and even that has some serious problems.

[@natkin6595]

I took econ 100 to fulfill a general requirement at my school (with one of the top business schools in the country), and our professor gave us a question to justify whether the invisible hand works or not, specifically saying that either answer is correct if we justify it well. Every single person who said no got zero points.

[@birmax5420]

When your teacher is actually a 1800 scientist who invented time travel

[@alexritchie4586]

Econ classes don't teach economics; They teach the professor's political opinions.

[@jongxina3595]

I mean yeah why would you say "No"

[@vlc-cosplayer]

@@jongxina3595 if the hand is invisible, how can you tell if it's doing anything?

[@alkalize]

Yeah my econ professor would misrepresent real world events to fit his narrative. At least he wasn't like my other professors who gave a bad grade for disagreeing with them on topics like social security, medicare, minimum wage, etc. I did enjoy his class because he appreciated when students would disagree with him, and would fight against his views. Other than his misrepresentation of certain facts (which was probably not malice, just confirmation bias), he was actually one of my best professors.

[@no-lifenoah7861]

Economics majors have some pretty specialized knowledge; they leave academia with some pretty big holes in things like geography, statistics, and economics

[@nemanjalazarevic9249]

One of those things happens to be their brain

[@mikelake1306]

Jargon. The specialized knowledge is jargon. I took a grad-level course straddling math and econ departments. We worked together on problem sets: the econ majors translated the questions into English, we solved them, and they would copy the answers. Real head-scratchers like "find the area of a triangle."

[@gabrielpena366]

Or biology.

[@GogiRegion]

@@mikelake1306I took two levels of economics, and literally both classes were 90% just finding the area of a triangle.

[@Gee-xb7rt]

You know that its not that uncommon for people like me to have degrees in at least two of those, I have degrees in geography and economics, economics from a social science program, not business. Econ-stats is offered as its own degree.

[@Siearben]

I actually got out of my obnoxious "wow, professors and all other students are so stupid, wow, i'm the only smart person in this university" phase after a while but I guess this is not mandatory. Enjoy the free engagement for your ragebait video I guess

[@FabrisFanatic]

@@waxcutter9813 it's mostly unnecessary. The video creator is just being a hyperbolic snob and telling us what a bad student he was that he spent an entire semester unable to round the answers the way the professor wanted, lol.

[@ジュレジュ]

This is what any person with a major complaining about other majors sounds like to me tbh, including those in this comments section. Insufferable.

[@smallfox8623]

We will pray he gets out of this phase soon 🙏 it's very obnoxious!

[@Siearben]

@@waxcutter9813 You can trust that the things you learn in university are the things you ened to succeed in your career. I don't think accounting is known for complicated mathematical models. But, to counter the narrative of the video, that doesn't mean the major doesn't come with its own challenges. They're just different from understanding complicated math.

[@Max3b75]

@waxcutter9813 It's an Integral. The entire function to be integrated is " x × [any function of x (i.e. cos(x), ln(x)]" f(x) just tells you that there is a function that you don't need to know for the context of the problem. It was probably an explanation of integration by parts. Integration will usually be reexplained in the f​irst year of uni for those that didn't learn it before, but usually you are expected to at least know the concept before then.

[@BaHo_0]

6:51 You kinda failed a simple rounding operation on a statistics class, i don't know why are you angry at the professor...

[@user-cc7vx7sw4z]

I double majored in aerospace engineering and economics. I found it funny how wildly the difficulty of economics electives varied and how students self-selected into them. Advanced econometrics was legitimately rigorous and some of the smartest students I met in college were in that class. At the other end of the spectrum, the hardest part of international finance was not slamming my head into my desk when one of my brain dead classmates struggled with the ridiculously basic math in that class (literally if you know that 1-1=0, you’d be fine). I have no idea how some of the people in that class got into college much less passed the calculus prerequisites.

[@ladyalicent705]

How they got in: “Donation to institutions is a form of free speech! 🤡”

[@onurbikic]

Problem about this guy he did not took an Econ class or been on same class with econ students, he was in Business Econ, with business students.

[@Tommy-wn2rd]

This is a little off topic but how difficult was it to manage the course load with those two majors? I was thinking about doing the same exact thing with economics and electrical engineering. I have never heard of too many other people who have done it until I saw this comment and would love to know how it went for you.

[@korben600]

By any chance did you go to Purdue university? Because I took Aero courses (until I had a breakdown) and despite me failing out of that shit, the intro to Econ courses were concerningly easy.

[@rez505]

It seems that Jeff ran into the issue of sig figs lmao 😂

[@DiamondKingStudios]

I had to learn about significant figures for my tenth grade chemistry class, and my teacher made it more annoying than it had to be, frankly.

[@rez505]

​@@DiamondKingStudios yeah for sure... it's an annoying but necessary system to deal with

[@imbadatgames568]

hate sig figs, damn near failed high school chemistry because of them

[@josephrupsis4623]

Hate sig figs

[@jessicaHHHHHH]

I lost so many points because of sig figs in high school. You’d think I’d make the effort to do them properly after unnecessarily lowering my grade, but I was still technically getting the right answers, and I didn’t believe that adding too many numbers to my answer could be a bad thing. That segment was exactly how I felt at the time.

[@dillbourne]

As a particle physicist, that "normalizing the data" procedure is probably, but not garuntee to be bullshit. On one hand, maybe he didn't trust that you had graphed it right. Or there was something wrong with measuring those two points. But there should have been a short follow-on study to CHECK that they were mistakes. So I'm inclined to believe he was just bullshitting.

[@trollinape2697]

How much maths is there in particle physics?

[@dereisenadler6717]

@@trollinape2697right now, I have taken up to vector calculus, am taking ordinary differential equations rn, have to take linear algebra and partial differential equations over the summer, and complex variables with applications sometime in the future.

[@kaizetam6931]

In chemical engineering lab analysis, it's the norm to remove any "outliers", since there could be human error involved during tests

[@nullinf]

@@trollinape2697 a lot

[@michaels.3709]

​@@trollinape2697 Highly dependent on whether you work on the theory side or the experiment side. Both will require you to do physics PhD coursework, so you'll definitely need to know graduate-level maths while getting the degree, since almost all physics coursework is theory. (Of note for folks that want to search for more info, "particle physics" and "high energy physics" [HEP] are used pretty exchangeably these days since most particle physics is done at high energy collider experiments). In practice, Particle Theory is the continuation of the PhD coursework. My understanding is that knowing things like group theory, Lie algeabras, and other advanced maths is critical, as this is the foundation of quantum field theory, (which, itself, underpins all of modern particle physics). I'm sure the maths specializes as you begin to focus on a specific thesis project and career interests. On the experiment side (where I currently am), it's a mixed bag. Phenomenology is a very theory-adjacent subfield where physicists will model how specific theoretical particles will decay/interact with specific detector components and try to understand the specific signatures there. My understanding is there's a lot of field theory used here, too. Doing physics analysis from collision data (or calibration work, or precision measurements), you will typically learn a bit of quantum field theory at the PhD level, but the research is mostly statistics. My thesis is a particle search analysis and I haven't touched actual particle physics in a few years (and need to go and review things like the Feynman rules, etc for my defense). I still do a lot of math, but mostly I do statistics calculations and I write programs, so the computer actually does the math. Still need to know how to do the math, though, to know what you need to calculate. Most important things to understand are Bayesian statistics, likelihood functions, and how maximum likelihoods are calculated. Also, propagation of uncertainties, and knowing how to calculate both statistical and systematic uncertainties is key. Then you have hardware work, where you actually build detector components, solder chips into PCBs, write firmware for FPGAs, etc. If you work with a group that does any hardware development work, you can get exposure to a lot of different projects. How much maths are actually used varies. I've never done hands-on hardware development, but usually you're involved in both the fabrication/testing as well as the design, so there will definitely be math used in the design portion. I have done some FPGA work, and that's all programmable logic and binary arithmatic, so you'll need to know at least some basic algebra for that. Most of the FPGA stuff is doing signal processing calculations, though, so that'll require calculus and an understanding of things like Fourier Transforms, etc. Overall, quite a bit of maths for particle physics. If you know the kind of work you want to do (and what skills you'd like to learn), it's likely there's a project in HEP that will teach you those and more. The trick is finding a group doing the kind of work you want!

[@aeybees8966]

>Claims to be a STEM student >Calls all economics student dumb >Doesn't know what rounding is

[@ssiipp7848]

Typical STEM superiority

[@jacksonsmith2955]

>Has a physics degree >Calls all economics students dumb >Knows the difference between rounding and truncation Yup, he seems about right.

[@MadocComadrin]

​@@jacksonsmith2955 >Knows all of that >Can't figure out through potentially 20-26 assignments that the professor wants rounding to the third decimal towards the nearest zero. >Also doesn't understand that using elipses isn't appropriate for truncation in typeset math as it's often used for denoting obvious patterns (that potentially undoubtedly/infinitely if there's nothing to the right of the ellipses).

[@Rallysoldier]

Doesn't make sense to round .712... to .713... You would just round to .713

[@thomquiri9860]

6:55 that's actually correct considering the next digit is 6 (greater than 5) so you have to round up

[@Alec-ej7sh]

„econ students are too lazy so they use random number generators“ proceeds to show example of a physics student doing exactly that

[@quasimodo1914]

That was hilarious

[@opioh7052]

Uk whats even crazier ? The guy at ftx he showed in the article who did the random number generating majored in cs lol

[@bilbolaggins2431]

To be fair equating business Econ to real Econ is akin to a high schooler saying “math is easy” after enrolling in the special needs version of the class

[@redstoneactive6589]

the only hard part about econ is remembering formulas and jargon.

[@Zer0Blizzard]

Ask a macro econ professor to explain why the United States isn't a govt controlled economy, and use that as the litmus test for how drooling they are.

[@jacksonferguson2847]

@@Zer0Blizzard "government controlled economy"? What are you on my guy?

[@travislyonsgary]

​@@jacksonferguson2847 They are noting its not a command economy

[@user-ux8xl6qd1c]

⁠​⁠@@Zer0Blizzard probably because the U.S. isn’t communist and or doesn’t use a command economy cause they are the most infamously difficult part of establishing communism due to the fact the the amount of factors in a economy are almost boundless and individual economist no matter how intelligent wouldn’t be able to fulfill the wants and needs of every individual participating. This isn’t even a economics question it’s a political one like asking why didn’t the the Chinese nationalist just crush the communist during the long march. Their are to many factors such as the stock market existing the U.S. being founded with free market ideals and the Cold War causing the U.S. to double down on those ideals. Your question is 1 not their field 2 proposes a far fetched reality 3 is politically charged. If you asked me something like that I would look at you dumbfounded to due to the complete lack of relevancy.

[@wassim1sameh800]

I had an exchange year at an Ivy league, in my first sem I took 5 classes, 4 of them were graduate level, 3 in EE and one in Physics, the fifth one was a freshman econ class. I got straight A'a in the EE and Physics classes and a B in the econ class because of how dumb everything was. Every time I'd go to the professor and say "oh, that's illogical" he'd shut me off and say you don't know what you're talking about. The logic and the math was completely absurd. Not to mention he had to spend 15~25 minutes per class explaining the quadratic equation. I was just very disappointed that these kids were the ones that will get job offers on silver platters while I will work my ass off just to get a small offer because I was from a third world country and not from an Ivy like them.

[@honkhonk8009]

Facts. Dude I hated Econ. Got an A- on it SOMEHOW even though I thought I failed it. The econ that I learn in class, is nothing like the Econ I learn from KZbin. I thought I was gonna be learning stuff like Bachelier processes. Maybe some cool math shit. But nah.

[@bananaraptor7747]

@@honkhonk8009"Cool math shit" You are so incredibly deserving of your engie pfp.

[@SM16Basketball]

That fact that you can’t distinguish between economics and finance is maybe why you got an A-, not because of the class being stupid

[@SeaScoutDan]

Yes boss, you want to me to round this way, fine whatever. If they want to round to 3 sigg figs, I write out 4 sig figs, then round to 3.

[@wassim1sameh800]

@@SeaScoutDan As an EE I can safely say they round stuff worst than engineer and physicists. An engineer would round up to a nearest decimal according to their calculation - pi = 3, e = 2, and g = 10, a physicist would round up to get an order of magnitude - assume the cube is a sphere, and econs round up to the nearest non-scary-looking number

[@rightwingsafetysquad9872]

You worked in academic physics research without understanding significant figures? Gotta side with the professor on that rounding thing. That's entirely on you.

[@ssiipp7848]

Yeah, I took high school level physics and the first thing they did was teach us about significant figures.

[@JohnNelson1]

Now I don't have to post this!

[@bayleev7494]

the presence of an ellipsis implies more numbers, meaning it's categorically incorrect to round the ones you already have

[@rightwingsafetysquad9872]

@@bayleev7494 Yes, but using elipses in that context is wrong.

[@bayleev7494]

@@rightwingsafetysquad9872 how do you know? by the sounds of it, a lot of the practice questions were basic calculus and algebra. if it were one of those questions, they would not necessarily have rounding conventions. also, and more importantly, the marker seems to have said it would have been correct to write 0.783..., meaning your logic falls apart anyway.

[@mahiainti678]

6:42 ok, i'm sorry, but that's your own fault here. That is pretty standard practice

[@HildeTheOkayish]

Not with the ... at the end right? That would be like saying "i rounded the number to 0.763 but i didn't round properly so it's 0.763...000" or something. The ... implies there is more behind the 3. So both 0.763 and 0.762... are correct but not 0.763...

[@halasyamv3190]

6:48 are you sure he wasnt just rounding the number? but taking off five points looks exessive to me

[@Placeholder333]

@@alfredwaldo6079 No, "..." means truncated, not rounded.

[@alfredwaldo6079]

@@Placeholder333 yeah

[@adbon6279]

Sure... if the dots werent there. You dont round and THEN put dots after it, cause then thats just an objectively different answer. Realistically jeff shoulda just rounded, but also rounding 2/3 to .7 is criminal.

[@ndrew9567]

@@adbon6279 i mean thats what sig figs are for, you have a system to determine if you round from the tenths, hundredths, or whatever place and its consistent. ok normal rule of thumb i learned in stats is to go 4 places past the decimal point so you can say 76.27% in this example instead of 76.3% and the whole thing with the dots is just objectively wrong but there is a system (that the prof only half followed)

[@TwoForFlinchin1]

​@@Placeholder333 I think he's supposed to go to three significant figures in this example

[@connor9024]

As an Econ student, I kinda want to defend myself by saying how Econ and business are different, and business students have little business being students, but on the other hand we just make things up and point to graphs. Most likely that was a statistics class for business students, getting into econometrics gets pretty fun using statistical methods to explain real life trends!

[@redstoneactive6589]

(my first instinct was to type "NERD") I think that fun part is a lot better used by things that aren't just an economics degree.

[@Sinestia.]

tbf as an econ major a lot of my major classes were pretty bad too. I think all of the social sciences suffer from really awful intro classes that straight up teach myths and completely sidestep explaining method. You have to get to upper level stuff and econometrics for it to get good.

[@connor9024]

@@Sinestia. I’m not too sure how your school is. At mine, ALL business students have to take 2 Econ classes. Many students struggle with these classes because you’re right, the early classes throw a lot of hoopla at you with little to no math and expect you to just believe everything they say. By the time in your undergraduate you reach econometrics, you’re working beside the schools PHD candidates, as it’s a prerequisite for them to enter into their programs. Vast differences from where you start your degree and where you finish it with ECON. That being said, we still sound like lunatics anytime someone says anything about present value.

[@uignireddngfiurdsgfiurdse]

Believe me, it's the intellectual bankruptcy of your discipline that's permitting the drooling idiots in business schools to justify their conclusions.

[@lwrcse-uj4oi]

@@connor9024 Basically arts courses seem to be like this. History 201 is so much easier than my girlfriends 400-500 level history courses, it's actually shocking. Everyone takes HTST201 and is like "oh history is easy" then in one course my partner ended up writing 1500 words a week. Same happened to me with Econ, 201 was an easy A, now I'm doing econometrics, intermediate micro and macro and about half the class for these courses (and the ones after) will drop out.

[@illuminaticake4528]

Glad youre taking sponsors, sure you could use the money, lol

[@redditastic6711]

Is this sarcasm

[@itsrinayaaa]

​@@redditastic6711 why would it be?

[@WenGrinno]

@@redditastic6711 You are *required* to believe it is from now on.

[@illuminaticake4528]

@@redditastic6711 in some videos of his he says things like "like and subscribe so i can pay for [x]" or something like that and he pays for his adobe creative cloud sub with youtube money

[@jean-pierrecoffe6666]

Dang dropping to 40 IQ is tough

[@Heligoland360]

6:40 OK but your professor's right though. Now the ... is weird, I'd expect significant figures (perhaps this is an American thing), but if you're going to truncate a decimal you round the last digit, which you did not do.

[@InfinityMax365]

This is exactly what I was thinking. Also 2/3s reported to a single decimal place is 0.7 that is the correct way to denote it with one significant figure. I have never seen an ellipse used to denote unreported decimals. We were always expected to follow the rules of significant figures. This is a very weird point in the video, and I’m totally on the side of the professor. Also if on the first hw they grade it that way, don’t do it that way again?? That’s an expectation they have and even if you disagree it’s not that difficult to comply with the rubric. Edit: yeah just looked it up the “repeating decimals” are only informally used to denote a repeating figure, 2/3s repeats so you could use it potentially for that, but the first example is hard to know if it repeats or terminates. Again weird point and clearly wrong.

[@Vangard21]

... Implies truncation and shouldn't be rounded. Squiggly equals implies a rounded answer.

[@robincray116]

6:50 That thing with 0.762... vs 0.763 is also known as rounding. 0.76269.... can be rounded off to 3 significant figures into 0.763. Being unfamiliar with this concept feels very maths major.

[@rohaisme]

The issue is the rounded version still hass the ... implying that there is more numbers.

[@sepro5135]

Im 99% sure he knows that but 0.763… makes no sense. 0.762… or 0.763 do. That’s the point he was making

[@robincray116]

Significant figures is enforced in some classes. 0.7627 probably would have gotten points deducted as well.

[@Y.Z-Au]

@@robincray116 Exactly. 0.76269 implies that the measurement has an accuracy of 5 d.p. while 0.763 implies that the measurement was accurate to 3 d.p. The former is misleading and deserves only a partial mark.

[@Y.Z-Au]

Every major has its own assumptions and paradigms that look strange to outsiders. I studied three completely unrelated majors. Humility and the Principle of Charity go a long way.

[@matthewdowling6549]

I’ve always been a math person. Took a Calc class and absolutely sucked at it, but I at least knew the basics. When I heard 3:34 I felt my soul leave my body

[@honkhonk8009]

Lol polar opposite for me. I fucking looooved calc but took a discrete math course and got ass grades

[@xinpingdonohoe3978]

​@@honkhonk8009 which of your 11 hard science PHDs was the one that you sucked at, Dell?

[@uristmcary]

Full respect to the x is a constant legend. If you don't put it in the function properly it must obviously be a constant.

[@someguycj]

I have never seen such insanity as taking an “x” out of an integral on the basis that it’s “constant to f(x)”. Is it just a number, or is this guy trying to insinuate that a whole function or variable inside an integral just doesn’t matter?

[@raspberryjam]

f(x) is f times bigger, so ∫xf(x)dx = ∫x(f+1)dx = (f+1)∫xdx = f+1

[@someguycj]

@@raspberryjam Is that assuming x=1, or does this work in the context of x being any type of function or value?

[@braxbro6674]

@@raspberryjam that's... not how that works

[@TSSPDarkStar]

@@raspberryjam Can't tell if this was supposed to be a funny meme

[@jackinzbox.]

@@raspberryjamCan’t believe you forgot the + C. Rookie mistake.

[@monkeeee]

I have a a degree in Econ and this hits the nail on the head for any class that had “Business” in the name. Most of the classes I had that focused on specific concepts (Public spending, Environmental, Behavioral, etc…) had almost zero student overlap with any of the business econ courses. Half of the guys in the upper level business econ classes were some of the most brainrotted people I have ever met.

[@det_tf2]

Yeah same, I was kinda looking at getting an econ major with a business emphasis but one semester in a business communications class was enough to push me away from anything business related.

[@metroid1859]

As a history teacher, I am convinced economics is a major designed for people who hate math but don't want to admit that they'd be better off in language arts

[@merekcook573]

Bro divided 781/1024 and didn't round so the professor took off 5%, (781/1024=.7626 unrounded). Instead of just chilling about a miscommunication or not realizing a professors expections to round. He decides that insult the professors intelligence and blast the class in front of the internet.

[@Attaxalotl]

As someone who's currently taking an online macroeconomics class, it is not halving my IQ but crushing my soul.

[@errenhere]

Biz Econ is like Econ for the people who rode on the short bus when they were in school.

[@hammerth1421]

Business rounding is fun. It's kind of like physicists and data - everyone always chooses what helps them the most. Costs get rounded down, revenues get rounded up and random numbers from university problem sheets get rounded randomly.

[@reeceb4622]

Yeah, at my college Econ and Business are split into different schools for this reason. As an Econ major I got some good experience tutoring business majors how to do their business calculus. Whenever anyone asked how Econ was different from business at my school, I told them that Econ is like business but for people that aren’t afraid of calculus and coding.

[@vectorhacker-r2]

I knew physicists were full of it, but I didn't know it was that bad.

[@JoshuaGramm-ur9re]

Exactly

[@Runenut]

this guy is a real piece of work

[@benzemamumba]

They are absolute shitlords and insufferable knuckledragging apes.

[@AnonYmous-spyonmepls]

We have 3 mainstream accepted theories of the universe each contradicting each other and 2 mainstream theories to this which contradict themselves. Go figure.

[@MidMarPhotography]

@@AnonYmous-spyonmepls ...That's what theories are. You can theorize that you'll crash on the way to work or be just fine. The contradictory nature of both theories doesn't say anything about the theories themselves.

[@CubesAndPortals]

Maybe it's just my lack of a college education, but I'm pretty sure you always round up by 1 if the next digit is 5 or higher. Not sure about the "..." notation.

[@camicus-3249]

Can't say I've seen anyone write ⅔ = 0.7... before. ⅔ ≈ 0.7, sure. But never with the "..." (To be clear, I would happily write ⅔ = 0.66..., and use "..." notation often for intermediate steps of a calculation)

[@rez505]

in my analytical chem classes they tell us how many significant figures they want, idk if the econ prof was doing that.

[@CubesAndPortals]

@@camicus-3249 yeah honestly the ≈ came up a lot more, I saw the ellipses in early science classes but only until we'd covered significant figures.

[@geldarus]

​@@rez505exactly this, I've never seen the ... used in proper calculations before

[@stego-]

id assume that if a number ends in “…” it would be truncated and not rounded. (would be weird to round if you are saying there are more digits after. the point of rounding is to cut it off)

[@harveyhutsby7697]

the part about 92.5% not being the highest grade nearly made me explode. I'm sure you've heard this before, but in the UK at all stages of schooling it's rare for 70% to not give the highest grade. In rare cases, the top grade can be less than 50%. 92.5% not being top is simply insane to me, I'd love to see the difference in exam question styles.

[@justsomenightowl7220]

I mean, I understand it not being the highest grade, but bottom third?? What kind of statistic classes are you getting? Everyone passes with an A???

[@pooperdooper3576]

​@justsomenightowl7220 the *exam grade* (the 78%) was bottom third of the class, not his final grade of that whole class, which was a 92.5%

[@josephvictory9536]

Yea, the english system is way harder. I cant speak for the university level, but i did both high school in an english and canadian system. I was laughing with every math question in the Canadian system and averaged a bit over 90%. Which is also harder than the US system by the way. Whereas i was fighting for over 70% in the English system. I used to think i was just retarded, then i realized why Americans think they are so smart!

[@alexritchie4586]

​@@justsomenightowl7220No, it's all graded on a curve, so it's as unlikely for someone here in the UK to score 75% as it would be someone in the US scoring 95%. Basically you can lop off the remaining 30% because unless you found and answered the secret, hidden questions, 70% is 100%

[@epicchocolate1866]

@@josephvictory9536it’s funny though how England performs considerably worse in OECD testing, then both Canada and the US. Complicating math doesn’t mean you learn it better.

[@Oryctolagus342]

Absolutely insufferable

[@howtoappearincompletely9739]

Agreed.

[@yuehan6711]

I feel this is a pretty dishonest portrayal of economics. Intro courses are intro courses, this is like taking a precal course and lamenting the state of mathematics. The field is full of issues but good work is done sometimes even at an upper undergraduate level. Also economics has nothing to do with or is at most tangentially related to buisness.

[@steventaylor2028]

It is not even that. The problem is that he took a business class and is confusing that with economics.

[@yuehan6711]

@@steventaylor2028 He never specifies so it's hard to tell through the rant in the video lol

[@SI-fv7gc]

Cope, econ and biz students are brainlets, and they're courses for neanderthals. Took a 2nd year FINC course and it was literally maths you do in Grade 10 🤣🤣🤣

[@yuehan6711]

@@SI-fv7gc Finance is not on any economics track lmao, your ignorance is showing

[@lo433]

@@SI-fv7gc gigacope, bro never took micro theory or metrics

[@SloMoMonday]

Pray you never have to take an MBA course. Know companies that are actively avoiding people with MBA degrees.

[@anjoliebarrios8906]

sauce?

[@Zer0Blizzard]

I would hope so, unfortunately the vast majority of companies, particularly ones controlled by rich assholes, DEFINITELY want business grads.

[@darkthunder301]

Why? I'd assume companies want to hire smart people?

[@Solusist]

@@darkthunder301 Yes, that's exactly why they want to avoid people with an MBA background.

[@benzemamumba]

​@@anjoliebarrios8906source: trust me bro.

[@guestb8389]

Took an economy class in high school and about 25 of the 30 students in the class did not even know, or understand the concept of PEMDAS.

[@SenhorAlien]

​@@Teronix100There is no debate, there are the people who are right and those who are wrong, easy as.

[@epicchocolate1866]

@@SenhorAliennah not true. It’s slightly up to interpretation and so we are careful to be more explicitly in writing

[@JimBob1937]

@@Teronix100 , I wouldn't say PEMDAS isn't accepted per se. PEMDAS is correct as a convention and is used extensively. Rather, a lot don't understand that PEMDAS defines addition/subtraction and multiplication/division as equal in priority, an ambiguity. Parentheses exist and are the highest priority as they're used for disambiguation. It's up to the author to avoid ambiguous notation.

[@JimBob1937]

@@SenhorAlien , those social media posts about these are actually ambiguous, and both are right, since the author intentionally left it ill-defined. It's a great viral tool for them, since people will debate each other endlessly.

[@JustBerib]

@@SenhorAlien”No debate ‘cause I say there isn’t”

[@w014prc7]

who doesn’t round the last sig fig of a decimal???? That’s totally fair to lose marks over

[@Y.Z-Au]

Exactly, you can't write 0,7626... in general. 0.12345 implies that the figure is accurate to 5 d.p. If I see that, I'd assume either you have super accurate measurement, or it's divided from very large numbers. This is misleading.

[@steffenjensen422]

Physicists tend to not round unless it's absolutely necessary. But he was in an econ class, so he should've done it the way econs do it

[@Brent-jj6qi]

The problem was that it should be .762… or .763 not .763…

[@sixwingedasura3059]

Statistics taught me two things: one, how easy it is to manipulate any set of data, and two, never trust anything ever again.

[@stankyt5882]

Me shifting my data just to get a silly p value down from 0.1 to 0.051 (I need it to look believable)

[@FishHRO]

As Mint student: pick an ultra easy introduction class for non-mint student -> complaining its to easy and insulting idiot or weaker students which get filtered out by subjects like this -> stubborn sticking to personal preferences -> scoring medicore at the oh so easy final exam "Arrogance breeds contempt, and contempt breeds insolence."

[@aidenhall8593]

To call them all stupid when you failed at the most basic part of a class, following the teachers instructions, is frankly really stupid

[@sottonk]

So really early on in the course your professor made it clear you should round, not truncate but your ego or laziness prevented you from learning that lesson... And your take away is that everyone else was too stupid?

[@jewels3400]

I remember in my stats we rounded nearly all of our numbers. Statistics is already an, "arguable," set of numbers. Like on surveys people lie, or methods of gathering data may be flawed. So a .00000076 difference isnt going to make a significant impact. Certain types of information need different amounts of specificity, like if you are testing measurements of liquid, youd want like 5 decimals. Where as if you are counting descrete data, like one person, or one cat, you cant have, "half a person," that doesn't make any sense. So you have to make it the closest round number.

[@ryuuk4498]

I've never seen someone just writing 0.342... to indicate that the number keeps going. Is this an American middle school thing? It's like such a normal standard to round the number throughout the scientific community

[@sottonk]

@@ryuuk4498 I've taught Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, the only time I've seen it used is Computer Science in some specifics contexts, but even then it's usually for integer division (sometimes called floor). I've never seen a Physics or Maths course that would accept truncating answers.

[@JimBob1937]

@@sottonk , yeah, I'd think truncation would cause a systematic downward bias in calculations, and wouldn't expect to see it in real world application except narrow circumstances.

[@johnblomberg389]

Yeah.. Dunning-Kruger is one hell of a drug.

[@dmaneiras]

Such an academic snob lmao

[@AB-et6nj]

Like most of the comment section

[@shaelynowens8591]

Yeah...I enjoy funny stories about how college sucks but all his videos give the vibe of "im smarter than everyone else if you aren't in calculus 3 you're stupid" really rubs me the wrong way

[@nobodyworthknowing8707]

I remember a lot of my peers in Engineering couldn't handle the math and physics and switched their majors to Business b/c it was way easier. Also...did you say you were in the bottom 1/3 and the curve brought you to an A-? Wow... No child left behind, indeed...

[@storytimewithjeff]

No child left behind is hilarious

[@Mefaso09]

Yeah I was wondering about that too, wtf is going on with grade inflation in the US?

[@WWFanatic0]

@@storytimewithjeff As is your inability to understand the difference between business majors and econ majors.

[@Conqueror933]

"my brain had been sanded down to such pristine smoothness you could stick a plunger on it" I was not ready for that.

[@RainbowLord]

Blu stick > glue stick (for the business majors this is a “greater than” symbol signifying that blu stick is better [greater] than glue sticks)

[@Bigheadman1226]

Blood doesn't understand rounding and blames his professor

[@AstridFrost_UwU]

youre so mathematically illiterate you dont know what a recurring decimal is or how to notate it...

[@APaleDot]

@@AstridFrost_UwU you shouldn't be using a recurring decimal when rounding

[@hens0w]

@@APaleDotIts a stats class, he should round

[@APaleDot]

@@hens0w Yeah, I didn't say otherwise

[@garetjax2768]

That same student later circled x with an annotation saying "right here" when asked to find x.

[@xinpingdonohoe3978]

It's better than him looking through his phone, wondering why the teacher wanted the number of his ex.

[@RedRattt]

I met a business student who said he was 19 and when I said I was 4 years older he asked if I was 18...

[@LogicNotAssumed]

Watching this video halved my IQ. This video wouldn’t exist if only Jeff had learned how to round in middle school.

[@braydonfisher9273]

I was in a lecture earlier today and a person in front of me was asking Wolfram-Alpha what 36-24 and 2.4-1.2 were, and similar questions. It was a sustainabile engineering lecture.

[@honkhonk8009]

I mean tbf dude im not pulling out my calculator when I already got my laptop out lol. My entire google search history, is just polluted with stupid ass searches like "6 + 7" lol

[@michaelwong426]

Because when you're integrating, differentiating, proofing, or whatever.. You really can't be bothered with arithmetic anymore.

[@My_Old_YT_Account]

​@@honkhonk8009you know your computer has a calculator, right?

[@pooperdooper3576]

​@honkhonk8009 the point is that he needed a calculator at all for 36-24 and 2.4-1.2

[@braydonfisher9273]

@@pooperdooper3576 exactly. I can understand not wanting to do bigger multiplication or arithmetic but something small like that? Its just odd.

[@morenomaikol]

Hey, Economics and Mathematics major here. Please stop referring to business students as "econ" students. Don't know what kind of academic swamp you study at, but economics is very very different from business. A PhD in economics requires more mathematics than an engineer would dare take, and economics majors are consistently ranked as the best prepared in top law programs. Fun video, but please rename it. Business is not economics. We do not claim the tards.

[@wchristian2000]

Yeah a lot of people don’t know this and its a little frustrating. Also tribalism in academia is getting out of hand imo…

[@lwrcse-uj4oi]

Ah this explains my issue with the video. He probably took a business Econ course and decided the whole field was easy. This is a fair assumption but if he wants to comment on the issue he should be more informed. Our undergrad degree, unbeknownst to all the stem nerds is actually the highest paying degree as far career-net-worth goes, contrary to what the FLOTM majors think.

[@wchristian2000]

@@lwrcse-uj4oi its academias best kept secret ssshhh. Also econ phds yield extremely high earnings.

[@steventaylor2028]

Was about to say this. People confuse economics and business all the time. Econ students at least those who go on to grad school usually are complete math nerds knowing proof based real analysis, linear algebra, probability theory, differential equations and are mostly able to do data analysis in R or Python. Not a small portion were double majors in math or physics, and they do not find the material easy. It is already dubious to base your view on a entire academic discipline on just a couple of introductory courses. But it becomes even more ridiculous when said introductory courses are not even really related to the subject. I don't know why people confuse business and econ so often. Maybe it has to do with the fact that many business programs teach a dumbed down version of introductory economics (i.e. "business economics"), or are simply using the term "economics" as a euphemism for their business classes. It is also the case that econ undergrad education in the U.S. is very often severly lacking in rigor compared to the undergrad education in European countries, maybe that is part of the problem. In any case, the correct title for the video would be: "I Took an Business Class and It Halved My IQ"

[@wchristian2000]

@@waxcutter9813 what do you mean when you say you don't get higher level math?

[@ANTIMONcom]

The correct way to round 0.7626 to three decimals is 0.763. Why do you have a problem with standard rounding?

[@Blade.5786]

Because he probably wasn't asked to round it. The ... means there are numbers he is omitting. Technically, that's the most precise answer. The professor probably expected him to round based on the lowest number of significant figures (3 in 781). But since this isn't experimental data, there was no reason to assume that convention from the student's part.

[@ChristianConrad]

@@Blade.5786 : _"Because he probably wasn't asked to round it."_ There's nothing to indicate he was asked to report his results in the silly truncating-ellipsis convention either.

[@polygontower]

@@ChristianConrad So you should be able to report your answer in any reasonable enough format.

[@eeronat]

6:16 This video is all about "me smart, they dumb" and goes on pronounce LaTex as...

[@yuseifudo6075]

And? A lot of people pronounce it that way

[@thesagapov]

One review for the first microeconomics class I took said that the math was too complicated, but the most complicated math in the entire course was calculating the area of a right triangle.....

[@sirmiglouche8274]

6:43 the professor was actually right, you are truncating when you actually should be runding, it's the same with meaningful digits when quantifying an experiments, for example: "I find 0.255678 on my measuring tool" if you only have three digits of accuracy you should report 0.256

[@_WhiteMage]

Actual title: "I took a business class and it halved my IQ."

[@GolerGkA]

Your professor was right, you made rounding errors.

[@essmene]

A friend of mine once said "University is not the place to give you the best education possible - it is the place where you earn your degree despite all obstacles presented to you."

[@peterl3909]

Speaking as a bad student with a learning disability, the idea that you felt bad for getting an A- in a math class makes smoke pour out of my ears and my nostrils and my eyeholes, which are empty because my eyes are bugging out of them like a ross seal

[@TheFakeGooberGoblin]

6:57 Did he, your omnipotent physicistliness, perhaps ask you round to the nearest thousandth and you did not?

[@illwerral]

the only concrete complaint about the prof's actions is that you got docked for rounding wrong. 781/1024 does indeed round to 0.763 using normal rounding rules.

[@steffenjensen422]

The issue is that he wasn't rounding the number, he was just omitting digits while writing it down. But if this result were to be used in another calculation, he'd have used all digits again so as to not introduce avoidable rounding error. This is apparently not how things are done in econ though, they would've just rounded

[@winterwhittle8380]

You seem really fun to be around

[@happyfase]

I remember taking a algorithms course and at least 5 to 10 minutes every lecture would be wasted by someone interrupting the professor to tell them they're missing a semicolon in their pseudocode. Yes. Their pseudocode.

[@athaeneus]

As an economist myself, I feel an urge to argue. My IQ was actually halved even before I started studying it.

[@Affalterbach1967]

They made junior economics students typeset their homework on LaTeX ? Wow.

[@uristmcary]

They probably had the option of using other word processors.

[@leonejohnfrattari2595]

I believe it's normal to round decimal numbers that way, since the number you wrote is less precise than the professor's version.

[@darth_dan8886]

I still don't get what was wrong with the professor's rounding. It looks correct. Dot-dot-dot isn't something we were ever allowed to use in maths tho, so... Yeah.

[@skipfred]

Lotta shade for a man who doesn't know how to round a decimal 😂

[@he1ar1]

A joke from my student days. What class do you take if economics is too difficult; business; what class do you take if business is too difficult. Marketing

[@KWCHope]

You didn't round and coped about it on youtube, thats wild

[@1plus68hehe]

i have a teacher in high school who is EXACTLY like this. She's an english teacher, so already probably the most useless class for a senior in high school. But every time I do an assignment EXACTLY like she asked me to, shell find some petty ass reason to make my grade as low as possible. Every single day its like her class is just taking my brain to a grindstone and smoothing and polishing it out.

[@ianrau6373]

Report her to admin, and get as many people as possible to complain simultaneously. If possible, involve your parents and others parents. If you can find evidence of bias where similar work by you and another person were given different grades for petty reasons then she’ll be given a headache at the very least. Don’t take this lying down, it’ll never get better if you don’t complain above her head.

[@1plus68hehe]

@ianrau6373 nah, she hates everyone in my class equally. Also I go to a private school, so what's right isn't what happens. She knows people, and she's been here a few years now, which is longer than I have been. I'll just be labeled as a troublemaker and expelled.

[@chesspiece4257]

if she’s doing it to everyone maybe she’s just trying to hone your skills? if the rules are consistent at least. personally i think english is probably one of the most important classes you can take as a senior. being able to write well is good for any job

[@strangevol5264]

Give us some examples, that way we can know you aren’t lying. Just out of reasonable doubt

[@polygontower]

@@chesspiece4257 I personally find English classes one of the easiest for teachers to teach you rules and the likes that are completely and utterly useless, such as the so-called 'split infinitive'. And, perhaps another one would be marking down students who use phrases that don't form a complete sentences by themselves. I mean, phrases are used everywhere for emphasis and effect-newspapers, letters, books, etc.-that teaching them it's ungrammatical hurts their writing and is also wrong. For example, this excerpt from a novel, "Our lives took the forks and turns and twists into our own paths-into dark forests that sometimes felt impossible to survive. All leading to this moment. (Here, the phrase solely consist of a gerund-participial verb, which does not, in a traditional sense, meet the requirements for a sentence.)" Or maybe the 'rule' that conjunctions such as 'And', 'But' or 'Or' can't be used at the start of sentences. For example, this excerpt from another novel, "...spilled out in tears and screams and in heavy, pulsing silence. And somehow, as much as I hurt, I knew it was even worse for Dad." Revisions: *For your convenience, some missing words have been added back in. Some stupid issue with italics and bolded letters being deleted. And so there goes all the fancy formatting!

[@HarukiYamamoto]

Graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from a “third world” country. One time, probably due to boredom, I decided to do one of those free supply chain management courses from MIT. Straight A’s in all the tests. We need the degrees, but it turns out that connections are far more important at finding a job than we have been led to believe.

[@microwave221]

Took a macro econ class to fulfill a req because one of my friends was a TA in it, and l was blown away. I still remember the prof explaining how demand can regularly change over time giving the example of coffee in the morning vs the rest of the day, and someone had to raise their hand and ask "but what if you like tea?".