Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
New on JustinMath.com - The Cycle of AI; How I Went From 19 to 25000 Followers on X in 18 Months; Production Systems
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Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are 3 new posts: How I Went from 19 to 25000 Followers on X in 18 Months
~1050 words • Here's the progression I followed to level up my writing and build an audience. It’s reproducible if you're willing to put in the work.
The Cycle of AI ~150 words • Progress is made in AI, people lose their shit thinking Jarvis-level AGI is just around the corner, the singularity gets canceled, then nothing is AI, until more progress is made. Rinse & repeat.
I Didn’t Realize How Fragile My Coding Chops Were Until I Started Working on Real Production Systems
~400 words • Nothing prepared me for how violently they punish even the smallest mistake. And a new podcast: On The Rails and Out Of Scope - Math Academy Podcast #6, Part 2
What we covered:
– The benefits of short problems. Math Academy problems typically take only a minute or two. This way, students can stay on the rails with lots of reps, successfully building up complexity instead of getting crushed by it from the start.
– What goes wrong in college math classes: they tend not to scaffold content very well, forcing students to build their own bridges across knowledge & skill gaps. Weekly problem sets often consist of a handful of hour-long problems that instructors hope students will “self-scaffold” up to. In reality, what happens more often is that students fall off the rails.
– Founders of growing start-ups cannot be hands-off. “Things falling off the rails” is the most realistic and most dangerous failure mode, not micromanaging. Founders of small, scaling companies need to be in “founder mode,” not the “manager mode” that CEOs of huge, well-established companies are in.
– Within teams, it’s important to let conversations flow out of scope. Every innovation, every solved problem, requires relevant background context, and you often don't know what the full context is beforehand. It's easy to let conversations flow out of scope when you like who you're working with and what you're working on.
0:00 - Introduction
1:32 - Why Math Academy problems are short by design
9:48 - Long problems dilute reps on the skill that actually matters
11:00 - Isolate the new skill first, then recombine into full problems
14:10 - Typical undergrad math classes: too few problems, too complex from the start
18:07 - The proof skills gap: often assumed and not taught
29:32 - Alignment decay: teams naturally drift out of sync unless continually aligned
35:04 - Small misalignments compound fast
38:28 - Founder mode: stay in the weeds to stay in sync
49:07 - Early, frequent parent communication avoids end-of-term blowups
50:48 - High-trust collaboration requires relentless communication
57:42 - Out-of-scope conversation enables context sharing
59:14 - Over-scoping kills context sharing
1:00:51 - Enjoyment & trust fuel context sharing
1:06:13 - Missing context produces confidently wrong outcomes
1:10:01 - LLMs fail when context is missing
1:11:38 - Humans fail when context is missing
1:14:19 - Online discourse fails when context is missing
Best, |
Justin Skycak
Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: The Most Mathematically Gifted Student I Ever Worked With Still Needed To Be Pushed to Learn Calculus~200 words • Even when you’re doing what you love, there will be grindy phases. But kids typically don’t understand this. It’s often up to parents, who can see the long game, to push...
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: You Can Explain Anything If You Break It Into Small Enough Steps~150 words Just Solve Today’s Problems Today~300 words How To Get Eyes On Your Writing When You Have No Audience~150 words And a new podcast: American Enterprise Institute’s “The Report Card” Podcast: Math Academy Listen...
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