>For those of us who did maths this is obvious, but for those for whom maths was just a list of formulas and processes, applied without any real understanding, I can see that this can come as a surprise.
This comes off as obnoxiously superior. I was excellent at math in school. I was the guy who understood the theory and could extrapolate. And yet this surprised me. Not because the theory is surprising, but because I just hadn't thought about it before - or maybe I did, and it didn't stick. I don't work with percentages every day.
It's sort of like implying that only people who are bad at programming don't know about a particular API or pattern. That's not what makes somebody good or bad at something.
This comes off as obnoxiously superior. I was excellent at math in school. I was the guy who understood the theory and could extrapolate. And yet this surprised me. Not because the theory is surprising, but because I just hadn't thought about it before - or maybe I did, and it didn't stick. I don't work with percentages every day.
It's sort of like implying that only people who are bad at programming don't know about a particular API or pattern. That's not what makes somebody good or bad at something.