Hacker News Reader

Comment by ltbarcly3 | Hacker News Reader

Some people just won't ever be good at math. There are people who have basically no visual intuition and can't predict what an object will look like when rotated in 3 dimensions. It may be possible to practice this but someone who does poorly at this untrained is unlikely to ever reach even median level ability. There are techniques you can learn to perform this task in a multiple choice test situation but they don't train your brain to be better at visualizing 3d rotations at all.

This is not to say that object rotation is a proxy for mathematical ability, but just a demonstration that there are cognitive tasks which people vary widely in ability on when untrained and which we don't have an effective way to train, at least at an arbitrary age. Lots of Math seem to be this way.

View on HN

I know you said object rotation isn't a proxy for mathematical ability. But I just want to add that not all intuition is geometric intuition. And not all math is even geometric.

Of course, there isn't a switch that gets flipped which suddenly makes you "good at math". But still, I think most people with an interest can study it, learn something, and make some progress. I'm happy playing a sport, but I know what separates me from an athlete and I know I won't ever be a professional athlete.

Possibly true, but "good enough" is within reach of many more people than realize it. Engineering level calculus is not particularly high-level math, but will get you a long way in terms of applications.

I find it useful to imagine that the brain comes with two types of compute power.

One is similar to a CPU, and provides the ability to follow procedures accurately and fast. This helps with arithmetic and a lot of cases where one can follow a memorized pattern for how to solve a problem.

The other is more like a GPU. This helps in a number of areas, such as visualization, geometric intuition, inductive reasoning and often creativity when facing novel problems. Most of these are a form of pattern recognition.

> It may be possible to practice this but someone who does poorly at this untrained is unlikely to ever reach even median level ability. There are techniques you can learn to perform this task in a multiple choice test situation but they don't train your brain to be better at visualizing 3d rotations at all.

Any source for this claim? I'd like to read more about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com