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> This sounds a lot like you may have in fact succumbed to your abstraction ceiling

It sounds more like you're turning a vibes based theory into a tautology.

Hofstadter struggling with math for the first time in graduate school isn't a unique story, nor is his self introspection about this event a good basis for an apparently unfalsifiable theory about human cognition.

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We have mountains of evidence that humans differ dramatically in cognitive potential, and more again that often effort / practice can only explain a small amount of the variance in performance in a wide variety of fields. We have basically zero evidence at all that anyone can just learn anything if they try hard enough under the right teacher, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Abstraction ceilings are about rates and difficulty of learning, so even if we assumed the (absurd) claim that no one has any fundamental cognitive limits, until we are immortal, being slow enough still creates an effective ceiling.

Intelligence denialism is the incoherent and indefensible position here.

That stuff always gives me such a eugenics 2.0 vibe — no, no, the hierarchy is based on innate cognitive ability now. Gives me the creeps that they're actually in academia pushing that stuff.

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