Let's also not pretend that "you could have learned epsilon delta proofs, you just didn't try hard enough or your teachers weren't competent" or "you just didn't have enough time" and etc. is also not rude and presumptuous. Denying the existence of such limits is equally offensive.
“To stop thinking in terms of “gifts” and “talents,” one has to find an alternate explanation. My way of looking at things, which has served me well throughout my career, was to imagine that creative mathematicians were hackers who had found ways to unlock “hidden modes” of our cognition. Most of the time, they’d done so unwittingly, and were entirely incapable of explaining how.”
It is a phenomenon like child-like mental yoga of attention.
The hubris and willful ignorance required to imagine that everyone is just equally and infinitely unbounded in their cognitive ability is simply mind-boggling in 2026.
Also clearly false by almost all current research.
> So the task is just to get people back into that mindset.
Again, you have no evidence, and this is clearly wrong in cases of mental retardation or brain damage. Modern genetic studies also seem to suggest intelligence is related to a lucky absence of errors / genetic problems that are otherwise inconsequential (or even advantageous) in other domains, so really, your "everyone starts perfectly equal in intellectual ability" is just empirically disconnected and ignorant fantasy.
Cognitive disparity is because of compounding investment of attention and metacognition in development, preferably in a self-referential non-symbolic universal way because intuition is partly based on sensual metaphors and embodied cognition. Everyone has issues distinguishing ungrounded concepts if they don't have a map of them from their attention previously..
Mental rigidity (aka "fragile perfects") is a fairly common phenomenon for math anxiety, whereas Grothendieck advised uninhibited playfulness to deal with uncertainty. The perceived difficulty of mathematics is a social phenomenon rather than organic comprehension limits on abstraction ceiling.
It is the social aspect of math that is the superintelligent part of it, which transcends the genetic determinist perspective. Civilization advances because education transforms the breakthroughs of genius (which all children have ultimate capability for) into the baseline intuition of the rising children by sharpening their attention. Math is supposed to be a democratization of human understanding, that's why the Greeks were so keen on deduction and why proofs are for systematic communication. If a stupid-ass computer can do math, so can any human being.
Sure, but exclusively? There are no other factors that don't depend on effort / investment / social context?
I can't take you seriously when you take such an absolutist stance on these things when science has long since accepted nothing complex about humans is 100% nature or 100% nurture (really, shared vs. non-shared environment vs. genetics: but, surely you know this).
I think the fact the Feynman took an IQ test and scored 127 is damning of the entire concept. I think what turns mathematicians off is the thought that psychologists who couldn’t tell you the difference between a scheme and a metric space think they can actually measure who has the capacity to be a mathematician and who doesn’t.
Like, why fucking bother doing anything? Why run the 100 meters at the Olympics, let’s just do some genetic testing and measurements to pick the fastest man in the world. Why teach kids music, let’s just measure hand size and do some sight singing exercises and teach the talented kids piano. This whole nonsense reeks of Gattaca-style quasi-eugenics where people get sorted into profession by people who don’t actually have expertise in any of them. You’re not in the guild, you don’t get to appoint to the guild, and you certainly don’t get to gatekeep who can apply for the guild.
Edit: Dropping slurs when someone compares your views to eugenics is an interesting strategy. Shouldn’t you be at a meetup discussing Curtis Yarvin’s work or something?
Everything about your arguments and other posts is similar reductions to retarded extremes (our only options are "eugenics 2.0" or deranged intelligence denialism - there is no room for anything in between, e.g. the idea that base intelligence matters and sets a hard average ceiling on potential, but that effort and other factors might push one slightly above/below this ceiling relative to others with a similar intelligence, and etc). Or alternately you hallucinate things I never said or even remotely implied (e.g. we should gatekeep based on dumb psychology metrics or hand sizes).
Just be honest: you know intelligence is real and matters, but you want to dance around this fact because you find it ideologically inconvenient, or you can't admit you yourself have limits (and lack the courage to realize the obvious social broader consequences of this personal admission).
I imagine you think calling some of my language choice a "slur" here is some kind of gotcha, when the term I used is specifically one widely disputed as actually being offensive, given it is mostly used now to refer to normal people acting in intellectually deficient ways, and not generally to those with actual learning disabilities that deserve our sympathy. There are studies on this, which you surely are aware of.
If I had referred to your more deranged positions as "smooth-brained halfwit extremes", you likely wouldn't haven't tried to impotently pull this "slur" card, even though the semantics are basically identical. Which basically goes to show that you value irrelevant surfaces over substantial realities, and frankly is perfectly consistent with the midwit intelligence denialism on display in your posts in this exchange.