Comment by D-Machine
17 hours ago
Work on your reading comprehension, I made it clear that increased effort is what an abstraction ceiling feels like, but also made it clear that GP could have been talking about the effort of academic busywork.
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.
You’re in a kind of compulsive ideology here. This same vein of thought and why it is harmful is described by David Bessis in the book Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity.
“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.
Uh huh. A bunch of quasi-mystical bullshit to justify utterly inept garden variety intelligence denialism (it also just shifts terminology: if we accept your metaphysics, it would still be strange to propose that everyone has exactly equal "hacking" ability).
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.
But everyone is as a kid when they learn language and everything else. Some people retain that level of watching, listening, and babbling (hacking) when they don't know what to do. So the task is just to get people back into that mindset. Innate intelligence isn't necessarily only symbolic manipulation (analytical), it also is experiential/creative and practical per Sternberg.
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Whereas “abstraction ceiling” is hard science backed by ample literature, not a loose metaphor directly contradicted by several prominent mathematicians who didn’t quit when the going got tough.
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?
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Well you're just a generally rude person, aren't you.