Comment by 2snakes
12 hours ago
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.
> But everyone is as a kid when they learn language and everything else
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.
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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?
"Abstraction ceiling" is just a way to talk about intelligence at at the tails that reveals one of the difficulties / limitations you can encounter when it comes to compressing / abstracting complex mathematical objects. Your objections to the term are facile and clearly stem from an obviously unvocalized intelligence denialism that is simply indefensible today. Also, intelligence != IQ, obviously this is too simplistic.
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).
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