alt Hacker News"It's the economy stupid" is what I would say. Mental capacity is capacity. Most of us don't study math not because we don't want to but because we can't.
I bet if you asked in a survey of people that if you were given a UBI that covered all your expenses and needs what would you do? It would be perfection of the self or art. Both of these are what is practicing and learning math.
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Didn’t we have that experiment during Covid? A bunch of people got paid to stay at home, sometimes for 2 years. How many Grammy nominations since then have gotten to musicians that came out of that? A new face at the Oscars? MOMA exhibiting an artist that was a barista before the pandemic?
At least anecdotally, many people around me now have more children, on the other hand.
I must disagree. I consider art same as entertainment to the most part. I would want to be good at math and I also disagree that it has anything to do with mental capacity. It's not a competition, I don't need to be better at math than others but my pursuit of other things like cryptography, better algorithms, and understanding physics is limited by my primitive understanding of mathematics.
If I was a multi-millionaire, learning lots of math on my free time would be one of the things I would pursue while chilling at my beach house.
UBI scoped for self-actualization would be nice, imagine all the mighty works people would make if not for The Markets making us organize around badware.
Come on, get real. If people had all of their needs covered a lot more of them would sit around getting high and playing video games than perfecting their art.
Yeah, but we are all in software so for us economy is not a concern. All of us should learn maths.
One thing I can agree with is that if one is stressed out and have poor psychological habits you will suffer and be miserable regardless.
I would say focusing on mindfullness(like vipasaana) can go a long way in this. But mindfulness is not an intellectual exercise, one has to live it. Do multiple hours of meditation a day and it gets you somewhere good in a few months.