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D-Machineyesterday at 7:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

2snakestoday at 12:21 AM

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.

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catgaryyesterday at 7:22 PM

Well you're just a generally rude person, aren't you.