I was listening to some more of the Darkhorse podcast discussion between brothers Bret and Eric Weinstein, about Fundamental Truth, and How to Think About It.

It’s a pretty rambling discussion, but one of the thing Eric says that I locked on to, was his assertion that that he thinks much of the populace is just insane when it comes to some of the fundamental physics problems. He feels like people will watch any number of a series of shows: Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, and master an incredible number of complex plot developments. Yet if you were to ask them what the four fundamental forces in the universe are, they’d act like: I can’t learn that complicated stuff! I don’t know if he’s right, but he feels like if there were a minimal effort, much of the basic populace could understand, maybe not work them, but at least understand, some of the great physics problems of today.

I’m in that category of being easily intimidated by at least certain types of problems. I’ll listen to philosophy and try to get in and learn, but when it comes to anything math, well….my go to joke is: Math and I have not been on speaking terms since the 5th grade and long division.

I am NOT among those that grasp math easily. That ability to mentally manipulate the concepts in my mind, is, as I understand it, the fundamental task of IQ. I occasionally joke about that too: I did pretty well on my IQ test- got an 87… which is a solid B+!

I don’t really know what my IQ is, but I imagine it’s pretty average. My little sister was in all the ‘gifted’ programs when she was in school, and I, well, let’s just say I was tested, told I did fine, but was never invited to the party. So I’ll take that as evidence I was under whatever line necessary to be called ‘gifted’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not upset about this, I’ve just come to accept that it is what it is.  
Now lots of people think I’m more intelligent than I think I am. (Ok… it’s just my mom) I think I give off the appearance of being more intelligent than I am because I’m interested in lots of things and I have a decent facility for remembering enough about those subjects to sound like I know more than I do.

But I am digressing, so…. back to dave and math. I have, on a few occasions, proven to myself that I am actually capable of understanding math, it just doesn’t come easily to me.

I remember trying to go back and process through some trigonometry problems after I got out of school. I’d be stuck, and show my wife my page of calculations. She’d look at it and be like: oh, yeah… you misadded 2+3 up here and it screwed everything up downstream. So I’m prone to boneheaded minor errors… (which pretty much sums up my approach to life itself) but not incapable of understanding the concepts with enough time.

There was a time when I needed to help my oldest son through some homeschooling too, and I was forced to do his math problems ahead of time so I knew what was up, and ….. I was able to do it. And no, ya wiseacres, he wasn’t in 1st grade at the time… it was 9th, so the math was harder. Algebra I think, in that case. Anyway… all this is to relate my own difficulties with math- which is basically real difficulties psyching me out to the point where I convince myself I can’t do it- illustrating what I was listening to in the podcast. I bet a lot of things we write off as being too complicated, probably aren’t, but we psych ourselves out of it. I’ll stipulate that there are things that may not be worth the time to learn, after all there are always going to be time trade-offs for what we are going to invest in, but IF one wanted to learn something, my guess is it would be more doable than we want to think.  

I have also heard there are various ways in which people learn things. I read books and learn. For other people, that’s next to useless, they have to learn hands-on. So I’d guess one has to make allowances for that as well, but assuming the correct method for learning could be applied, maybe we’re all much more capable than we give ourselves credit for.