I’m the same way as this person about math.

In every other field, concepts slide naturally into my mind and I can manipulate them however they want, like fitting a bunch of Lego blocks together to make limitless possibilities.

But math is like constructing a Lego set on a picnic table outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. I grope blindly in the pouring rain for the first piece, and finally put it in place, but by the time I’ve found the second piece and move to connect it to the first piece, the first piece has blown away and is nowhere to be found, and the instructions are sopping wet, and the picnic table has just been carried away by a tornado.

Part of it just that I’m not interested in it and it is taught really poorly almost everywhere. But the other factor (heh) is that I’m just absolutely terrible at it, and it feels to me just like the above extended metaphor of the storm and the picnic table.

Thousands of hours spent on math and I’ve learned really nothing. Not for lack of trying. It just is all meaningless garbage to me at the non-conceptual level; a language I will never understand and is so far from anything I can understand that I can’t even discern it as a language.

I wrote about the Miller Analogies Test yesterday. I score 4 1/2 standard deviations above average on that test, which is somewhere around a 160+ IQ. (Has in most people an extremely high correlation to other IQ tests, which is why all high-intelligence societies accept it.)

Yet you give me a math-ish IQ test, and will reliably I score at a 70 IQ or so. People start trying to fit me with helmets so I don’t accidentally hurt myself after I take one of those.

I do wish I had the math ability that others of similar intelligence seem to possess, but it’s like imagining being able to fly under my own power. It’s just not going to happen. I’ve studied so much math in so many different ways for so many years that I know this is true. Sometimes the universe just is how it is.