> It certainly took you many years to learn how to read and write, yet here you are.

Exactly. Most people don't realize how unnatural and difficult written language actually is, yet here we are. There's a great book on the subject called 'Proust and the Squid'[1]; it looks into the history, development and neuroscience of reading and it's quite eye-opening. There's really no reason to believe why math/music/programming/etc should be any different.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/...

If reading and writing were once unnatural and difficult skills but now are easily picked is just because evolutions has wired our brains to learn it faster, maybe future generations will struggle less with math for the same reason.

I don't think you realize how much time you spent learning to read and write, considering that every waking moment you're surrounded by things with text on them.

Also, you have a pretty skewed idea of how evolution works. How long do you think it took for evolution to "wire our brains" to learn to write quickly?

The fact that we're continually surrounded by written text only helps explain why we haven't that much difficulty learning how to read it.

As long as the time it took for evolution to rewire our brains, I'd say more than a thousand of years, it's not like writing was invented yesterday.

What proportion of the world was literate a thousand years ago?

"Now", as in an immensely tiny blink in the human evolutionary time-scale? Sorry, that's more wishful thinking than the notion of skill acquisition. Surely you're aware of feral children, and more 'normal' dyslexics; what's the deal with those? Clearly we should be reading straight out of the womb by now, so what gives?

Feral children by definition aren't exposed to anything resembling writing and dyslexia only proves that neurological differences play a major role in our ability to comprehend and parse information.

Exactly, but dyslexics can still read, because they can learn how to. Their genetics may not have given them a good start, but evolution certainly didn't make their lives any easier either; they still had to learn things 'the hard way' like the rest of us -- just with a bit more resistance.

Difficulty and ability are orthogonal matters, but you seem to be trying to defend a hard/static correlation between them. Of course difficulty affects ability, but it doesn't limit/promote anything. As long as you keep exposing yourself to something, your brain will adapt to get more used to it (i.e. 'get better' at it). That doesn't indicate how fast you'll be at it, nor does it mean you can't start at a lower/higher point than other people (which in itself doesn't dictate whether you up superior/inferior to them) -- it just means it's possible.

I'm not saying that if you start out without being able to solve basic equations and then spend 10 years learning math you still won't be able to solve those basic equations, you will, but the effort to get there will be a power of that needed by a "math-inclined" person. And once there the math-inclined will still run circles around you.

> ...but the effort to get there will be a power of that needed by a "math-inclined" person.

'math-inclined'... so in other words, interested/experienced in math?

Um, yeah?

You don't like math, we get it. But you can't justify matters of taste 'scientifically' like that. There is no other way we can quantify these 'inclinations' you speak of other than taste, so there's nothing really new here.

Not everybody born with perfect pitch wants to be a musician, and I can guarantee you there are plenty of musicians without it that can run circles around some of those that do have it.

I'm interested in programming and music, and confidently feel I'm good at both, does that mean I'm "musically/programmatically-inclined"? If so, how might I be? Or instead, how would you define a person that isn't musically-inclined? You could argue that a literally tone-deaf person isn't, but not that !musical_inclination == tone_deafness; so how would you define it? The simplest definition that would catch the most cases here would just be the lack of interest. So in other words:

    if (interests.contains(some_subject)) {
        return POTENTIAL_SUCCESS;
    }
    else {
        return null;  // because it is 'undefined', not necessarily FAILURE
    }

Pretty novel idea there. Who would've thought you needed to be interested in something to excel in it?

> I'm not saying that if you start out without being able to solve basic equations

Well, I'd argue this is a bad place to start out. The better questions are:

    1. What do these equations represent?
    2. Why do we care about what they represent?
    3. What does "solving them" mean for the things they represent?

So, maybe a more important muscle to exercise is the one that lets us go up and down the ladder of abstraction. A huge part of mathematics is seeing a class of (relatively) concrete things, finding commonalities and drawing out abstractions, reasoning about the abstractions, and then drawing conclusions about the more concrete things.

You can do so much of this without the formalisms of classroom mathematics and, honestly, it's what "real" mathematicians do. The formalisms are just a high-bandwidth way of communicating these ideas between mathematicians. They're just a highly technical map of the terrain, not the terrain itself.

In fact, if I was teaching someone and they invented their own bizarro syntax for "solving" equations I'd be ecstatic. Whatever it was that happened in their head that made them

> but the effort to get there will be a power of that needed by a "math-inclined" person.

This is fine and true, perhaps, but if so it's true of all things, not just mathematics. You can replace "math" with "writing" or "running" or "playing a kazoo."

What do you think makes mathematics special?

Also see http://www.amazon.com/The-Math-Gene-Mathematical-Thinking/dp...

Reading and writing are basic skills that could never be compared to anything even remotely resembling a subject like mathematics. And I don't think math isn't important, conversely I think it's the most important discipline of all, a pillar of modern society. But I also acknowledge that it's also the preserve of a selected few (like chess for instance), read my other responses for a more detailed view of my point.

It doesn't take a grandmaster at chess to play the game. Just as well, there are varying levels of understanding and producing mathematics.

You think of language as a basic skill because you have taken it for granted your whole life, but the same kinds of mental abilities used for language are what is needed for mathematics. There are heaps of scientific evidence supporting this. [1]

Again, you are putting mathematics on a pillar because it's foreign to you, not because of any inherent difficulty in the subject itself. You're "acknowledging" a myth as fact.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Math-Gene-Mathematical-Thinking/dp...