When I try to convince people like Scott that they're actually very good at math, they often say "No, you don't understand, I'm really bad at math, you're overestimating my mathematical ability because of my writing ability." To which my response is "I know you think that, I've seen many people in your rough direction who think that they're really bad at math, and say that I don't understand how bad they are, and they're almost always wrong: they almost never know that what they were having trouble with wasn't representative of math."

I do currently think I'm really bad at math, which may very well be true, but I do also find it very plausible that I've so far only been exposed to unsatisfactory math curricula/teachers, and then had a sort of vicious-cycle of reinforcement, where I would get insecure about my weakness in "math" (especially relative weakness), and learn to hate the "math" and feel helpless about learning it, which in turn would make it harder to learn and increase my relative weakness.

Still, I might not be too far gone. Can you recommend anything I could try that you consider more representative of math?

Thanks!