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eli_sennesh comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - LessWrong
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My terse summary of this post's argument is "I have good aesthetic sense and unremarkable calculation ability; I was able to translate my aesthetic sense into mathematical ability. Scott Alexander has great aesthetic sense, thus he should be able to translate that into mathematical ability, even in the presence of poor calculation ability."
I think this only works if you keep 'mathematics' a broad and vague category. Yes, Scott could probably do well in a group theory class--when I took it, I was surprised at how much of it would have been intelligible to a much younger me, whereas other math classes I took at around that time really did require linear algebra and calculus and so on as a foundation.
But being good at group theory is different from being good at "math" in general! If Scott's dream was to become an actuary or accountant, aesthetic sense would be irrelevant in the face of calculation ability. If you start with the goal (say, mastery of Bayesian probabilistic reasoning, or causality discovery, or so on) and then try to learn the math necessary to achieve that goal, it seems obvious to me that someone could be poorly matched to their goal, and possibly unable to succeed even with the expenditure of heroic effort.
(If one starts with one's abilities, and then finds the goal that is best matched to those abilities, one can obtain much greater success--but may value that success less.)
So, I'll defer to Scott if he disagrees, but my impression is that he has substantially more trouble learning scales and chords than his brother, and that he is "worse than him at music." It might not be logically necessary, but we can certainly notice that it is probabilistically likely.
Well, actually, if the class Scott got a C- in was the famed Calculus 2: Sequences and Series and Integral Calculus, then I have to mention that I've heard from many people that they did terribly in that class, even when they went on to do quite well in other math courses. I myself got a C+ in that class, despite getting an A in Calculus 1, an A- in Multivariable Calculus, another A- in Linear Algebra, and generally somewhere from B to A in most math or theoretical CS classes I've ever taken, and even better marks in most programming-based CS courses I've ever taken.
That's before we get into JonahSinick's actual theory, which is that "verbal" general intelligence can be traded off with strictly calculative ability to get better at math even when one is mediocre (or "merely above average", a rather awful term if I've ever met one) at running calculations in one's head.
Further, in all cases, learning and practicing skills deliberately makes you get better at them, and we certainly ought to blame the school system for constantly forcing students up into the next math class when they actually have the minimum necessary understanding to move on, rather than sufficient understanding to understand well. Everything before graduate school also does a miserable job of teaching what math describes, with the result that I spent high school very angry at the trigonometric functions for being ontologically fucked-up because they appeared to have no closed-form definition (I didn't know about the infinite Taylor series for them at that time, nor Euler's formula and its use to obtain closed-forms for trig functions).