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Kawoomba comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - LessWrong
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Part of what I'll be arguing is that the whole conceptual framework that people are using is wrong. :-)
As far as I can tell, it's empirically true that Scott's emotional reaction to the unsolvability of quintic is unusual amongst mathematicians (while being almost uniform amongst elite mathematicians). If true, then on that dimension, he's better at math than the average mathematician, even without having any technical knowledge, even not knowing calculus well enough to have gotten a grade higher than a C-.
I don't doubt that his struggling to get a C- in calculus reflects some sort of relative lack ability on his part, but I don't think that it carves reality at its joints to call that "mathematical ability."
Separately, I think that his calculus experience would have been very different if it had been immersive: I don't think that he would have gotten a grade below C in calculus if he had spent all waking hours talking about calculus with me for 6 months. Of the ~200 calculus students who I taught at University of Illinois, I don't think that there are any students for whom this is true.
... and we're down to definitional quibbles, which are rarely worth the effort, other than simply stating "I define x as such and such, in contrast to your defining x as such as such". Reality has no intrinsic, objective dictionary with an entry for "mathematical ability", so such discussions can mostly be solved by using some derivative terms x1 and x2, instead of an overloaded concept x.
Of course, the discussion often reduces to who has the primacy on the original wording of x, which is why I'd suggest that neither get it / taboo x.
I agree that a more complex, nuanced framework would better correspond to different aspects of cognitive processing, but then that's the case for most subject matters. Bonus for not being as generally demotivating as "you lack that general quality called math ability", malus points because of a complexity penalty.