Maybe someone thinks that the meme of “everyone can learn calculus” is a really bad one? I remember you being similarly frustrated at the “everyone can be a programmer” meme.
I didn’t downvote, but I agree that this is a suboptimal meme – though the prevailing mindset of “almost nobody can learn Calculus” is much worse.
As a datapoint, it took me about two weeks of obsessive, 15 hour/day study to learn Calculus to a point where I tested out of the first two courses when I was 16. And I think it’s fair to say I was unusually talented and unusually motivated. I would not expect the vast majority of people to be able to grok Calculus within a week, though obviously people on this site are not a representative sample.
Quite fair. I had read Zvi as speaking to typical LessWrong readership. Also, the standard you seem to be describing here is much higher than the standard Zvi was describing.
Maybe someone thinks that the meme of “everyone can learn calculus” is a really bad one? I remember you being similarly frustrated at the “everyone can be a programmer” meme.
I didn’t downvote, but I agree that this is a suboptimal meme – though the prevailing mindset of “almost nobody can learn Calculus” is much worse.
As a datapoint, it took me about two weeks of obsessive, 15 hour/day study to learn Calculus to a point where I tested out of the first two courses when I was 16. And I think it’s fair to say I was unusually talented and unusually motivated. I would not expect the vast majority of people to be able to grok Calculus within a week, though obviously people on this site are not a representative sample.
Quite fair. I had read Zvi as speaking to typical LessWrong readership. Also, the standard you seem to be describing here is much higher than the standard Zvi was describing.