> But many people feel the same way about, for example, physical exercise: they don’t enjoy doing it and find it to be very hard work when they try. But it would be strange indeed to say that you can’t “do” exercise. You may not want to do it. You may be unwilling to invest the time and effort into doing it. But you aren’t incapable of doing it. And the same is true, in my experience, in mathematics.
The way physical exercise is often presented to people, it's no surprise they give up on it. A lot of gimmicky exercise programs and contraptions designed to take money from you in exchange for no visible results.
And even time tested exercise programs like P90X won't teach you the fundamentals. You'll spend a lot of time doing crunches which is the least effective and most time consuming way of working abs.
The same is certainly true for math and when people say they can't do any moderately complex math, they're saying "fuck you" to the establishment that wasted their time while teaching them nothing. They also do just fine without complex math, just like most people who never exercise.
The way physical exercise is often presented to people, it's no surprise they give up on it. A lot of gimmicky exercise programs and contraptions designed to take money from you in exchange for no visible results.
And even time tested exercise programs like P90X won't teach you the fundamentals. You'll spend a lot of time doing crunches which is the least effective and most time consuming way of working abs.
The same is certainly true for math and when people say they can't do any moderately complex math, they're saying "fuck you" to the establishment that wasted their time while teaching them nothing. They also do just fine without complex math, just like most people who never exercise.