—“CURT, ARE COMPLEX IDEAS INACCESSIBLE OR DOES IT JUST TAKE SOME PEOPLE LONGER?”—
While it should take 110 IQ to pass university courses there are people with 100IQ that manage to do it. (not that they’re taking the hardest courses).
As I understand it, it takes a lot longer to learn what exists, longer to learn what must be calculated by substitution, and the meaningful barrier is invention of what does not exist yet.
In other words, to be very good at chess you have to play a lot, and learn a lot of increasingly complex patterns. To be very good at math you have to use it a great deal and be very good at increasingly complex patterns. To be good a programming, you have to use it a great deal and be very good at increasingly complex patterns.
The barrier for people is usually frustration and exhaustion in that learning to apply those patterns by intuition and permutation is actually beyond some people. You would be horrified below 95 at how hard it is for people to learn the most basic things.
I find most interesting is those children who are mentally retarded by because of their desire for approval, they will work endlessly to learn some simple thing that they can accomplish on their own.
The real problem we faces as a polity is the Dunning Kruger bias, which is that we tend to assume a little knowledge provides more understanding that it does. The example I understand best, is in the field I understand best, which is economics. In economics you can almost guarantee that the majority of economists will be wrong on any particular question of nuance. The reason being there are only four or five people who understand that question, and all of economics is counter-intuitive (which is why it’s so complicated). Yet all economists opine on some specialization that they are entirely ignorant of. This also mirrors the academic anchoring problem. In that, a survey of 1000 people on the street will yield better predictive results (of observable phenomenon) than the specialists will.
My greatest frustration is the “Island 120” group, which is people able to graduate from non-STEM courses but not STEM courses, and virtue signal that they belong to the island 120’s group, but who vastly overestimate their understanding and vastly over express their confidence. The 120’s are the range where you know enough to be dangerous by convincing a large body of people you know enough. (the media).
This behavior is equivalent to a cult where all members are convinced of their wisdom simply because they all believe the same nonsense. In my understanding of western civilization today, those people play a disproportionate role in information sharing – and most of what they think is nonsense.
Reality is always quite simple, it’s just often less pleasant than we imagine it to be.
-Cheers 😉