Time preference and mathematics:

Human beings think they suck at math but it turns out that they are too high time preference to see through the tedium of it.

Math is NOT complicated. It’s tedious. Math is about generalizing to any system. Doing this with simple addition is very tedious so we only teach our society how to do it in ONE BASE (base 10) and even that is too tedious for people.

They scream - What am I ever going to use this for? And their high time preference tells them: NOTHING

This is why the successful math students in the world tend to come from privilege - it’s not because they paid for better teachers - rich kids with high time preference don’t learn math no matter how good the teacher is.

But some kids have a time preference low enough to see value in going deep and will spend their time ensuring the ruthless tediousness that mathematics entails.

It’s not about intelligence. It’s about time preference. Bitcoin will bring a renaissance of mathematics once we lower the time preference of children and the adults who choose their education.