Editing Openai/6946e524-30cc-8001-94c7-7d2853931a25 (section)

===== How to overcome it (without gaslighting yourself) =====

You don’t need to “power through.” That often backfires.

You need to restructure the input.

====== 1. Force semantic expansion before symbol parsing ======

Before touching the formula, ask:
* What kind of thing is this? Bound? Definition? Property?
* What is varying? What is fixed?
* What is the informal claim?

For the first formula, the informal version is something like:

: “The outer measure of a union is at least what inclusion–exclusion would give you, if you apply it to outer measures of intersections.”

Once you have that, the symbols stop being noise.

====== 2. Rewrite aggressively (on paper) ======

Literally rewrite:
* Replace ∑ with “sum over”
* Replace index sets with explicit cases for small nnn
* Expand for n=2n = 2n=2 or 333

Your brain wants examples before generality. Give it that.

====== 3. Delay reverence for notation ======

Textbooks often treat notation as sacred. Don’t.

Rewrite it in your notation.
Invent helper symbols.
Break one line into five.

Mathematicians do this constantly off the page. The published form is optimized for storage, not cognition.

====== 4. Read proofs backwards ======

Start from:
* “What is this supposed to establish?”
* “What would have to be true for this inequality to hold?”

Then work backward. This restores intentionality.