Openai/6946e524-30cc-8001-94c7-7d2853931a25

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gpt-5-2

User: It's so weird, I think I'm realizing I've always had this problem.

It's so weird, I think I'm realizing I've always had this problem. I look at a textbook with math like the first picture, and my eyes just glaze over it, my brain just shuts down. I look at something like the second photo, and I'm perfectly comfortable.

What's going on here? What can I do to overcome it?

Assistant: What you’re noticing is real, common, and—crucially—not a deficit in intelligence or mathematical ability.

What you’re noticing is real, common, and—crucially—not a deficit in intelligence or mathematical ability. It’s a mismatch between how meaning is packaged and how your cognition likes to unpack it.

Let me be blunt, then precise.

The first expression is not “harder math.” It’s compressed math. The second is semantic math.

Your brain isn’t shutting down because it can’t reason. It’s shutting down because the first line withholds meaning until after you’ve already decoded a lot of syntax.

What’s actually happening

Look at the two examples stripped of mystique.

First image (measure theory / inclusion–exclusion–style):

• Heavy symbolic density
• Multiple binders (∑, indices, sets of sets)
• Meaning emerges only after you mentally expand it
• No narrative scaffold

Your brain is being asked to:

1. Parse unfamiliar visual patterns
2. Track multiple levels of quantification
3. Hold partial interpretations in working memory
4. Only then attach meaning

That’s a working-memory tax. A big one.

Now the second:

Second image (modal logic semantics):

• One quantifier
• One relation
• Clear agent (“for all worlds accessible to www”)
• Reads almost like English

The semantics are front-loaded. You can chunk it immediately:

“Agent

𝑖

i knows φ iff φ holds in all worlds they consider possible.”

Boom. Concept first. Formalism second.

Your brain likes that.

This is not a math vs logic thing

Here’s the provocative claim, backed by decades of cognitive science:

You are comfortable with mathematics when it preserves semantic locality.

You disengage when meaning is deferred behind syntax.

This has nothing to do with abstraction level. Measure theory isn’t “deeper” than modal logic. It’s just less narrativized.

Plenty of brilliant mathematicians report the same thing. Paul Halmos famously complained about “formula worship.” Even Grothendieck rewrote mathematics to restore meaning via structure and diagrams.

You are not broken. The notation is hostile.

Why your eyes “glaze over”

That glazing feeling is a protective response.

Your brain detects:

• High symbol density
• Low immediate payoff
• No obvious story

So it says: This is going to be expensive. Abort.

It’s the same reaction people have to:

• Legal boilerplate
• Badly written proofs
• UML diagrams with no explanation
• Enterprise architecture slides at 8am

Again: not stupidity. Cost–benefit triage.

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.

Big picture lesson

There’s a deeper theme here—one you already care about in your own work.

Formalisms that hide intent are brittle. They privilege insiders. They punish latecomers. They mistake compression for clarity.

Sound familiar? It’s the same critique we make of bad software architectures, overformalized verification conditions, or opaque AI systems.

The path forward isn’t to harden yourself.

It’s to insist—quietly but firmly—on meaning before machinery.

And the good news? Once you rebuild that bridge, even the scary formulas stop being scary.

They just become… verbose ideas in bad typography.