Back in high school I used to help my fellow students with chemistry problems. I noticed that many of them seemed to have a lot of trouble with what I thought were really easy problems. I noticed that many of the chemistry problems had obvious analogues in everyday tasks like baking cakes. I kept trying to reframe chemistry problems as baking problems, expecting that this would make everything easier. I thought my fellow students had some sort of aversion to chemistry but could handle baking easily enough.
This approach never got me anywhere even though I kept trying to make the problems more intuitive. In the end it hit me that the people having problems with the chemistry problems also couldn’t solve problems like “let’s say you want 50% more cupcakes, you have three more eggs and four more cups of wheat—can you do it?” The problem was never the chemistry, it was always that the basic math needed to solve the problems was genuinely hard for a lot of seemingly non-stupid people.
Back in high school I used to help my fellow students with chemistry problems. I noticed that many of them seemed to have a lot of trouble with what I thought were really easy problems. I noticed that many of the chemistry problems had obvious analogues in everyday tasks like baking cakes. I kept trying to reframe chemistry problems as baking problems, expecting that this would make everything easier. I thought my fellow students had some sort of aversion to chemistry but could handle baking easily enough.
This approach never got me anywhere even though I kept trying to make the problems more intuitive. In the end it hit me that the people having problems with the chemistry problems also couldn’t solve problems like “let’s say you want 50% more cupcakes, you have three more eggs and four more cups of wheat—can you do it?” The problem was never the chemistry, it was always that the basic math needed to solve the problems was genuinely hard for a lot of seemingly non-stupid people.