It seems to be our fate to enter this world with lousy quantitative instincts, as if Adam had miscounted the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge and forced all of us to suffer for his arithmetic sin.
— from Derrick Niederman and David Boyum, What the Numbers Say.
Who is this “Adam?”
lousy compared to what?
For a species of ape that didn’t evolve in an enviroment which demanded the regular use of algebra, I think we do remarkably well at math. Remember, humans doing math are like the dancing bear: It’s not that we do it well, it’s that we do it at all.
I agree with the comments above. It always makes me uncomfortable when human cognitive abilities are stigmatized. As O’Hare says, compared to what? We need to start by trying to understand what the system is trying to do, what performance it’s trying to optimize, and what constraints and trade-offs it’s operating under before we evaluate how well it’s doing.