> I get especially mad when people suggest that there are some ideas that are just special, that only special people can get. I think this is an important poin

> I get especially mad when people suggest that there are some ideas that are just special, that only special people can get. I think this is an important point. After working with concepts in enough domains you start to see they are all made up of the same kinds of things; when it seems like they aren't, you're likely missing some implicitly used concepts that you don't even know you're missing which makes learning this new thing seem fundamentally more difficult than other things. The way I think about why this would be (or would not be) is: are all concepts reducible to some small set of basic entities—i.e. are they all built up from some shared concept 'atoms'? Now, I don't have a way of giving a definite answer to that, just my experience asking this question over and over again while picking up new concepts, and my experience so far puts me in favor of these 'atoms.' For instance, are there any concepts that can't be broken down into sets of 'types' and 'relations' between the types? (or something along those lines) Could there be more significant barriers to people learning new concepts than limits to their intelligence? I've taught programming to a lot of people, and it's easy to see where they get caught up: they're doing fine, making progress, happy, excited, a little nervous; they make minor mistakes but quickly see their errors and it doesn't worry them too much. Then, they run into some difficulty that puts the question in their mind of whether they can really do this or not and you can observe their agitation increase. Typically they want to go do something else pretty soon after. If they are especially persistent they will face this scary situation and go back into it the next day—but more often they'll feel guilty about not going back to it for a long period, maybe do it once or twice after without much enjoyment or progress, and ultimately, quietly drop it. What I have never seen is someone run into a wall with some concept, persistently revisit it and work earnestly to understand, and yet still fail. That's what they fear will happen (maybe an evolved feature to prevent spending too much time on theories that are going to dead-end?), but it doesn't.