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Being more charitable, you could argue fractions are complicated - you're essentially passing someone a function, rather than the result. You could argue that

Being more charitable, you could argue fractions are complicated - you're essentially passing someone a function, rather than the result. You could argue that of any number system, but if you can count to ten and understand "more left of decimal point = bigger, more right = smaller" then most comparisons in numerals are easy. 0.25 vs 0.33, 1/4 vs 1/3. We are, I believe, the only animals able to comprehend either, especially in conjunction with units of measurement. Side note, but one of my favourite gotchas is in optimisation - say for a race car, where we want to minimise time (for a constant distance), rather than maximise speed. Strictly speaking, they're equivalent, but people doing the latter almost always end up focusing on top speed, and overlooking the time lost going slowly.

pantaloony 6y ago
Oh, I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I think it’s a sign of 1) how legitimately hard “basic” math stuff is for a lot of people, and yeah, fractions seem to be the earliest point at which a lot of (even actually, truly smart!) people stop really “getting it”, 2) people not getting why they should care, and never being sufficiently motivated to care—frankly a lot of math comes off not just as pointless, but like mathematicians are trolling the mere normals, as commonly presented, and 3) “math people” largely not getting that math beyond basic arithmetic actually doesn’t matter very much for a huge portion of jobs and lives, and that they’re failing as a field to communicate the ways in which it could. You might guess from the above that I’m pretty firmly in the camp that thinks “k-12 math just isn’t mathy enough and that’s why it’s bad” is dangerously wrong. You’d be right about that.