You don’t have to have ‘bad math skills’ to do things like that; I think even many beginning mathematics students fall into the trap of rushing to answer a give

You don’t have to have ‘bad math skills’ to do things like that; I think even many beginning mathematics students fall into the trap of rushing to answer a given question before they’ve fully contemplated it. It’s sort of where gradient descent goes wrong. You repeatedly move your solution in direction that makes it slightly better, until eventually it gets to where you want. But if you’d taken a moment to calm down and survey the landscape properly before making your initial move you wouldn’t have got stuck in a local minimum (or a weird, but valid, solution like this one).