If surgery didn't involve risk to patients, you could probably teach quite a lot of surgery to almost anyone. They might not be as able to improvise in rare sce

If surgery didn't involve risk to patients, you could probably teach quite a lot of surgery to almost anyone. They might not be as able to improvise in rare scenarios, but the could probably remove appendixes pretty successfully. Some knowledge is inherently linear. Hard to teach multiplication to someone that can't add. Some aren't and a lot are grey areas where prior knowledge isn't absolutely necessary, but it's a big advantage. For example you can teach a lot of statistics without teaching the way things are calculated, but doing the sums with pen and paper will give you a better understanding. A confidence interval has a meaning that can be explained using words to someone without the mathematical skills to be able to calculate it. So is a statistical distribution. Is it better to know who to calculate the probability distribution with a pen and paper? Yes and in some interesting cases, it's very important. That doesn't mean that a lot of useful statistics can't be taught to people who will take shortcuts using software. Knowledge keeps growing like a tree with thickening branches and sprouting branches of their own. We can't tell new people where the last generation started. In the world of increasingly specialized knowledge and the culture of lifelong learning that I hope is evolving, its important to find ways of dropping people into the middle of fields. AI for not mathematicians seems doable.