L
ots of people aren't "math people", which is perfectly fine. The abstraction and habits of thought required to be good at math are hard to come by, and most people are pretty aware of their limitations in this regard. Sometimes, however, you come across people who think they are "math people", but, in fact, are not. These are strange beasts. Usually, they are intellectually gifted in some area, and have assumed that their intellect transfers over to math fairly easily. Probably, they have not spent a lot of time around "math people", but think "mathy thoughts" a lot, and have scored into their minds half-functioning abstraction habits that seem like they work, provided the answers they seek are suitably non-obvious.
There's a philosophy blogger I follow who is like this. He can lay out Aristotelian philosophy with great alacrity, and has very illuminating things to say about theology; his examples and metaphors are original and striking. But if this man gets within ten feet of a math problem, he immediately starts sounding like a second-rate intellectual iconoclast. He just bumbles his way around his thought experiment setups, and his numerical manipulations verge on meaninglessness, and it saddens me to see it.
This also happened years ago with a Dungeons and Dragons blogger I used to follow. He would frequently post about the financial system simulator he had built for his game, that allowed him to have variable prices depending on which part of the world you were in. He made a post about how to build it yourself, for your own game. It was a complex process, but I diligently followed it through to the end, making grand excel spreadsheets with the promise of verisimilitude held out at the end. But something was strange -- the outputs I was getting were very clearly not dynamic, the way they were intended. I started to break down the simulation process, and found that it was hopelessly muddled, functions being sent into their own inverses, and a scattered chain of logic connecting them, until by the end of the excel links, all of the dynamic variables "canceled out" -- it was a rube goldberg machine in which you got out exactly what you put in. I emailed the blogger about it, and he told me that he had found similar problems, and had to graft in an extra function at the end to get the results he wanted; but this extra function played no part of his tutorial, and I could tell that even it was ill-suited for the job he needed it for.
I had thought this man was a genius for years, but for all his intelligence in other areas, he just didn't have the clarifying mind required to actually see what he was doing. WIth trial and error, he had managed to jury rig a functioning system together, but it was an inefficient, teetering mess. It was quite the blow to me when I realized this, and I stopped reading his blog not long after.