I was reading Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan on my balcony, in the few hours of direct sunlight I can enjoy,

and found myself repeatedly baffled by his mathematical/statistical explanations. To be fair, Taleb provides warning notes like “the non-mathematical reader can skip to the end of this section”, however he also strives to make it explicable enough to the layman.

Each time my brain came up short, I read on with disengaged gears for a while, then realised I hadn’t taken anything in, and paused. I then went back and re-read, to identify and analyse my mental breaking point. It was always a term that Taleb hadn’t defined and a layman couldn’t possible figure out from the context. I realised I couldn’t make head nor tails of it and just read on to the next patch of firm ground.

I would estimate my IQ as firmly midwit, i.e. about 105-110. I have neither aptitude for, nor interest in, logic or mathematics or abstractions. My cognitive resources are definitely limited, in relation to my ambitions & interests; however, I often outperform people who are clearly smarter than me, I think because of some ingrained habits of thought & study: one of which is, when perplexed, to ask Why don’t I understand? What don’t I understand?

There is a great difference between casting the book aside, and analysing the specific point of difficulty. For example, with Plato my problem is broader, more general: I just don’t get his point, as often there is no point, just Socrates babbling and leering about wisdom at some adolescent boy, and the reader is supposed to be positively struck by it all. With Taleb, it’s always just a question of terminology.

I would recommend the exercise of questioning one’s own cognitive limits: for one thing, instead of feeling utterly retarded, one can identify a specific difficulty; and for another, it most likely sharpens whatever intellect one has.