Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking

Agree. I’ve been trying to learn ML and data for a few years now and, around 2021 I guess, realised Maths was the real block.

I’ve tried a bunch of courses (MIT linalg, Coursera ICL Maths for ML, Khan etc etc) but what I eventually realised is my foundations were so, so weak being mid 30s and having essentially stopped learning in HS (apart from a business stats paper at Uni).

Enter a post on reddit about Mathacademy (https://www.mathacademy.com/). It’s truly incredible. I’m doing around 60-90 minutes a day and properly understanding and developing an intuition for things. They’ve got 3 pre-uni courses and I’ve now nearly finished the first one. It’s truly a revelation to be able to intuit and solve even simple problems and, having skipped ahead so far in my previous study, see fuzzy links to what’s coming.

Cannot recommend it enough. I’m serious about enrolling in a Dip Grad once I’ve finished the Uni level stuff. Maybe even into an MA eventually.

Too often people think of learning as accumulating knowledge and believe blockers are about not enough knowledge stored.

That would be like strength training by carrying stuff home and believing that the point is to have a lot of stuff at home.

Intelligence is about being able to frame and analyze things on the fly and that ability comes from framing and analyzing lots of different things, not from memorizing the results of past (or common forms of) analysis.