Moonbase

Chris Neukirchen writes a very good article about abstraction, its importance, and the ways in which education can and can’t address its development as a skill.

Being able to abstract is the most important thing, because it multiplies our brain power. Alexandre Borovik writes in the draft for Mathematics under the Microscope:

In our conscious and totally controlled reasoning we can process about 16 bits per second. In activities related to mathematics this miserable bit rate is further reduced to 12 bits per second in addition of decimal numbers and to 3 bits in counting individual objects.

It is completely obvious that we need to fit big ideas into these few bits to be successful thinkers, by omitting what’s irrelevant.