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E.g., for an extreme (but real) example, “I don’t like animation.” But more common examples — well, Dave Lartigue on his blog sometimes makes fun of people trying to get others to try e.g. board games or comic books or anime, with attitude of “They said they don’t like it, why don’t you just listen to them?” The problem is that it barely seems like a coherent category to dislike in the first place! Comic books are just another medium. Board games — well, lots of people aren’t into games, but if you’ll play [certain sorts of] video games but not [similar sorts of] board games, that seems off. Anime is just animation from Japan — OK, yes, it has its own set of tropes and conventions, but that’s not really a huge obstacle.

Now, to continue with the above examples, I, for one, have no particular interest in comic books or anime (don’t think I’ve read/watched any in… a long time), and I certainly make no claim that anyone else should be particularly interested in e.g. board games (hell I barely qualify as “particularly intersted” in those either). And from what I hear, most comic books really are terrible! (And apparently so is comic-book fandom.) But that doesn’t mean I would reject something because it’s in comic-book form, any more than I would because it’s animated. That would just be unreasonable.

Now, OK, medium certainly does have a real effect — movies and books are quite different in what they can show! — and so it’s quite possible that someone might have a reason for disliking a particular medium but fail to articulate it; maybe a person says “I don’t like TV shows” when what’s really going on is that they don’t like serial fiction. (Or even, they don’t really like motion pictures, they don’t really like serial fiction, so in combination they find it awful.) But, I don’t know, people… should be clearer and say that? (Since that isn’t strictly speaking specific to the device that is the television.) I don’t know. I don’t really have an answer to that.

(There is also the problem of people saying “I don’t like X” when they actually mean “I don’t like X as it currently exists” or “I don’t like existing implementations of X” or “I don’t like most X that currently exists” etc., but that seems to be more of a problem in e.g. political discussions. Similarly there’s saying “I don’t like X” when they really seem to mean “I don’t like the community that exists around X”, which seems to be more relevant here; and though it’s in a different context, I’ve noticed Stephen Bond seems to make this mistake a bunch — or rather, a similar one, namely using the latter to infer the former.)

Math, on the other hand, seems to be a pretty coherent category, or at least mostly, anyway.

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This makes inability not alone a personal misfortune but a national disgrace bordering on a crime. And nobody seems to believe that some people just do not have the gift.

That kind of sentiment (and I agree it exists) certainly goes too far in its respective direction. However, it is also important not to go too far in the other direction. Sometimes, people really will do better at something by believing it’s possible to learn it by practicing harder, instead of believing that it’s just a matter of having the gift.

Example: The Trouble with Bright Girls

She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls’ IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

…

Researchers have uncovered the reason for this difference in how difficulty is interpreted, and it is simply this: More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

(Preemptive clarification: I’m not trying to make a point about gender here, even though the example involves it.)

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I think dyslexia has the same or similar with words/letters. So maybe your Java friend could ‘see’ symbols better than ‘seeing’ numbers as numbers?

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Eh, did you ever hear of the mathematician and the engineer who were put in an enormous room with a beautiful woman? They were told that every ten minutes, they could close half the difference between her. So, every ten minutes, the engineer moved. After a few times, the mathematician shouted at him, “Don’t you realize you’ll never reach her?”

The engineer shouted back, “Don’t you realize that I can get close enough for all practical purposes?”

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Logic and discrete math are another direction to go in, and there’s been some push in that direction as support for computer science, but the results haven’t been great as far as I can tell.

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