A lot of people have math phobia which is a kind of learned helplessness about math. They tune out of conversations involving math because their instinctive belief is they can't do it. They find discussions of math upsetting. I'm used to dealing with this as an educator.

I look at math phobia through a stimulus-response framework. People learn math phobia by being exposed to math while also experiencing negative feelings at the same time. So logically, they come to associate math with bad feelings.

My approach to combating math phobia is expose people to math in the context of positive feelings. For me, this means jokes and memes and my general positive attitude to the subject. That way they associate math with feeling good.

This approach has disadvantages. For instance, it's not the most efficient way to teach but I think it makes it more likely in the long run that a person would learn more math because hopefully they don't have all this negative stuff going on inside as soon as they see formulas.

I know that for a lot of us who've studied advanced math, a few good childhood experiences can create a passion that lasts a lifetime. Ask almost anybody in a technical field who really likes their job and they'll tell a story about a positive experience that got them started.

So far so good. Now, one thing I've noticed is there's another kind of math phobic person who's very common online. This person thinks they understand math very well even though they actually have a very low level understanding of it.

They associate their assumed mastery of math with a deep sense of personal competence. Teaching this group of people new math causes them to experience math phobia as well. But unlike regular math phobics who get scared, these math phobics get angry. Really, really angry.

They don't understand the math that you're teaching them but that doesn't make sense to them because in their minds, they're very competent at math. The only thing that makes sense to them is that you're a liar whose goal in life is to make people feel like they're bad at math.

Logically, it doesn't make sense. Why would anybody chose to be a liar about math? It has to be the least interesting thing a person could lie about. I think for them it makes me, the liar, seem even more perverse and bizarre because "What kind of sicko would even do that!?".

When I first encountered this, it was very puzzling. It's not a very common population of people I've met in my years of teaching and tutoring math but I realized I do encounter it sometimes when somebody trained in one kind of mathematical culture takes a class in another.

In my personal life, I've seen it when economics majors take classes in the school of public health where I'm a teaching assistant. We use the programming language R. They want to use Stata. We tell them they must do statistics our way to pass the class. They get very frustrated.

It makes sense because in a way they are being gaslighted. In our world, they're wrong but in their world, they're very good students. I find that the best economics students get the most frustrated because they've more deeply internalized the conventions of their field.

I don't have an answer to all this. This is just a phenomena I'm noticing and trying to understand. Perhaps you've been on one side or the other of this situation. It seems to be an important issue that adds to the challenge of teaching the public about technical topics!