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Intellectual Lazyness Posted on August 22, 2011 by Vadim Kulikov My friend gives private mathematics lessons to young pupils, mostly high school students who need some help in their curriculum math. Here is a story about a student of him. My friend asks him: how much is 5+6? The guy looks at the roof, then back at my friend and says: “umm..13.” My friend encourages him to think a bit more and the guy looks around and says “umm..10? no! 11! NO! 12?”. The guy was around 14 years old (going to the 8th grade in the Finnish educational system). What was a possible reason for this behavior? The guy didn’t know what + means? He didn’t know what 5 means? He was joking? He has ADHD? (I guessed the latter two when I heard about this; my friend was sure the student wasn’t joking.) No, dear reader, none of the above was the reason. Later, after my friend made cautious warnings to the pupil about his future and learning success, the student started to strive for his goals and a miracle happened: after some time he had no problem solving much more advanced mathematical problems than 5+6. In the beginning the student was lazy to think. Not only was the student Lazy. We all are to some extent. I do recall incidents from my own postgraduate mathematical studies, in which, I confess, I behaved in an analogous manner. Imagine that you are reading a blog post and the writer asks you to visualize the curve which is parameterized by How likely are you to continue reading without actually putting any effort at visualizing the curve? If I then state that the curve is compact, how much effort do you put at checking it? If you are told that Google reads all the data from your hard drive when you are logged in, do you accept this (or postpone judgment) without giving a thought to whether this statement is rid