bobthereddituser

Yes - you've already done the first step: recognizing your weakness.

Now, if you truly want it to not be a weakness, attack it.

Take math classes and don't quit. Work with your professors/teachers every day after class if you have to. Get tutors. Use Khan Academy. Try to get into MIT, Caltech or Harvey Mudd. Even if you don't make it, you'll be miles ahead of where you are now.

If you aim for the stars and miss, you'll still hit the moon. How's that for a cheesy apropos?

Also, since you are already good at science, keep working on that. You'll soon find how math and science start intermixing and complementing the other. You may just find your talent with science is a bonus in math!

EDIT: PM me with any specifics you think you want to talk about!

Is Alton Brown a Doctor Who fan?

What is your opinion on the Paleo movement? I think Alton Brown Paleo recipes would be better than manna from heaven...

There's nothing wrong or wacko about wanting to smoke pot rather than drink booze. For god's sake, most drug users are no different than most social drinkers. And increasingly, a majority of Americans agree that pot should be treated similarly to wine, beer, and alcohol.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I fully agree with this. I was just trying to point out that for people who were raised in a "just say no" environment and think that drugs are the root of all crime and evil in the country, trying to discuss how the drug war has lead to organized crime, reduced liberties, and is fundamentally no different than alcohol or tobacco consumption - to these people libertarians seem like a group that simply can't be taken seriously, despite how rational or logical the concepts of these ideas are.

Just as you pointed out, the free market is better at doing lots of things - but for someone to understand this, they need to learn the basics of economics and markets, free association, voluntarism, etc. The opposing side has the advantage of being ingrained as the "way things are done" in the culture, as well as being fully intuitive - even if they aren't necessarily right. It is much easier to think "there are poor people, the government is powerful, therefore the government should help them," than it is to realize that poverty is a multi-factorial problem, and much of these problems are caused by governmental policies in the first place.

That's what I mean when I ask how to help introduce libertarian principles to those who are unfamiliar with them.

Hi!

With a gold standard, people can grasp onto the idea that there is something of value behind the currency. This evolved into our current fiat system where the full faith and credit of the respective government is "backing" the currency - and thus people think there is value to the currency.

Since a currency is only valuable as a currency when people agree on its value as a medium of exchange, do you think that bitcoin will have a more difficult time facing acceptance and therefore widespread use as a result of the technological basis of its value? After all, not everyone can intuitively grasp the value of something that seems like using computers to solve math problems that are set up to be difficult to solve...