Jobs: It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never g... See more

The machinery for learning new things becomes creaky. It’s not easy or comfortable to get that old mainframe up and running again. So many things in life are not easy or comfortable already! Why opt in to another one? And do I even have room in my brain, on my calendar, for another thing that I do ?

Haskell suggests that a major reason is that transfer tends to be harder when our knowledge is more limited. As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned. However, I’d like to add my own hypothesis as an explanation for the transfer problem: m

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