Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?

Do you wake up in the morning and are reminded of constants and theorems in everyday things and laugh empathetically with donuts as you recognize your shared absurd topological homology, or go to the office and automatically recognize what's possible and not from its implied complexity class in office conversations? Are you checking Bayesian priors in your interpretation of the news or other risk?

This is only half kidding, as I also identify as useless at math, but I think its words and concepts can be very funny, and I wondered what someone who actually knew this stuff might think about. It begs the question of what one is actually doing when they are doing math as well. Are you reasoning with abstract and quantitative models, are you writing papers and proofs of new ideas, or are you encoding a narrative dynamic into a symbolically defined logical relationship? Maybe you're just being recognized as a peer by the community of people who recognize each other as good at it?

When I learned music again later in life, I found I appreciated the same things, but with better intuition and words for articulating and reproducing them. Working musicians have a trade where it's expected they can show up and perform in a group based on sight reading of the notation, same as a programmer.

All this is to say, I see a lot of these "I can't math / how do I math" threads and am always interested in them, but maybe we should start with, "how does anyone math" first. So, how do you math?

To me, it looks like the rest of your comment, wherein you casually mention constants, theorems, topological homology and other concepts that don't even come to mind for many people who self-identify as being bad at maths (as I do).

I have a BA in math and I think the most-useful mathematics for everyone is probability (math theory and basic calculations). This is because you'll be better able to deal with (quantify) uncertainty. The concept to aim for is (learn enough so you can understand and use) expected value calculations - which are, I think, the foundation of rational decision making under uncertainty.