User blog comment:Edwin Shade/The Grand List Of Transfinite Ordinals/@comment-30754445-20171130012046/@comment-32876686-20171130042545

I'm honestly not very sure.

Well, actually, if I'm to be completely honest I just made this list so that I could feel more accomplished, because a few weeks ago I was uploading a blog post every day, and it just felt more 'complete' and 'right'. Now that I've stopped that for a few days I feel unaccomplished and I want to post something that's worth other people's time, but I don't have the experience needed to write the blog posts I really admire and that I'd like to be able to write someday, specifically ones with original discoveries or extremely powerful yet elegant notations. (Or anything to do with Turing machines.)

Saibian's written a substantial amount of text on Googology, Bowers is known for being one of the 'founding fathers' of the subject, you have made a letter notation, and others have done their own unique things, but I have yet to innovate something that I'll be well-known for. I don't know how long it will take me to understand some of the concepts on this Wiki, but it feels there's a sharply defined strata of really knowledgeable experts and then people who are just average here, and when I try to start at some fundamental place I feel is simple enough to understand the rug gets pulled out from under me and I get faced with more concepts.

For instance, I thought algebra and basic mathematics was the simplest layer of mathematics there was until I read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and began to understand what it was like to use formal systems for the first time, (which was also how I understood the SKI calculus well after reading the book). This was a few weeks ago, but I still couldn't explain very well Gödel's proof if asked, which is something a lot of people seem to be able to know by heart.

If the question is not annoying, I'd like to know, what is the average time required for a person to learn all this stuff about formal systems and Infinite Collapsing Functions, and so forth ? Because I've been trying to learn about all of that but I think I'm a bit slow when it comes to that.

(I'll try to make this list so that I carefully explain intuitively to the layperson each and every ordinal then.)