[skybrian]

I think this has to do with tolerance for being stuck, and that varies depending on how rewarded you think you’ll be for figuring it out and getting unstuck.

Real science and math involves getting stuck on problems, perhaps for weeks, months, or years. I guess we should be happy that there are people who can tolerate being stuck.

My tolerance for getting stuck on a mere game has dropped dramatically since I was a kid; many of the games we played then are unplayable by modern standards. You had to draw maps and take notes, yourself, rather than the computer remembering things for you.

But text adventures back then sometimes weren’t meant to be played alone. The game might be single-player but it was a group activity for college students where you’d share ideas. The modern equivalent might be games where you’re expected to search the web to find recipes and strategies for things.

[mckirk]

Yep, we aren't exactly being conditioned towards higher frustration tolerance nowadays... I don't think I could still deal with a PC without an SSD.

I think there are different kinds of being-stuck, though. With many problems in science, there's at least things you can try to gather more data. So you're stuck, but you can come up with new experiments to get new insights into the problem. Here, you're only given the one set of examples and have to make do. I guess you could still see the process of generating hypothesis and testing them against the examples as a sort of "experiment", but it still feels a lot "stuckier" if you don't get anywhere with it.