To finish, a fun question: is there some way to improve still further on arabic numerals? I believe the answer is almost certainly yes! But that's a thread for another day.
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2/ i.e. I only have to learn 3 symbols, rather than 10 of them, and the symbols (kind of) relate to each other. I = 1. Crossed Is = 10. Half of X is V.
Very true. Another example in this vein: @andy_matuschak has pointed out to me (and I vaguely recall from childhood) how complex & hard to learn children often find the place-number concept. @farrarscott made the same point above.
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I like Engelbart's parable of the tricycle versus the bicycle: the tricycle is much easier to learn, but eventually most of us want to learn the bicycle. On the other hand, there's only so much time to invest in tool-learning.
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A fun problem - maybe a nice essay - would be to figure out how to make those tradeoffs. It's a kind of multi-arm bandit, exploration-exploitation problem, with highly uncertain payoffs. Nice problem!
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