I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I ag

I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I agree with other posts emphasizing that early life nature/nurture experiences can have a strong effect, but learning and doing math and science gives you the ability to acquire mental models and thought patterns honed over many generations of top minds of humanity. It's one thing to be "street smart", raw IQ + grit + right attitude, and it's another thing altogether to be able to distill systems, structures, and predictable interactions in an otherwise chaotic observed reality. To me the latter is what determines quality of thought. Anecdotally, I've met people who were far smarter than me on the raw intelligence scale, but haven't gone the math/science route, and you can just feel how poor their toolkit is for modeling different aspects of everyday reality. A very crude analogy would be the hardware you have and the OS and software you're running on it: studying STEM subjects is akin to installing useful software, developed by generations of brilliant engineers that you wouldn't be able to reproduce on your own in 100 lifetimes.