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Again this? It's been run up and down on Twitter. Effectively: a maths education is a great IQ test. If I was hiring a press agent, I'd still ask math question

Again this? It's been run up and down on Twitter. Effectively: a maths education is a great IQ test. If I was hiring a press agent, I'd still ask math questions. E: "I think this is great. I was always interested in computers as a kid but was awful in math." When I was a kid I was intermittently good and bad at maths, and hit a low point in high school trigonometry. Different teachers, different styles. I still "grew up" with college calculus, and ended up taking even graduate-level courses in mathematics. (Not without spending a year or so in film school thinking arts were right for me because I wasn't 'mathy') We need to do away with this widespread notion that some people are good at maths and some have other talents. That's just mathematical anxiety, poor organization (I was bad at high school linear algebra because I couldn't line up my matrices right on paper) and some level of license already being given to people to suck at this. We don't tell people they can be bad at talking. Kids who can't talk to strangers or have bad praxis are taken to psychiatry. As a civilization, we need to suck it up with mathematics. As long as we tell sociologists that they don't need to know maths, we're gonna end up with bad theories of society that don't understand nonlinear dynamics, as much as mathematicians scream about catastrophe theory. And then there's this: programmers who can't grok some two years of college maths are just going to suck constantly. How many complex "language problems" resolve into constraint linear programming, FFS?

throwaway1z7d 12y ago
> We don't tell people they can be bad at talking. The brain evolved to communicate effectively with others. It did not evolve to manipulate symbols in a logical way. We can do it (some of us rather well) since the brain is still quite flexible. But it may account for the difference.
- thanatropism 12y ago
  Then there's the Molière character I can't remember from Candide who says the nose evolved so we can rest our eyeglasses.
  - throwaway1z7d 12y ago
    That's funny, but if your serious then your response does not make much sense here. My point is: Language came early in human development and to humans everywhere, without exception. Indeed the need to communicate may have been one of the main selectors justifying the cost (Brains are expensive to run). But many tribes are ok without maths and it has been around for just about three millennia and so could not possibly have had much influence on brain development.
  - thesteamboat 12y ago
    I think you mean Pangloss, who was a parody of Leibniz in Candide who was written by Voltaire. [0] Is there some connection to Molière that I was unaware of, or was that just a brain fart? [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Cri...
    - thanatropism 12y ago
      I meant Voltaire. I'm an idiot.
- cheery 12y ago
  Why so many people are so crap at talking then?
mamcx 12y ago
> We don't tell people they can be bad at talking. Of curse, we do. People is terrible at talking in public, for example. And a lot of people have serious issues talking with others (like the opposite sex). In fact, problems in human communication are far more serious and widespread than problems in math. The problem in how teach and learn math is a subset of it: If we have problems with math, is the failure in how the subject is talked among us.
- mcguire 12y ago
  If you were as defined by being bad at speaking as some people are by being bad at math, you would starve to death because you couldn't pay your bill at the grocery store.

throwaway1z7d 12y ago

> We don't tell people they can be bad at talking. The brain evolved to communicate effectively with others. It did not evolve to manipulate symbols in a logical way. We can do it (some of us rather well) since the brain is still quite flexible. But it may account for the difference.

thanatropism 12y ago
Then there's the Molière character I can't remember from Candide who says the nose evolved so we can rest our eyeglasses.
- throwaway1z7d 12y ago
  That's funny, but if your serious then your response does not make much sense here. My point is: Language came early in human development and to humans everywhere, without exception. Indeed the need to communicate may have been one of the main selectors justifying the cost (Brains are expensive to run). But many tribes are ok without maths and it has been around for just about three millennia and so could not possibly have had much influence on brain development.
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  I think you mean Pangloss, who was a parody of Leibniz in Candide who was written by Voltaire. [0] Is there some connection to Molière that I was unaware of, or was that just a brain fart? [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Cri...
  - thanatropism 12y ago
    I meant Voltaire. I'm an idiot.
cheery 12y ago
Why so many people are so crap at talking then?

mamcx 12y ago

> We don't tell people they can be bad at talking. Of curse, we do. People is terrible at talking in public, for example. And a lot of people have serious issues talking with others (like the opposite sex). In fact, problems in human communication are far more serious and widespread than problems in math. The problem in how teach and learn math is a subset of it: If we have problems with math, is the failure in how the subject is talked among us.

mcguire 12y ago
If you were as defined by being bad at speaking as some people are by being bad at math, you would starve to death because you couldn't pay your bill at the grocery store.