<p>Well in your post you reported they called the content ‘pointless,’ which certainly suggests a difference in interest or motivation. I’ve said repeatedly that this is often the case, and makes observation on this subject matter very, very tricky.</p>
<p>However, given top students, it becomes a lot more clear. I also attend a top school, and I know plenty of students accepted to graduate programs at Harvard, for example. The ones attending for physics or mathematics, they write beautifully. I mean, as I said before, it’s practically a prerequisite of excelling in their fields to be able to write well and use many of the skills that are taught primarily in the humanities. Yet the ones I know who are attending Harvard for english or law, for example, struggled mightily in their natural science courses, and I can’t imagine them at all succeeding in upper-level science courses.</p>
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<p>So you decide to counter a generalization of anecdotes with a singular anecdote.</p>
<p>by “could” do you mean “do you possess the intellectual capacity” or do you mean “if i asked you to do it right now, would you be able to?” because if it’s the second, then of course someone untrained in math or physics couldn’t just whip up some research in either of those fields. knowledge about linguistics might be more accessible to the mathematician than vice versa, but so what? should we just force everyone to major in physics and math?
if it’s the first, then you’re implying that people who tend to be drawn toward the humanities are somehow innately less intelligent, which i feel is an unfounded assumption. i think the most important point here is that the question of which is more “valuable” or even which is located higher on your hierarchy between a liberal arts education and an education in mathematics/science depends totally on your worldview and isn’t something that can be answered with debate on an internet forum.</p>
<p>Except I don’t care to. So I won’t. See how it works? ;)</p>
<p>I despise proofs, in any case, and being able to write proofs isn’t what I’d call immediately applicable to my major (unlike statistics). That doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t write them. I just don’t want to.</p>
<p>For instance, you might not want to memorize hundreds of wedge-shaped signs in order to learn a language. That doesn’t mean you can’t. It just means you don’t care for it.</p>
<p>None of this has to do with intelligence. It’s about hard work and perseverance, basically.</p>
<p>I’m sure math majors would be confident in their ability to memorize wedge signs.</p>
<p>Are you confident in your ability to write proofs at a high level? Are you really?</p>
<p>Actually, this doesn’t really matter, because whereas the math majors would have ample experience memorizing tedious things, and hence his confidence would be justifiable, you probably have no idea what it’s like to write an advanced math proof.</p>
<p>Actually 90% of the work in being a math major is reading a text and understanding it precisely. Of course that’s a little different from literary analysis…</p>
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<p>No, mathematicians scoff at quantitative evidence.</p>
<p>I can seriously imagine one of my professors mentioning “quantitative evidence” and the whole class bursting into laughter.</p>
<p>Yup. Given enough time, practice, and explanation, sure.</p>
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<p>Actually, this doesn’t really matter, because whereas Assyriologists would have ample experience memorizing tedious things, and hence their confidence would be justifiable, you probably have no idea what it’s like to analyze the linguistic backgrounds of languages such as Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite, amongst others. :)</p>
<p>Dressing up the content in their fancy historical names doesn’t negate the fact that they’re wedge-shaped sign languages. Dude, you said so yourself. Dude!!</p>
<p>“Dude,” are you seriously asserting that most math majors could sit down in front of a text written in Assyrian and understand it? Because that is patently ludicrous.</p>
<p>I’m betting I couldn’t do high-level work in your major without going back and taking all those courses. I’m also betting you couldn’t do my job without going back and doing the courses and gaining the experience I have. So, how does any of this prove whose major is “higher?”</p>
<p>do people educated in mathematics and the natural sciences have the intellectual capacity to do humanities-related work? - probably, but we can’t prove this because all we could ever have is anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>do people educated in the humanities have the intellectual capacity to do natural science/mathematics-related work? - probably, but we can’t prove this because all we could ever have is anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>your beliefs on value not regarded, physicists aren’t currently doing research about the dying Ainu language, but why should they? they’re physicists. linguists aren’t researching the Higgs boson, but why should they be? they’re linguists. it doesn’t matter if one person “can” do another person’s job - if they’re not currently doing it, then who cares? unless you’re arguing that ALL people should receive an intensive math/science based education whether they want it or not so that they can go on to study sociology, literature, etc.</p>
<p>Now, now, settle down. Are you actually implying whatever skills or intelligences you access in doing analysis of languages is less familiar to the average person than the competences needed for writing advanced proofs?</p>
<p>Fun fact which I believe to be true: Take the hardest first year class from any Arts/Business major and it is automatically the easiest course you can take in first year engineering.</p>
<p>Okay, well, to be fair, I admit I think it’s somewhat unfair that math/science majors are forced to take intensive humanities courses at my university (no AP credits given), whereas the humanities/social science majors can take joke biology/physics/math classes to fill out the math/phy sci core (which we additionally do get AP credits for).</p>
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<p>Not less familiar, per se. Maybe on the same level of familiarity. It’s just something you learn.</p>
<p>If you want another example: My brother’s currently a biochemistry major. He’s abysmal at math. He barely scraped by with a B- in AP Statistics. He failed AP Chemistry in high school (both the class and the exam, and he had a genuinely good teacher for the subject). And yet, he’s powering through physical chemistry right now and doing quite well and working on research at the moment. No disrespect to him, but if he can go that far and achieve so much in the space of three years, then … you see why I’m a little skeptical about people saying there’s an intelligence threshold.</p>
<p>My biomed engineering friend I mentioned earlier (not an international student, by the way) and I have similar brains and operate on the same level of thinking. If she can major in biomed engineering and succeed (which she’s doing at the moment), I’m sure I can as well. I know both her and her capabilities. I know that my capabilities run parallel to hers for the most part, except my writing and quantitative skills slightly exceed hers. (She is, ironically enough, better at picking up languages than I am. Ah, well.)</p>
<p>Let me put it this way. Being a generally educated person, I believe I can envisage doing the work of analyzing an ancient language, the content of which may be unfamiliar, but the core intellectual components of which are not completely foreign to my everyday life or my general studies.</p>
<p>Yet your characterization of writing proofs as being dependent largely on time, practice, and explanation supports my belief that a writing proof is very disconnected from the lives of those who haven’t done it. Not because time, practice, and explanation are not essential ingredients, but because if those are as specific as you can get, then you don’t have a very good grasp. In fact I don’t have a very good grasp either, but I can recognize when someone else also doesn’t.</p>
<p>This above is an issue of familiarity, which affects whether we can make confident predictions of our ability to do well in a field without actually entering it. This is separate from whether there’s an intelligence threshold for any of these fields.</p>
<p>On the issue of intelligence thresholds, see the link I posted earlier in the thread. It’s been studied, and there appears to be a threshold for physics and math. There is nothing of the sort for the softer majors. Yet a threshold is not the only relationship a major can have with intelligence. On a related note, such majors as english and sociology appear to correlate less well with SAT scores, which implies that they are less cognitively loaded than other subjects.</p>
<p>Time, practice, and explanation are also required in learning Akkadian. And most other languages, actually. (And this is without getting into the cultural context of an ancient language, which you can’t say isn’t disconnected from the lives of those who haven’t lived in the time period.)</p>
<p>Also, being a generally educated person, I believe I can do the work of a mathematician, if I were so inclined. Also, ornithology, astrophysics, physics, anthropology, and a number of other fields that I’m interested in to a lesser degree than Assyriology.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that the SAT is an accurate measure of intelligence, for my part, especially since it can be gamed very easily.</p>