/lit/ - Literature

>>20595561
This is wrong though because a lot of the folks in philosophy of x subject already got their PhDs in said subject. For example, quantum foundations is full of people who were very successful in physics and could obviously do the math to get into and through top physics programs, and then turned to philosophy.

On the flip side, people on the philosophy side who get seriously into the philosophy of physics or the philosophy of neuroscience have to become essentially specialists in those fields.

That said, what you're describing might be more true for your sort of run of the mill philosophers whose career paths are pretty much to learn philosophy, write some iterative papers on hot topics, and teach philosophy.

This might describe me. I've never been great at mathematics, although I feel a large part of this has to do with going to an inner city school system where freshmen classes would be around 1,100 kids and 225 would graduate four years later. Hard to care about geometry with gang bangers around and math was always taught as this totally disconnected thing we had to do to pass a state test.

I took two STEM majors in undergrad and did fine enough there but I have these huge gaps in basic math such that I was 99th percentile on the GRE for verbal (higher since I had 170 and 168 started the top percentile that year) and 70th for math, which is shocking to me because I recall very little geometry or algebra. But I tested into the "advanced" track for quantum in my field at an elite school and did fine. I later was very successful in a finance position, then left for a startup and learned to code (basically automating the deputy city manager for finance job I had held).

I really don't like my work and am thinking of going back to school to study, and Hegel is my favorite philosopher. But it's like a 75% pay cut for funded PhDs because they pay less than $40,000 a year ago IDK if I can actually do it.

Whole point being, even if you're not incredibly gifted with mathematics doesn't mean you can't master very difficult mathematics for specific areas if you can understand the logic and semantic framing of the math. Indeed, I've worked with people whose mathematical acumen almost seems to hurt their analysis because they miss the essential questions and framing for the complexities of the analysis or brilliance of a coding solution.

But maybe part of the issue is that we think of visio-spatial IQ as "math IQ," and verbal-logical as "verbal IQ." It isn't really, the latter is more predictive of success in academia for most fields. Logic is a huge part of math.

Obviously visio-spatial too. When people talk about intuiting chaos theory and fractal self similarity from the "shape" of the math, I honestly don't know what the fuck they are talking about. When I create ETL pipelines and write SQL, M, etc. I joke that the data always looks like a rectangle the size of my screen. Visualizing my relationships? I just look at them in text lol.