/lit/ - Literature

>>16123768
I'm not english

>>16123768
Poe was both.

>>16123768
>you are either intelligent or a midwit

*breaks your barrier*

>>16123768
Slight edge to verbal over math on my SATs.
But I can count and add and figger

Math and Language are one in the same. Being one means you've a natural disposition for the other.

Even fucking Wittgenstein was both a mathematician and linguist. This quote is retarded.

>>16123768
Jorge Luis borges

>>16123768
pynchadoodle doo i see your thread is poo

>>16123830
No, writing and doing calculations involve different parts of the brain. It's logical to be good in one without being on another

>>16123798
implying he's any good

>>16123832
Blind nigger never even went to college.

>>16123859
Oh really?

There are plenty of good books written by mathematicians. Pic related, the works of Wolfgang Smith and Euler's letters to a german princess.

Lewis Carroll
Edwin Abbott

>>16123859
>BTFO atheism
>BTFO social "science"
>BTFO economics
>BTFO historians
>BTFO linguistics
>BTFO doctors
>BTFO medicine
>BTFO epidemiology
>BTFO academia
>BTFO nutrition "sciences"
>BTFO GMOs
>BTFO COVID deniers
>BTFO anti maskers
>BTFO socialists
>BTFO libertarians
>BTFO globalists
>BTFO nationalists
>BTFO wageslaving
>BTFO neoconservatives
>BTFO modernity
>BTFO evidence based "science"
>BTFO naive empiricism
>BTFO rationality
>BTFO cancel culture
>BTFO IQ
>BTFO racism
>BTFO identity politics
>BTFO Panarabism
>BTFO Nordicism
>BTFO Pinker
>BTFO Harris
>BTFO Sunstein
>BTFO Tetlock
>BTFO Dawkins
>BTFO Molyneux
>BTFO Murray
>BTFO Mary Beard

>>16123798
>Misunderstands statistics, incapable of responding to basic inquiries from undergrads
>Books are insufferable bragging about his boring life

>>16123951
No one understands math better than Taleb
>When, at Wharton, I discovered that I wanted to specialize in a profession linked to probability and rare events, a probability and randomness obsession took control of my mind. I also smelled some flaws with statistical stuff that the professor could not explain, brushing them away—it was what the professor was brushing away that had to be the meat. I realized that there was a fraud somewhere, that “six sigma” events (measures of very rare events) were grossly miscomputed and we had no basis for their computation, but I could not articulate my realization clearly, and was getting humiliated by people who started smoking me with complicated math. I saw the limits of probability in front of me, clear as crystal, but could not find the words to express the point. So I went to the bookstore and ordered (there was no Web at the time) almost every book with “probability” or “stochastic” in its title. I read nothing else for a couple of years, no course material, no newspaper, no literature, nothing. I read them in bed, jumping from one book to the next when stuck with something I did not get immediately or felt ever so slightly bored. And I kept ordering those books. I was hungry to go deeper into the problem of small probabilities. It was effortless. That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best. Five years later I was set for life and now I am making a research career out of various aspects of small probability events. Had I studied the subject by prepackaged means, I would be now brainwashed into thinking that uncertainty was something to be found in a casino, that kind of thing. There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.

I'm an engineering major though I consider myself to be much better at writing about literature. One thing is my hobby and the other one is what I want to do for a living (and it's another hobby too)

Blaise Plascal

This is a meme made up by liberal arts students to cope with their inability (read: lack of discipline) to study mathematics

>>16123768
There are philosophers like Descartes, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a poet who was also good at math.

Thomas Carlyle made some mathematical contributions(something called the Carlyle Circle was named after him) and was obviously extremely gifted with language. He's maybe the closest example I can think of.

>>16124016
he applied to math college and they said no. i read it on weikipedia.

>>16124090
Doesn't mean he wasn't competent or interested in the topic - he clearly was.

no, it’s not true. mathematics and the humanities are intertwined but the state of teaching is...sad. a lot of genuinely curious and bright people get ‘filtered’ out of mathematics by bad teachers who don’t really know the answers to “but why” and take solace in this whole math-english left brain right brain thing when they’d probably have liked math under different circumstances. imo if you are actually good at language/lit/etc—if it makes you curious, if you like philosophy and solving problems, you can likely develop number sense too. if you want to become a mathbro don’t let this shit discourage you. pick up a textbook and start working your way through the problems and look for your “but why” answers online. without someone standing over you trying to make you do some nonsense diagram you may find it less stressful.

>>16124045
Does inability always boils to lack of discipline?

>>16123936
>Shows up in Prussia
>Makes Voltaire look like a bitch

>>16124097
Are you saying the left brain right brain thing isn't true? Because that part is research backed

Leibniz

>>16124111
i’m saying that you don’t have to use the dominant hemisphere thing as a crutch and number sense can be cultivated in most people

>>16124123
>>16124111
(although i think the veracity of lateralization/personality type studies has been contested recently on some fronts anyways...if only bc the popsci presentation of the subject has veers reductive)

If you're intelligent in one area, you tend to be intelligent in others, especially in measurable areas like verbal and quantitative/logical intelligence.

That said, it IS true that most writers aren't accomplished in sciences and vice versa, but the reason for that is simple: most people aren't accomplished in anything at all. Very few people become successful writers OR scientists, so to become accomplished in both is especially exceptional.

A caveat about intelligence carrying over into other fields - that tends not to be true with the visual arts. Ability in the visual arts seems to rely on some combination of spatial intelligence and a developed aesthetic sense, and that doesn't seem to correlate with the types of intelligence measured by things like IQ. That said, it's also dangerous to get hung up on IQ, because IQ really relies on plateaus; in other words, once you hit a certain plateau, you can achieve anything you want, and the top plateau is 120, which is really the high end of average (about 1 in 5). Richard Feynman only had an IQ of 125, which he found pretty funny.

>>16124123
OK but I don't think they go hand in hand, as in one does not build up skills on the other.

Math is for midwits

>>16124152
>combination of spatial intelligence and a developed aesthetic sense
Are there academic fields that help to develop these?

>>16124186
Yeah - art school, film school, fine arts, art direction, graphic design, classical studies, aesthetic philosophy, architecture, etc.

>>16123964
This is the problem with Taleb. He never studied mathematics or even statistics. His degrees are in squishy business fields. His whole spiel on fat tails has always been trivial to experts.

>>16124099
For the vast majority of people, yes. Of course there are some who genuinely lack the ability due to a tragic lack of intelligence. But being competent at mathematics is only about applying yourself to the material, and practising questions.

>>16124227
yeah, my degree is in math and i found his...obsession with kurtosis as the root of so many problems to be mind-numbingly reductive and dumb. it’s like he just went wild after one or two stats courses.

>>16123768
It absolutely isn't, its cope for people who want to pretend they aren't missing out on half of human understanding/experience. The intelligent person knows that there is no "math person" and "english person," and that these categories are a laughable attempt to assert your useless identity. The person who speaks in such categories betrays a vain character.

>>16124251
But I researched about math degree and heard even from the folks who were good in Math at school saying they found it incredibly difficult

>>16123768
I got A*'s and A's in Maths and Sciences, and D's, E's and F's in English and Humanities.
It's not that simple though. Those were my GCSE results. At A level, I feel I hit my intellectual limit in core Maths.
Since leaving school, I have read extensively into the fields I got failing grades in GCSE.
It's not that I had a poor grasp of the subject matter in History, for example. It's that the exams were structured in a way that frustrated me.
Those exams comprised of a few high-point, open-ended questions requiring extended writing to answer them. I evidently have a heterodox relationship with my mother tongue, and my insistence on precision and exactitude in use of words led to a situation in which, faced with these exam questions, I entered a mental spiral in which I would try to draft entire paragraphs in my mind to make sure they were "right", before I'd even uncapped my pen. This painfully slow process meant I never got enough down within the allotted time.
This was further compounded by the open-ended nature of the questions. I remember asking a college tutor for advice when faced with an apparently simple question which I felt could be interpreted some three different ways, and I couldn't determine which question it was actually asking. My tutor told me I was trying to answer Level 4 questions as if I were completing a Master's degree (Level 7), which ultimately was one reason for my dropping out of college altogether - I've been NEET since, having done only 2 weeks of temp paid work in the last 4 and a half years.
So what the fuck am I?
I found some primary school reports and I'm amazed I wasn't diagnosed with ADD as a kid. I was diagnosed with autism in adulthood but I don't even know it's accurate. Regardless, I don't even have the consolation of a MENSA level IQ, with my perceptual reasoning at 127 and my full scale IQ at only 124.
I'm basically just fucked. Genetic trash that got left behind. Not gifted enough to make up for my deficits.

Who is Greg Egan and Isaac Asimov

>>16124319
Two gay guys who fuck you in parking lot

>>16123944
What is Taleb in his own perspective?

>>16124307
The only people who progress math nowadays are savant freaks. Of course your math friends find it difficult. They're part of the 99% whose careers will be insignificant footnotes in its history.

>>16124345
Oh, and anyone who says something about him being Phoenician after this post will have their mother die in her sleep tonight. No immunity images can protect you from this even if they smash they do, i cast a dodecatuple spell of you have to avoid mentioning Phoenicians.

>>16123830
im doing my dissertation on complete fucking retards, any chance you could do a quick interview?

>>16124319
Asimov was a total midwit, desu.

>>16124309
This is pasta right? Please tell me someone didnt just write this.

>>16124352
This is not true there are plenty of people who are able to obtain results in Math without being savant freaks. There are a lot of branches of math intimately tied with computer science which progress at a decent clip.

>>16124609
Believe what makes you happy.

>>16124096
why? because he wrote about parabolas? i learned that stuff in middle school calculus and i'm a modern burger.

>>16123851
>writing and doing calculations involve different parts of the brain...

>>16124360
He's Phoenician

>>16124360
>>16124785
Is "Phoenician" the Lebanese equivalent of Romanians saying they're Dacian, Albanians saying they're Illyrian, and Skopjaks claiming to be descended from Alexander the Great?

>>16123768
William Empson and David Foster Wallace (I don't care about your opinion on him, the fact is that he was good at both, and if not good then he was equally mediocre at both) are two notables missing from this thread

>>16123912
What the fuck

>>16124815
ja

Only if you don't consider doom a literary work.

>>16123768
Of course it's not true. This is what engineering majors tell themselves to cope with the fact that they have never read a book since they were 12.

>>16123768
Seems like a cope for people who really aren't intelligent, and I say this as someone who sucks at math and is good at writing english essays.

35 ACT.
Breakdown:
>36 Reading
>35 English
>33 Math
>36 Science

>>16125142
???

>>16123768
No.

>>16123798
So being good at neither one is breaking the barrier?

>>16125142
>Oh my God that's one of my favorite games as a kid!!!

>>16123768
No. Jacob Bronowsky was both. Check out his BBC series "Ascent of Man" which is basically Carl Sagan for adults.