Study Shows Good With Math Means Bad With People

Sylentmode writes "A recent study by Brookings Institution's Brown Center shows that students who are good with math are less likely to be happy, and are likely to have low confidence. From the article "In essence, happiness is overrated" says study author Tom Loveless. I wonder if Loveless is just a nickname, because he is so good with math."

Comments

Re:Causality chain backwards

[Vvaghel1]

that was the saddest, most simple minded piece of rationalization i have ever seen regarding success and its relation to socialization. Kudos to making me want to kill you.

Re:Quite True

[cold fjord]

Struck me dumb. This is a bright guy who I highly respect and yet his focus, despite his strengths, was on confidence.

Confidence makes it easier for you to make use of your strengths, and more likely that you will. That can have an enormous impact on your happiness, social life, career, and so on. The same thing applies to families, companies, countries and even cultures. Confidence levels can ebb and flow over time for various reasons. Self-doubt is inhibiting. To be gifted but inhibited from using those gifts can be a terrible curse.

The Closing of Civilization in Europe

One could also put it in a slightly different way: Europe lacks what America still has, namely the so-called "conservative reserves," or as the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen explained over 30 years ago, "the reserves in national energy and self-confidence, primitiveness and generosity, wealth and potential of every kind." Every so often I travel to the U.S. to recharge my batteries, and I am not the only European Conservative to do so. From time to time one needs to breathe the air of freedom before submerging again in the stifling atmosphere of Europe.

It is interesting to contrast this....

Facing down a culture where they talk like crazies

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

''You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."

... with this...

Beheading Nations - The Islamization of Europe's Cities

In an online story in newspaper The Daily Telegraph that was removed "for legal reasons," former Muslim Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo warned that British Muslims could soon form a state within the state. Dr Sookhdeo believed that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law." "In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate." "Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."

The next step will be pushing the Government to recognize sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" to deny them this. Sookhdeo noted that there is already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. "There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four." "The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that."

Europe is in trouble....

Re:it's a learned disability

[Lumpy]

Even educated men can expect a woman to be stupid.

when you women stand there and waht to discuss something instead of simply doing it? yeah. we get the stupid vibe.

Example? washing machine was not run. Wife in basement asking me questions about it for 5 minutes and never EVER simply touched the knob and started it. She was far more interested in discussing this tiny little thing for an extended period of time. we discussed it at first yelling up and down the stairs for 5 minutes, I got up, walked downstairs still holding the conversation and asking as I touched the knob and started it.

"why did you not simply press the button?"

Men see a simple problem and solve it, women want to discuss it for 4-5 hours.

Men see that as stupid.

There is your reason. It's not a stupid/smart thing. it's that women are wired so differently that men get incredibly frustrated.