Slashdot Mirror
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."
If one reads the actual article, it's not about overall happiness/enjoyment but happiness and enjoyment when doing math. This has really little to do with the overall happiness of the society, though it could be used, along with other more general studies, for that purpose.
No I read the article (at least partially), but I was responding to the summary. The article seems more to be a rebuttal of education theory that started being implemented about 10-20 years ago. People kept focussing on making kids feel good and increasing their self-esteem, but they're finding that making kids feel good about math doesn't help them do well at math. If anything, it's the kids who worry about doing well enough in math that succeed.
Not too surprising, if you ask me.
Not necessarily.
Let us rephrase the original statement to read, "If one is good with math, then one is bad with people." This can be represented more generally as "if p then q".
Since we know q to be true if p is true, we can also say that if q is not true, p cannot be true--this is the contrapositive, which is always true if the original statement is true. You have attempted to assert that if you are bad with people, you must be good with math--in effect, if q then p. This is the converse of the original statement and is not necessarily true (as you have astutely pointed out). One may, assuming the original statement to be true, in fact be both bad with people and bad at math, or good with math and bad with people, but not good with people and good at math. (We shall ignore for the moment that the original statement is not really true because the article doesn't mention social confidence. Rather, it mentions confidence in mathematical ability and enjoyment of math, not people. But I digress.)
Of course, you'd know this already if you were good at math.
For every karma whore there are four more people with mod points to kill.
Well, in his defense he did say he was not good at math, and by extension, logic.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I don't think the guy who posted this read the article very well. I think they actually mean that the students who are most confident in their math skills tend to score the lowest on math aptitude tests. That isn't really news at all, as ignorance is bliss. The headline on Slashdot completely misses the actual point of the article which has nothing to do with social skills. Maybe the submitter could actually try reading the article more carefully. Of course, the entire article is phrased in such ambiguous language that it's difficult to discern what is meant by "confident." It has nothing to do with social skills.
SRSLY.
Slashdot's done it once again - it's patently stupid to say that "good with math means bad with people". This is not what the study says at all. It establishes a relationship between enjoyment of math and math skills. It also concludes that the more you were taught math as a fun game the less likely you are to be good at it. It mentions nothing at all about social skills in relationship to math.
Too late for anyone to read this, and I've no doubt there are a load of "Bullshit, just look at me/some famous guy" posts, but... The Myers Briggs personality-type test (so often used in profiling people for managament) identifies the "ENFP" type or "Champion/Advocate" as being exceptionally good with people, while usually also having a curious propensity for maths, due to their intuitive tendency and ability to seek patterns and deeper understanding in all things. Since ENFPs account for about 3% of the population, this would seem to fly in the face of the article. Just a thought. See here for a profile break-down.
Meta will eat itself
From reading the article the bottom line is this. Countries that try too hard to make a subject fun, and make all their students feel good about everything tend not to do as well. The simple lesson to be learned here is to stop being wusses and telling little Johnny that he did a great job even though he screwed up the whole thing. Tell him he is wrong and work with him to learn how to do it right. Contructive critisism. It makes people less arrogant and hopefully better people. I sometimes think that most people in my generation and after never learned about constructive critisism. Personally I prefer it. If I screwed up, I want to know that I did, I want to know why I screwed up, and how not to do it again. Are we so afraid of hurting little Johnny's feelings that we don't give a damn if he hurts himself? And we wonder why we have stupid lawsuits about not having proper warnings that hot coffee is hot, etc, etc.
This actually isn't too surprising; physchological studies have repeatedly shown that the better people are at something, the more they tend to underestimate their abilities. Similarly, the worse people are at something the more they tend to over-estimate their abilities. This has been shown to be true for an incredibly broad range of areas, from driving to using proper English grammar to tennis to solving physics problems to telling jokes. People tend to evaluate themselves by focusing on what they can't do or don't know rather than what they can do or know. The better you are at something, the more aware you are of what you don't understand. Less competent people are less aware of what they don't understand, so when they evaluate their own competence they tend to over-estimate. Surprisingly, if you improve a person's skill to raise their competency it will usually cause them to lower their own estimate of their competency.