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The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize
An anonymous reader writes: The stereotype of the scientist or engineer is that he prefers facts, reason, and objectivity over more artistic pursuits. But the Priceonomics blog points out an interesting correlation: "the more accomplished a scientist is, the more likely they are to have an artistic hobby." It continues, "The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society — elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries — are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby." Is this more evidence that we in the science and tech fields undervalue art and pure creativity?
They probably just have more time. The "average" scientist, I suggest, is working his ass off.
E Proelio Veritas.
Just taking up an arty hobby probably won't make you a better scientist. Artsy hobbies might as well be a natural side-effect of being genetically better equipped for getting original ideas.
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
I'm not surprised that higher level scientists and engineers are generally more well-rounded than people who are only scientists and engineers by trade. When I look around my peer group, I see a pretty clear correlation between being better at their field, and being more well-rounded in general. Specialization and focus has its place, but in my industry (tech) the people who are "moving the ball" (vs. the break/fix positions) are also more well-rounded, not less, and that isn't limited to tech-specific things at all.
I think the real myth is that scientists and engineers don't appreciate/value/"get" art. The stereotype of the autistic super-scientist just doesn't hold up to real life for me at all, on average at least. Do you like music? Is it for the mathematical purity of the composition, or do you like the way it makes you feel? Congrats, if you picked the latter, you're into the arts.
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Most adults give up hobbies as they get older. Generally only my most driven and self motivated friends have maintained hobbies into adulthood, and those that have tend to have 3 or 4 hobbies. Just being driven enough to maintain a few hobbies into adulthood would likely make you 2 or 3 times as likely to have an artistic hobby as an average person, and Nobel laureates would certainly be driven individuals.
"Is this more evidence that we in the science and tech fields undervalue art and pure creativity?"
No, it shows that the better your brain functions, the more attention span you have to pay attention to many fields. Those of us who have to work our brains hard for those occasional flashes of brilliance don't have enough ooomph left over for "frivolities".
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Having free time is probably part of it, but another thing we have to ask is, what is art?
I know of one top-notch math researcher who has had quite a degree of success. He has a good position within a large institution, he has many publications, he is held in high esteem by his colleagues, and so on, and so forth. Yet in his spare time he has taken up sculpting. His preferred subject of these sculptures? Penises. He'll sculpt them out of clay, out of wood, out of plaster, out of styrofoam, and whatever other material he can find. He doesn't do it for a profit; his garage is littered with sculpted penises of various shapes and sizes. I was last in there maybe a year ago, and he had over at least 2,000 different sculptures he had made over the years.
While I know him from a sport we both play casually, I doubt that his colleagues from the math world know about his sculpting. Even if they did, I don't know if they would consider it "art". They would probably consider it a form of degeneracy. I know his wife is unsure about it all. She doesn't like the fact that there are literally cocks taking over her garage. She doesn't like having to move styrofoam penises off of the dryer before drying laundry.
So is this fellow's academic and research success due to his artistic hobby? I don't know. To be honest, I'm not even sure if it should be considered art. He's not even very good at it. Some of his creations have a penile shaft that's one color, and the scrotum is a different color. Some of them are bent and misshapen. Is something still "art" even if it's done very poorly? Which brings us back to our original question, "What is art?"
There are much simpler explanations than the one implied by the article, namely that "playing music causes scientific ability" or even "musical and high level scientific ability have a common cause". The Nobel Prize is not awarded based on objective scientific criteria, it is a judgment call by a bunch of primarily upper middle class European men steeped in European bourgeois values, which include that educated and smart people ought to play an instrument. And at that level, many of the scientists involved know each other personally, and music is a social activity that allows people to get to know each other more. It wouldn't be surprising if the Nobel Prize committee simply had a bias towards awarding prizes to scientists who they know to play music or who they actually play music with.
It takes a lot of intelligence to repeatedly hit a small ball with a stick.
Golf is the most pointless 'sport' in existence. You can't even compare it with low-level sports like baseball and ping pong, let alone sports that require actual skill and are moderately fun to watch, like basketball and football and soccer. And when people consider basketball players and football players to be dumb, imagine how dumb the average golf player must be.
All it takes to play golf is good motor coordination. Some people are naturally more talented at this, some aren't. That's ALL golf is. You know a sport is idiotic when a simple mechanical machine is better at it than any human could ever dream to be.
And about correlation, no it's not a coincidence that the majority of golf players seem to be those who are rapidly falling down the hill of age-related brain decay. And when their brain decays to the point where even playing golf becomes too hard, it's off to the bingo hall.
You might say I'm being too hard on golf. Actually I think I'm being too lenient. Golf shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence as real sports. Golfers deserve constant 24/7 ridicule until they finally pack their shit and we can repurpose the huge amounts of land devoted to that useless 'sport' for useful purposes, like landfills.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
There is definitely an actual correlation between studying an instrument and cognitive skills. Whether or not that translates to "academic merit" is another question, but it absolutely increases intelligence (independent of IQ when musical study is started).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
That's a study of young people, but a few weeks ago there was a study showing the same effect with older people in the news.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, Nobel Prize winners are well-known for being a bunch of lazy bastards.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The list of autodidactic musicians is pretty long. And pretty impressive.
Skill is learned. And practiced. The thing about practicing an instrument is that you get better whether you want to or not.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As someone whose primary thing is making art, I'm surprised that the overwhelming majority presumption here is that the practice has no "practical" (read: "marketable"?) value. Especially in a community populated by people trying to find "new" things--things previously undescribed--and create unthought-of solutions to problems of various sizes and severities, I would have guessed that the majority would be well engaged already with a route to such discovery and to such novel thinking.
One thing art has over, say, particle physics is that observing new phenomena is not only physically available to every single person (in their own aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual experience of the world) and the signposts toward discovery are made plain by simply checking in with one's self regularly--essentially, cultivating a rewarding relationship with oneself. How better understanding the instrument one uses to measure the world would be of any use to, oh, say, someone involved with science should not be baffling.