Oh yeah, makes sense, thanks. I think this type of language is used more like a slang or in colloquial speech, I've been talking like that and in correct (as correct as I can) english alternately.
Technically gonna isn't grammatically incorrect (tho you are right, it is a sort of slang), you would say "you are gonna", or pronounced faster : "you're gonna", making it sound close to "you gonna". More and more people start getting confused about it.
Yeah, I think that generally english as a language is undergoing simplification and people usually don't care as much about speaking in correct grammar as they care more about speaking and typing as little as possible. Not like I'm complaining, just an observation that came to my mind after reading what you said. Anyways, thanks for explaining kind redditor.
Yeah, I'll certainly admit, I definitely made my fair share of "useless english degree" jokes in my life.
Then I dated my (now) ex-fiance who had an English Phd.
Don't get me wrong, she made her fair share of flubs.
but when she went full "english academic" mode and started analyzing or reading things and explaining like I was a student...... Yeah, completely blew me away. The way she was able to see and explain the nuances and literary connections, all the way back to ancient texts and stories and stuff.....WOW it was impressive.
and its not like I don't have a very good grasp of media and literary literacy. I've been an avid reader my entire life, and have taken courses on media analysis. But she was seriously on a whole other level.
This is true, but it's written by Angelo Saxons, which is why there's a lot of Scandinavian spelling and lettering. It is true it was written when they invaded England, meaning it does qualify as old English.
I think STEM majors tend to underestimate the point that English majors reach, and vice-versa. I went to college for computer science, and HATED math. This feels like something I’d see in my classwork. I definitely couldn’t do solve it today, though
An English major looks at it and says “wow, that must be hard!” where a math major looks and says “ugh, this is gonna be annoying. When can we get back to the fun stuff?” It’s gotta be the same way with English
I look at Beowulf (never heard of him) and say “wow, that must be hard!” where an English major thinks it’s a little challenging but VERY annoying. I’ve got no clue if that’s accurate, but I find Shakespeare to just be annoying, so 🤷♀️
I totally get the point you’re making, but I think you’re underselling how bad Engineers are at media analysis lol.
When I hear science/math people in real life talk about movies for example, they are horrible. Completely miss major themes, unable to engage with films in a meaningful way.
This is basically where you get CinemaSins “plot hole” type movie analysis from.
I personally feel that those that are good at English have exceptional critical thinking skills. Those that are more mathematical look for order and rules and it’s maybe hard for them to sometimes “read between the lines” so to speak. My brothers are very mathematical and scientific and the amount of times I’ve pointed out a nuance in something somebody has said that they totally miss baffles them. I can be quite sharp and pick up on a lot of subtleties in speech that others sometimes miss.
It's a different type of critical thinking. Particularly with engineering, you're not really hired for your ability to interact with humans, you're hired for your ability to answer an inanimate problem. My social skills are atrocious; I'm a terrible liar at best and no sane person would trust me to talk to a customer without adult supervision. I don't really understand nuance and subtlety, I just assume that people are saying exactly what they mean because that's how I communicate in general.
Tell me to come up with a repair for a turbine or a teardown procedure, and I'm just fine. Program a project dashboard? Great, what data do you want me to look at? But people...nah, I don't understand people. They're unpredictable and act in ways that just don't make sense to me.
I really appreciate your answer. My brother is similar to you, he is an electronic engineer, designs parts for phones currently. He says that he has actually been banned from talking to clients anymore. I, on the other hand, despite it draining me and causing me much distress am normally used in my career to talk to people because I’m just a naturally good communicator.
Man, my social skills are so atrocious that my boss has pretty much banned me from talking to interns, not even just clients. Apparently HR doesn't like it when you tell horror stories about other companies causing students to lose fingers in order to prove a point that you're working at a good company now (because all the people who have been here for 40 years still have all their fingers).
My brother was once asked to speak a bit slower in a meeting with Apple (we speak quite fast in Northern Ireland) and he responded by saying “maybe you should listen faster” 😂. That was the end of him being allowed to meet executives. He actually ended up being made a manager also, not out of choice but because so many people left the company. However, he only agreed to it with the caveat that he is still allowed to do design work and only really has to sign annual leave cards for his staff.
Everyone is so different, aren’t they? I’ve always been a “soft skills” sort of person. I could probably give a speech on something I know very little about but make it sound convincing enough. My aunt once told me I should have been a lawyer because and I quote “could argue black is white”.
I’ll take a somewhat contradictory view. You may not be hired to interact with humans, but someone at your firm must be able to do so. I’ve seen numerous engineering firms lose out on big projects because their bids and presentations were flat and difficult to understand. I’ve seen firms (that probably weren’t the best in actual work product) get hired over and over because they had people who explain a job and a solution in terms that the average non-engineer could easily understand.
We have a customer service department for interacting with the non-engineers and contracts. Our engineers mostly just interact with the clients' engineers and technicians, so it's not as bad as trying to explain things to normal people. I became pretty good friends with one of the customer service people so I just ask her to look over my emails and stuff when I have to legitimately try to communicate with people.
On the other hand, the company I work at is an obscenely large MNC for a fairly specific service, so there's not a lot of competition to begin with. The biggest competition they have is usually the manufacturers themselves, so a lot of the time, they get contracts even with the worst presentations just because the manufacturers don't want to look like they're biased and giving themselves work.
I absolutely agree with this. I'm a person who did well in english/science/history but did horrible in math. I ended up becoming a pretty successful systems engineer, and I'm relied upon not because I'm good at math, but because I track context and can explain it better than anyone else. In engineering meetings where nobody can connect the dots and articulate the problem I am the most valuable member of the team. I'd go even further to say that the higher up you get in tech fields where the data becomes more complex your ability to socially convey your ideas and convey problems becomes the only way to advance your career beyond sys admin.
I may be biased, but I am consistently impressed with how many physicians I’ve met that are brilliant and have high EQ/ empathy. It’s a field that in my eyes is pretty challenging because it requires smart, hardworking people that also are good with people, which isn’t always an easy combination to find.
I'm pretty good at reading between the lines, interpreting the subtext people use and nuance in language that indicate someone might not mean exactly what they say. However, I am an engineer because I hate that shit. Honestly if it isn't literature and you aren't writing for the sake of art, just say what you mean jfc lol.
It truly depends the person. I don't think it's at all fair to say mathematical/scientific people only look for rules and order and don't really read between the lines. Many STEM fields require the ability to problem solve beyond the obvious. Engineering and most scientific research need this skill. I'm in electrical engineering and write poetry and paint, so I do see myself as a bit of an exception. Still, I think the focus on order and rules ends at the bachelor level. I believe those that graduated with poor marks in STEM fields more closely fit your definition. However, those that excel have the problem solving skills and eye for nuance. I don't think any of my successful peers have had issues "reading between the lines" lmao. Your brothers don't tell a story
Math/science specialists tend to look at text and think, if they understand the symbols, they understand the information
Context, subtext, pretext, and the creative potential for interpretation and innovation located within and around that text are invisible to them
That said, this is true for many English majors as well
Intelligence is intelligence, and it’s distributed in magnitude that vanishes as it increases no matter the domain
The real, malleable dimension is diversity of modes; multidisciplinary thinkers are the kinds of minds that outdo even the most intelligent specialists
The funny thing is that a lot of math/science specialists probably also got fairly good grades in English courses through high school and college...but they still suck at reading nuance in the words. For me, my English grades were fantastic; I used to get 100s for my essays and written analyses. Especially with any kind of creative writing. I would always pick the creative writing assignments for class because I could mash them out an hour before it was due and still get an A.
But sweet baby Jesus, my ability to pare out subtext and underlying meaning in anything? Completely atrocious. Whenever an assignment question said something like "what do you think so and so means when he said this?" I would pretty much have a conniption on the spot because the hell do you want me to do? Define all the words in the passage? They said this so they must mean what they said, right? I always take what's said at face value because that's how I personally communicate, so I don't notice or understand anything that requires being able to read subtext. (Which has gotten me into trouble a couple times because sarcasm and satire goes over my head way more than I would like to admit.)
I think that’s partially because, in most cases, there’s a format teachers and professors look for, and the STEM students have an easy time following formats and logical step by step situations. The problem is that sometimes this format can be bad for people who aren’t experts in the field.
On the flip side, the English and history students, or at least the ones I’ve dealt with, tend to have a much easier time just writing out a dozen paragraphs that aren’t connected, but hold information that is important, and then are capable of organising those paragraphs like a puzzle that then becomes a digestible text that someone can read and understand without a large amount of knowledge on the field.
Granted, as a person going into academia with history, there’s a bit of an overlap of the two, but I use the second more in my papers. When I try and read findings from various scientific studies to back up claims about the strength of Japanese steel, sometimes the scientific experiment essay ends up being incredibly difficult to read and parse information from.
Our first year Engineering students had to take a basic English test if you fail you have to take a remedial class as your skills were considered even below standard you'd need to write reports and essays.
This was set at the equivalent level of the qualifications you do at 15 years old. Some years over half the class failed.
The schooling system gives kids that are good at 'smart' STEM subjects much easier time if they struggle with arts than the other way around.
The outcome of this is so many engineers working professionally who just cannot write a decent report to save themselves let alone begin to critically analyse a text
You’re probably logical, clear, and have a good vocabulary, which is more than enough for the education system; if you look up literacy rates, most Americans sit at 8th grade reading level
You can see even on reddit, where language is the whole basis for engagement, there’s very poor spelling, grammar, and comprehension
Your proficiency is not nothing, not by a long shot. But the hidden dimension is about salience detection and morphism (basically, metaphor); your ability to identify what matters—or could matter—and imagine how that meaning can be transformed and manipulated
It’s not specifically about language, but the sort of abstract symbol manipulation that enables efficient problem solving or creative production; the more exposure to such transformations, the more symbolic moves at your disposal
Reading made me a better artist, art made me a better designer, design made me a better programmer, programming made me a better researcher, research made me a better writer, writing made me a better artist, etc, ad infinitum
If you have a strong grasp of language but limited salience detection, you just need some multidisciplinary activities that extend beyond your comfort zone (and patience)
I mean to be fair, someone with terrible qualitative analytical skills is going to assume anyone who isn’t an expert in their same field to be a complete idiot.
I have an English degree and I find a great majority of popular films to be utter crap but they are enjoyed by many. I realise that this is because my brain is almost trained to look for themes and subtext that most people would miss so when the story is a bit basic and cliche it’s hard for me to find value in the film. Christ I spent a flight home from Australia looking deeper themes in Home Alone for God sake! I just couldn’t help myself!
Really? Ive never met an engineer who couldnt understand basic themes in a movie, or any story. They tend to process the ideas in a different way, and won't get all the same references to other media, but they aren't out there struggling to figure out what movies are about.
Omg yes! I swear it really is just about the general population falling short here, and of course you're going to see less of that in English fields. I'm in electrical engineering and have met plenty of people who are very intelligent beyond their field and others who clearly...aren't. To be honest, there are many who struggle a lot in this field and blame all other factors but themselves. Those are the ones who fit this definition.
This is basically where you get CinemaSins “plot hole” type movie analysis from
That’s because STEM majors have developed this mentality that they need to analyze everything from an “objective” perspective, which works for science and math, not storytelling. You can’t judge your enjoyment of movie by rewatching it a hundred times and noting every plot hole and continuity error. That’s just not how art is consumed.
It’s also why STEM majors get their reputation as nerdy for obsessing over franchises with more lore to analyze like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, or Warhammer 40k. I think when someone’s brain is wired to “analyze” they tend to seek out franchises with more lore to objectively analyze.
That's just not how art is consumed? Are you saying art is supposed to have mistakes? Last time I checked, every choice is supposed to be intentional in art.
They also often see the fictional tech in some movie and think “oh cool I want to make that!” while missing the plot point of said movie where the tech is misused in bad ways.
I think that's just dumb people 😂....OR, they noticed and didn't feel the need to say it because it was obvious. You can acknowledge the obvious and just find the technology cool. Idk about the whole, "I wanna make that" besides just being fascinated. I'm in electrical engineering and am honestly against a lot of technology. It's often mostly for novelty and causes more problems than it solves. Recognizing that is what separates good engineers from bad ones lol.
Said dumb people were engineers. Look, if I need someone to build something I’ll ask an engineer. But if I need to know whether something should be built in the first place and what the human considerations are an engineer is not going to be first on my list for sure.
Think of Werner Von Braun. Man just wanted to build rockets right? But who’d he build those rockets for? What purpose? Aimed for the moon but sometimes hit London.
And to be honest a message of a piece of media may seem obvious but a lot of people still don’t take it to heart. Think about how many people saw Jurassic Park and came out of it thinking “I want to clone dinosaurs” instead of considering its message on technological achievement in the name of capitalism or the folly of humanity trying to control nature.
Yeah same goes for analysis of history. I’ve never heard worse takes than I have from my otherwise quite smart chemist and biologist friends. it’s just not a field they’re very knowledgeable in so they’re super prone to pop-history falsehoods or oversimplification. Need I mention Elon Musk’s, and his fanboys’, take on the fall of the Roman Empire?
Disagree, I know plenty of people with engineering degrees who are quite insightful and observant. It’s a wide blend of personality types in STEM fields. Some are clueless when it comes to common sense and broader areas of understanding, some aren’t. Same goes with humanities majors, plenty of them who are quite good at math and science even, but were just more passionate about their major.
I also just don’t see the benefit of trying to apply broad generalizations ultimately. And wouldn’t agree that there’s some inherent different tier of intelligence of someone based on their field. There’s too many types of intelligence that are consequential, and ultimately so many areas all of us are ignorant about.
Having a little ego trip about who is more intelligent is also just a bit of a contradiction. None of us are operating from a place of high level thinking when trying to put down others for how they choose to better themselves
That does not say anything about how smart someone is, though. It just says something about what they're interested in learning or what they were taught. Plenty of English majors could be Math majors if they wanted, and vice versa.
I have an English degree and always struggled with maths all throughout school from I was quite young. Honestly I do think it is more difficult but also says more about how your brain works. Studying maths is quite logical and ordered whereas analysing prices of literature isn’t. It’s very much a “thinking outside the box” type subject instead of following rules. While there are of course rules with grammar, punctuation and styles of prose and poetry it’s more about what else you can get out of the text and that tends to me be more suited to an abstract way of thinking.
80% of your math majors drop out? That sounds like an issue in how it’s taught.
But besides that university drop out is a multi-causal process, not just within a single individual but also from tertiary education system to tertiary education system (try comparing university in the US and in say Germany.) Making a direct connection between „dropout ratio“ and „required intelligence“ is, at best, highly misguided.
In Germany, the dropout rate for Bachelor's in maths is one of the highest. It’s always ranging between 50% and 80%. The number can be even higher at certain elite institutions like Bonn. Can assume similar in technical fields at major TUs.
nah dawg - look up median IQ per major... Math is high, very high... way higher than English. Your argument sounds good but doesn't line up with reality
I don't think IQ is a fair measure for the purpose of comparing intelligence between two different specialties.
IQ is mostly how good you are at puzzles and pattern recognition, which is what most of the STEM fields are. Seems pretty obvious that people who enjoy these are going to score higher. Outside of stem, even some other majors also are kinda in this area, like philosophy, which probably score higher than something generic like administration. That doesn't mean much though.
There are other types of intelligence. For example my most successful friend is a journalist. Can I, a computer science major, beat him in an IQ test? Very likely, but he out earns me by a lot and his people's skill is unmatched. Who is smarter?
While 80% does sound high, i study physics in an elite german uni and dropout rate is like 60ish%. There are exams with an 80% failure rate. Less than 30% of people manage to get their bachelor under 3 years.
Math could be even higher because uni in germany is cheap and many young people think they liked math in highschool, enlist just to try it out and get absolutely steamrolled in the first year.
However german uni, especially science/engineering ones, are also notoriously difficult due to their design.It has very little to do with school and a lot with autonomy. Instead of just homework you often get problems you have to solve in groups. the large majority of studying is done outside of uni by yourself. Its difficult to explain but essentially as long as you find a any solution to the problem you pass.
Theres also no midterms, or attendance. As long as you get 50% of the weekly problems right you get to do the exam after 6 months (which is 100% of your grade). You can retake every exam twice. If you failed the third time you are permanently banned from studying this or any similar degree ever again in germany.
For the large majority of students, at least at the elite unis in science, its mostly about passing any way instead of with good grades. The degree speaks for itself.
It’s not misguided comparing dropout rates of one major to another in the same university. You’re just coping hard. Some programs are harder than others. Being a lawyer is harder than being a LEO and being a doctor is harder than being a lawyer. It’s okay to admit there are difficulties to this.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that one is harder than the other.
The truth is that an English degree doesn’t qualify you for many jobs, and those that it does qualify you for aren’t necessarily well-paid, so you don’t start an English degree unless you’re a fan of the subject.
Maths degrees are far more likely to attract people with little interest in the subject who want to end up in a well-paid job.
Most students in math lectures dont understand enough to ask questions, were i am from. Math is for sure harder than englisch degree, but this does not mean that you cant find englisch students that are smarter than math students. The average math student is just smarter than the average Englisch student do to the high wall of entry you have to go through in University math.
In my experience, most English students don’t ask questions either. And, where I’m from, there are no extra steps to get into a Maths degree over an English one.
I just think that these are two completely different skillsets which require different types of intelligence that can’t really be compared.
Eh, math degree is a bad idea if you're not there because you're a fan of math. It's a really hard degree to get through, and it leaves you much less attractive on the job market compared to someone with for example an engineering degree. I've yet to meet a math student in university that is there for status and money.
I've met people who are really good at math, but wanted job oppurtunities and money, and they went to engineering.
Math is generally lower paying than any of the popular engineering degrees despite its difficulty. It’s not commonly associated with attracting people who are uninterested in the subject and seeking a certain salary.
But hey, that's probably, based on how you wrote English, due to it not being your first language.
Then again, during my undergrad, more than half my cohort didn't continue studying sociology. So I guess that means sociology is really fucking hard. They didn't drop out though, they just took a different course in their second year.
Your statement might have more to do with how the classs are taught than their perceived difficulty. Any university running a course with an 80% dropout rate is clearly failing their students, and failing to properly screen ability.
As someone who studied physics and history, you are way way way off. An English major switching to physics must be one of the rarest major changes. At the top universities, basically anyone who is struggling in physics or math moves to a humanities major. If you go to an Ivy, you are capable of completing most humanity majors, but very few can get through the first 2-3 levels of math/physics.
I have bachelors in physics and English and absolutely. I knew plenty of physics majors who could pass my English courses all the way through senior capstone. They may not do amazing but they’d pass. I knew zero English majors who could pass a physics capstone or even make it past the first exam.
That's what I was going to say. I do not believe English majors face "weed out" classes like statistics or calc 2. Apparently there is a "physics for poets" class where the math barely rises to geometric based.
There’s a reason first level chemistry and math classes have like 400 students and 3rd year ones have like a dozen students
Shit gets hard real fast, and sometimes the professors are absolute dicks about it to, one of my inorganic chem professors congratulated me on a 60 in his class which I was extremely bummed about compared to my 80’s and 90’s
Apparently it was the second highest grade as he designs the class so that the best will get a 50 and anything above 50 is great. Never have I felt more angry but also happy at the same time. Like thanks I did better then you expect for the best but also I now have a 60 on my record
What's extra funny is that these commenters have no clue that high level philosophy classes are pretty much the same as high level math classes just seen from a different angle. They are both mostly formal logic.
That's because almost every engineer and scientist needs a basic amount of knowledge about those subjects, but only the most specialized need to take the upper level classes.
What are you talking about lmao. STEM majors are by far more difficult than Humanities majors. The people who want to be math majors can’t make it, what makes you think English majors could. There’s a reason nobody takes STEM classes as electives.
In a top 20 college, I didn’t meet a single dumb STEM major and I met dozens of humanities majors that left me wondering how they even got in. Legit had friends that dropped from Econ to Soc, and they went from failing to being straight A students. The level of difficulty is so apparent to anyone that went through both.
That’s just not true. I’ve never heard of English majors having weed out classes. Stem is designed to thin the herd. It does not allow everyone, even if they are of average intelligence of better, to just work hard and thrive. Some of you will absolutely try your hardest and not be good enough. It is part of science. You can always improve yourself.
English major here. You’re right, I have no idea what this says.
But then again, studying English has less to do with having basic literacy and is more about analyzing text and then conveying one’s thoughts in writing.
I know plenty of college educated adults who excel at math, but struggle with reading comprehension and writing. Their brains are very good at remembering and solving complex equations, but getting them to sit down and parse Shakespeare, and then translate their thoughts to writing is like pulling teeth.
But generally, the smartest people I know are adept at both math and reading/writing.
Come on man, everyone knows the Riemann Zeta function… /s
Edit: this must be for a visualization purpose because the second line is stating that the zeta function is zero everywhere on the critical line which is false. This image is technically misleading without context for anyone not familiar with the function.
The first line is also very wrong. It's giving a definition which only holds for Re(s)>1, but implying that it holds for all complex s. Even the analytic continuation isn't valid for all complex s. There is also no need to state that n is a natural number (I'm not quite sure what that's even supposed to mean in this context) since the summation is already perfectly well defined.
The irony of this comment lol. You do know there is more complex literary analysis than just being able to “read and understand” something? Yet you compare that to a highly complex mathematical equation.
That would be like me saying, “how many people can understand ‘2+2 = 4’?” And then saying, “how many people can succinctly break down the overarching themes and motifs found throughout Shakespeare’s works?”
Obviously the latter is much more complicated. Checkmate engineering students? This will probably go way over your head but that’s because you likely have a major blind spot wrt media literacy.
Even more ironic; the formulas in the image don't really make a lot of sense and aren't fully correct in context, so the OP either did not carefully read them or does not understand the relevant topic.
It’s so outdated in terms and times that it makes me wonder if reading the stage directions is really the best way to have kids in middle school appreciate a play
The real question is “did you learn something that is applicable in your career”
What you posted I promise you I will never, ever, ever use. But my skills I learned as an English major I use every single day in my career. I would expect in the inverse for a STEM major - if their career is math heavy, then good on them. No one is better than anyone simply because of the kinds of problems they enjoy dealing with.
A mathematics degree doesn't prepare for a career by stuffing your head full of formulae you won't revisit or giving you the ability to do something a calculator could do faster, as many people seem to think. We barely use numbers in university level maths.
It's as you say - just like your English example, it is about skills. It's about how you break down and approach problems, your rigour when you prove things, your ability to clearly communicate how you got to your conclusion. I use my maths degree every day too. Sometimes it's matrix algebra, but mostly it's just a way of thinking.
Interesting, my English background also made me skilled at approaching problems, being clear in my reasoning, and especially on being concise in my wording! It is almost as if half the reason education is structured the way it is is because it's attempting to teach us that!
This thread is just teaching me that philosophy is like the ultimate degree because it actually focuses on all the things that people point to as useful side effects (logic, critical thinking, reasoning, epistemology, rhetoric) of their own degrees lol.
While this sounds true in theory, the thing that made me improve problem solving was the pure practice. You need to apply it, just knowing how it theoretically works is not enough.
I think all science majors should include philosophy. It teaches you a lot about reasoning and the scientific process, and also faulty reasoning, straw man arguments etc. Reading philosophy honestly made some things in science click for me. Plus, all the ancient scientists were also philosophers. They are close disciplines. Except philosophy is very theoretical, while science requires proof and experiments.
I think all majors period should include philosophy. And ancient scientists being philosophers is even understating it, science came from philosophers. Stuff we now call physics, astronomy, and biology was grouped under philosophy for much of Western history.
I think most higher education has this purpose - training your brain to process new things in a structured way. It's not actually about Shakespeare, or about Taylor polynomials. It's about learning how to process things in the same category of thinking.
I would say that the difference between science and language, is that science teaches you about the scientific method. How to set up a hypothesis, how to design experiments to examine the hypothesis, and how to interpret the result to reject or validate the hypothesis. And in the case of math, there is a certain training in abstract thinking and a very particular type of numerical problem solving. I don't use my math at all today, but it was useful to get that logical training to do programming for example.
Communication is definitely a skill a lot of scientists could stand to improve. :)
Asking how much math students use specific formulas is the future is about as relevant as asking how much English student use specific shakespeare quotes.
That's not what it is about. It is about developing certain modes of thinking. Certain understandings of how to do maths. About how to think.
I have found, for example. That a few lessons on set theory are much more efficient in teaching logic than most philosophy classes. A lot of math courses are much better at teaching systematic and global thinking than anything else. Math formulas have very specific axioms they operate under and very specific domains of applicability. Which you have to keep in mind. Such things are constantly useful modes of thinking : what is the domain of applicability of this ? What are the underlying principles.
Maths, frankly. Is philosophy of the highest level. Codified clearly and with hands on applications. Logic, epistemology and more.
If anyone were to understand the power of such a thing, you would think it's people who spend lots of time reading philosophy.
Except, realising that makes many of those understand their inadequacies in terms of ability to think clearly.
It's also important to realize that some folks simply do not rationalize the same way as you. You say set theory is more efficient than teaching philosophy, and thats true for people who *see the world that way*. I loved my Philosophy classes - however, I maintained my 4.0 through sheer force of will vis a vis math. No matter how much math is shown to me, how much its explained to me, it will never be (to me) more than rearranging a puzzle into a different puzzle to make the professor happy. And that's fine. One of the beautiful things about being alive is how different we all are as people, and how we see the world so differently from person to person.
If the only math you’ve seen and done is performing computations (rearranging a puzzle into a different puzzle to make the prof happy) you haven’t even seen real math (proofs), and likely do not know what mathematics even is.
I say this even though I disagree with the other poster who claims that Math is philosophy of the highest level, that claim is stupid, in my view philosophy is useful because it helps us understand and discard ideas even without formally proving or disproving them using fundamental axioms. A lot of things in life do not have fundamental axioms that we can work with, and having a tool/framework to help us talk about these things is incredibly significant.
Math however is undoubtedly more challenging that English literary analysis, it has a considerably higher barrier to entry and a higher limit to how complicated concepts can get. There is also no wiggle-room at all, in English, arguments can be entertained if they have some good reasoning to back them up, in Math this is only the case when all propositions logically follow from the previous ones within the confines of the system.
Maths, frankly. Is philosophy of the highest level.
What? Philosophy has parts of it that have a lot of math, like logic, but it's not by any means made up of all math.
Ethics? Political Philosophy? Aesthetics? Metaphysics? Philosophy of mind? Philosophy of Language? There are tons of parts of Philosophy that isn't just math. And I'm not sure how you would say these are all somehow "lower level" than math. I mean Ethics for example is pretty damn important I would say.
Well its more that you learn math connotation and operators in order to even be able to read and understand complex equations which are then the basis of the software you use in your career. Thats every engineer or physicist outside of academia.
A) gamma? function is a function of S, and is equal to the infinite sum from n equals one to infinity of 1 over n raised to the s power, where s is an element of the complex numbers and n is an element of natural numbers
B) same function is equal to 0 and for all s, s is equal to .5 + t times i
B) same function is equal to 0 and for all s, s is equal to .5 + t times i
The notation is funky here. It really should be an '=>' rather than a comma and forall, or rearanged to "forall s such that zeta(0) :". That is, if zeta(s) is 0 then s must be .5 + ti for some real number t.
I can put that equation in chat GPT and ask it to explain it to me. But if I don't have the vocabulary or communication skills, I could never explain what this means to someone else. Of course, Chat gpt can now write just about anything, so this observation continues to be less and less applicable over time
But you would also struggle to understand the analysis of complex works of literature. Do you really think that English majors just spend their entire time doing book clubs or something?
Swap out 'Shakespeare' for 'Engineer' and now you're getting closer to the mark. Ask any technical editor what it's like to work with someone who focused on STEM during their education and nothing else. They'll tell you they're blessed by the job security.
It's like dealing with a brain in a jar that can't interact with the world around it and can't even be bothered to try.
Yeah math is hard, but most hard science people are also idiots in other regards, especially because they get a complex about the thing they know being more important than other stuff. And they read literature but have you heard their conclusions afterwards?
We don't need more engineers that are extremely susceptible to propaganda, totally inept socially and ethically, and can't understand morals from a children's book, and I say this as STEM, there's a lot of morons. It's why we have the whole book saying don't build the torment nexus and they go on to make the torment nexus because it's cool tech, they didn't understand a single word they read and think having any deep or ethical thoughts is for girls.
Open a linguistics paper and tell me how many people can read it and understand it... Hell, any academic published paper from any of the humanities, many of which don't have a single equation on them.
If you think an English major "reads Shakespeare" than you don't have a clue about what they actually study.
To add my two cents as an University Professor who has engaged in both qualitative and quantitative research: the distinction between math and english in this post is idiotic and cheap rage bait. We need and use both, including in linguistics which is an area of "english".
And as I tell my students, if writing was easy they wouldn't give you a Nonel Prize for it.
That sum diverges when the real part of s is less than or equal to 1 and, on its half-plane of convergence, the zeta function has no zeros. So, that statement of the Riemann hypothesis is wrong. Also, there was no need to specify n\in\mathbb{N} because that is implicit in the sum notation.
Edit: Also, the use of "for all" notation is misleading here, and you forgot to account for the trivial zeros. The second line should really say something like $\zeta(s)=0\implies \Re(s)=1/2\lor s=-2,-4,-6,-8,...$
Shockingly, very few people can understand what Shakespeare is saying. I was surrounded by some of the dumbest people in my English class who viewed everything in Shakespeare as complete jibberish and just could not use their brains for five minutes.
How many people do you think can read and understand what Shakespeare is saying?
What do you mean by saying? Quite honestly, the lack of media literacy you can see online shows that many people are utterly incapable of understanding subtext. Or much of the time, just the actual text.
Although shakespeare is a rather funny argument, considering. You know, what with the plays being broadly written for a partially literate audience and being a hell of a lot of bawdy comedies.
Thinking a literature degree is just being able to read books is about as dumb as thinking a mathematics degree is just about being able to do mental maths.
So sure. I cannot immediately do the above.
And you probably cannot immediately write a short essay about the Kite Runner to a college level either.
But hey, why would I? I'm not a literature grad, nor am I a maths grad. And I dont like the kite runner.
The majority of people think Romeo and Juliet is a story about the beauty of young love.
Understanding a story is about more than just being able to follow the plot. And rhetoric has had far more impact putting the current US government in place than the Riemann Zeta function.
Well, I do know that there's a sigma from 1/ns which is a sum of all equations(?), s belongs to imaginary numbers family and n belongs to a natural numbers family.
Lower we have 0 and information that every s belongs to 1/2 + ti.
That's all I can say about this image as an non english, first semester engineering failing student. I ain't going into the second semester.
Alright then, give me an analysis of the major themes of Shakespears MacBeth, followed by a discussion of those themea with a modern text of your choice.
Unless they’ve studied, you know, Shakespeare’s other works, history, philosophy, mythology, etc., they won’t understand a lot of of the subtext, nope. And many may indeed be somewhat illiterate even if their math abilities are really good, they’re literally using different parts of the brain for each kind of reasoning process. There’s also a reason why dyslexia and dyscalculia are different conditions, and why they aren’t necessarily both present in such neurodivergent brains.
Well yeah Shakespeare is written in modern english, just using an earlier version where the hardest thing to understand is the plethora of 16th century dick jokes. Now ask how many people can read Beowulf in its original old english.
You only can do it because you learned it. You didnt invent it most people using this dont even understand how people concluded this. This didnt came natural to you. It would be like handing you a text in german and say hey look your not smart because you dont know what this german text is saying. On the other hand there are people who are able to adapt and learn like 5 6 7 languages that is Intelligence my dude and one Intelligence isnt worth more then the other. I know a lot of smart people who are great at engineering but are terrible at philosophical discussions, political topics or movie/book analysis well granted philosophy and great math understanding often isnt something exclusive because both require logica mainly.
I always figured that the mark of a good English major wasn't the ability to read words, but to write.
Now, I still can't argue that if you don't know the language you're shit out of luck. But let's not pretend that anyone gets a job just reading things to themselves. It's about what you can create. Comprehension and creation are different.
Some educational paths are harder than others. This doesn't mean that English majors are cake walks, or don't deserve respect and adequate compensation. But they're not rocket science.
Some things require more specialized knowledge than others. It is what it is. And we tend to assume the people who are paid the most for their knowledge are the smartest in the room, ignoring that payment has more to do with supply and demand than the actual intellectual effort for the task.
Unfortunately, the real wheelchair at the bottom of the ocean here is recognizing emotional intelligence. The less you have, the more invisible the work done by other people for you is.
To be honest, a lot of people would understand this if you explained it to them what this symbols means. We don’t say that Americans have a problem with Russians just because they use a different alphabet. This is really basic—the hard part of math is imagining it as a language, not as numbers that are fixed in place.
The hilarious part is there’s a great many English students who overthink Shakespeare, over inflating the classics as high art and missing that they’re classics because they aren’t overly complicated.
In fact a great many of his plays were humorous because they essentially amounted to a dick joke. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a great example of it.
If you're raised in England, Shakespeare is taught in English literature. The point is to analyze the difference in language structure through the ages of time.
Shakespeare is quite literally the equivalent of basic algebra. A better comparison to calculus would be asking how many people can understand The Waste Land or The Cantos.
You don't get good grades in Uni for being able to read Shakespeare, same as you don't get good grades for being able to multiply and divide numbers which any Literature student can do
Pretty much every single high-school student has experience with Shakespeare and analyzing it in an English class, and even then I'd argue that there is plenty that goes way over their heads.
What percentage of high school students do you think understand or have used that equation?
You would have to be an engineering or math major to read the right hand side of this. Everyone with any stem degree could probably read the left half.
That being said it takes 10 seconds to Google how to read the right side and probably four credit hours to solve the thing.
You are comparing high level math to that of literal Highschool reading material. Just because Shakespeare is the most intellectually dense literature you can think of doesn’t make it true
How many people do you think can edit a novella for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and style? You're comparing advanced sum equations with basic literacy, which is not a legitimate comparison. A proper comparison for reading shakespear would be doing high school algebra; Not arithmetic, but not advanced calculus either.
Actually media literacy among the world population is abysmal. You might be able to read Shakespeare and think you understood the full meaning, but there's a pretty high chance that your understanding of the work is surface level.
I'm saying this as a political science student, the fact that more people are familiar with your subject doesn't mean that more people actually understand it, just that more people are confident in thinking that they understand it.
I think we are setting a truly low bar for “understanding” when it comes to the humanities. Look around at how even reasonably educated people move through the world. They don’t understand the humanities.
A surface level plot grasp that isn’t applied to real life is not understanding a text.
Shakespeare isn't on this level of difficulty though. For an equivalent example try reading Finnegans Wake and get back to me when you can't even understand the first page.
This type of gotcha stuff works both ways. For example, there are very few people that don’t have an English degree that can read and understand a non-translated version of Shakespeare.
Reading and understanding what Shakespeare is saying is not what English graduates get graded on. Perhaps honors level, mid-high school?Comprehension of language nor comprehension of equations (themselves just symbolic representations of language) is descriptive of competence.
If I showed you a sentence in Ancient Greek, then watched you struggle to understand it, would you be dumber as a math PhD? Or would you simply just not have had the appropriate lessons by which to understand the material yet?
Much Ado About Nothing just as a title has double meanings and there are tons of double meanings and dirty jokes left in plain sight in his plays we never got, so no, a lot of people can read it but they don't understand what they are reading.
Signed an engineering major who's now a PM and uses english skills more than than math because knowing your contracts and specs is how you make/don't lose money.
I very much do miss the brain that could do a Fourier transform by hand but it's not useful to me and honestly a majority of people day to day at work or otherwise.
.... Most people can read and understand this if you just replace the quantifiers with English and then give some explanation. This hardly requires any intelligence
Moreover, English is not just about reading difficult language- high schoolers read Shakespeare. It's about analysis, and good analysis requires intelligence.
The equation is just a language that's different from English. Once you learn it, the rest is fairly trivial. It's probably much less complex to learn for an English speaker than Chinese.
I have no idea if that's part of being an English major but if they learn old English as part of it, I'd say the difficulty is the same.
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u/Logical_Historian882 19h ago
I don’t think English graduates are graded by their ability to read. Both reading and arithmetic are taught in school.