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Lumifer comments on Social class amongst the intellectually gifted - LessWrong
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Huh? No, it's not hard at all. Besides it's not like something prohibits you from using, y'know, numbers on LW.
Hold on. You're a smart guy and there are a bunch of smart people on LW. You wrote a top-level post which implies that you want to communicate something and, moreover, you think it's important. What's all this backsliding into vagueness and the very very low bar of "anything"?
As far as I can read you, you are saying that studying math, in particular among the peer group of mathematicians, is desirable for high-IQ people. You implied two reasons for that: it might lead to riches (and so you mentioned Brin, Gates, Munger, etc.), and it might lead to awesome internal experience and, to use a Maslowian term, self-actualization (and so in the follow-up comments you quoted e.g. Grothendieck).
Whether math is a good way to achieve wealth or internal rapture is debatable, but your position seemed to be fairly defined. Why are you backing away from it now?
It's hard to convey the quantitative effect sizes as encoded in our intuitions: they're not stored in our brains as numbers.
:D. The threshold that I'm trying to clear is "get readers to think seriously about whether or not developing strong proficiency with a quantitative subject would be good for those intellectually gifted people who they know (possibly including themselves), based on the considerations that I raise.
I have no idea whether you should try to develop strong proficiency in a quantitative subject: there's so much that I don't know about you and your situation, so I'm not going to try to make an argument on that front. What I have to say is actionable only with a lot of individual-specific context that I don't have. I'm trying to present information that individuals can use to help them make decisions.
I don't understand what that means.
Cool. That's an entirely reasonable position which can be discussed. Now these "considerations" that you raise, can you make them more coherent and explicit as well? Then the discussion can proceed about whether they are valid, whether there are more considerations which support them or, maybe, counterbalance them, etc.
I mean, e.g. that your brain doesn't have a numerical answer to the question "What's the probability that I'll get into a car crash if I drive to work tomorrow morning?" - it has information that can be used to derive a numerical answer, but the number itself isn't there.
Yes, I need to make the considerations more coherent and explicit. Thanks for the feedback.