There are certainly people who hold that position but I'm not one of them.
Me either. I wonder if someone's done a study to see if locus of control (internal vs. external) is a cohort effect due to the culture/spiritual teachings of the '60s, or simply age-related, so people who were in their 20's in the 1960's are now self-possessed and don't blame others for their feelings, while current 25-year-olds just haven't had time to learn it (although some may be ahead of the learning curve).
Birth advantages are basically what set you up to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe you get a job because you met somebody in college. But you had to be born such that you could get to college in the first place.
In any case, success has to be a combination of luck and effort. You might luck into that job, but you wouldn't have been hired if the employer didn't think you had the skills he was after - skills you probably had to work to build. And, once you have the job, you still can't slack off, not if you plan on keeping that job.
Some works of sci-fi, especially classic works like Orwell's 1984, aren't even in "futures-space" anymore; those exact scenarios are no longer possible. That doesn't decrease their value at all. Science fiction, to me, is less about sampling from futures-space than about asking "what if?" and then telling a story about it.
Simply put, in Maletopia it would suck to be a woman.
Why?
Women would essentially be second-class citizens - after all, they'd be living in a society designed around men's needs only.
I'm going to make an exception here from my normal practice and speak specifically as a woman: Those raids sound fun! But I'd probably be excluded from most teams. And as far as partners, my ideal partner would be a Mannfolk-type manly-man, who respects me as an equal - something that DeVliegenteHollander doesn't seem to think exists. (Perhaps he's right. If so, that might partially explain my series of pathetic failures at romance.)
A - I can transpose at sight, but not very quickly. Like grouchymusicologist, I do it using the concept of scale degrees.
B - I suppose it is plausible. But I can't think of any real-life examples. Learning good posture isn't going to hurt any athletic skill you try to develop. Having studied linguistics is only going to help you when you start to learn .
C - I've never heard of such. Natural systems tend to be pretty intuitive.
D - Artists are the people who understand that what's on the page isn't music. It's just instructions on how to play the music. Theorists are the people who develop the notation, and they have a lot in common with scientists. (Many musicians are both.) Yes, some aspects of music notation and theory are counterintuitive. So are some aspects of mathematics. Plenty of people can do both with a high degree of skill.
Other than that, I don't really know what to tell you - except to use your highly trained mind to come up with ways to practice doing the things that you have problems doing, until you can do them well enough to please yourself.
I have read that blog some, and have tried the cold-showers thing. It's great - in the summertime. Winter came around and I kind of fell off the wagon.
In other applications, hormesis is probably why I don't have issues with stage fright anymore.
Anecdote: My mom once tried to invoke the Mozart effect by putting on his music while me and my sister were doing schoolwork, hoping that it would make us more productive. It had just the opposite effect - we sat there and enjoyed the music, rather than doing our math assignments.
Only major problem I know of with terraforming Mars is how to give it a magnetic field. We'd have to somehow re-melt the interior of the planet. Otherwise, we could just put up with constant intense solar radiation, and atmosphere off-gassing into space. Maybe if we built a big fusion reactor in the middle of the planet...?
Outside of mathematics, a statement that is provable is also disprovable. Then it's called a hypothesis.
I'm reminded of the joke where an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are going to a job interview. The interviewer has rigged a fire to start in the wastepaper basket, to see how they react in a crisis situation. The engineer sees the fire, sees the water cooler, grabs the water cooler and dumps it on the fire. The physicist sees the fire, sees the water cooler, grabs pencil and paper, calculates the exact amount of water needed to extinguish the fire, then pours that amount of water into the basket, exactly extinguishing the fire. The mathematician sees the fire, sees the water cooler, and says, "Ah! A solution exists!".
Or hang some fabric on the walls to muffle the sound a bit.
All-around second to this comment. Someone with ears that sensitive probably shouldn't be living in a thin-walled apartment complex.