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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

> I had not realized humans could be that bad at math

Why would being bad at one subject or skill imply they are bad at all skills?

Reading the article, I get the feeling that the author knows less about human intelligence than he thinks he does.

Humans don’t operate at high detail all the time. So we skim and fill in the gaps with assumptions. Even when prompted.

The author doesn’t account for lack of comprehension vs lack of knowledge vs lack of interest. Beta readers and coworkers do this to me all the time and it drives me nuts. They should know better!

Also, as a writer, I use skimming to my advantage by omitting detail to allow the reader to tailor the story towards what they want to read.

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Written by a woman, by the way.

I mention this because I was surprised to realize that upon reaching the end of the article, and then of course I had to interrogate why I was surprised. I’m sure this will get some (justifiable) hate, but: I was more sympathetic to the arguments after realizing the author didn’t conform to my stereotype of a mathematically-focused man who undervalued other disciplines.

(I clearly have a blind spot around women who undervalue other disciplines.)

Thanks for pointing that out. It's too late for me to edit my comment.

I hate to admit this, but my knee-jerk reaction is to have less sympathy for the same reason. Stereotypes are really hard to break even when you're aware of them.

Ultimately the author's gender doesn't affect my opinion of the article.

> Why would being bad at one subject or skill imply they are bad at all skills?

Statistically, human cognitive capabilities of all types are positively correlated, for what it's worth. If you observe someone failing badly at structured reasoning about a given topic, then you would be reasonable to expect they'd also be worse than average at surface-level talk about the same topic. However, Constantin's argument in the article was that the two capabilities -- surface-level talk vs structured understanding -- look independent in her personal experience.

I'm skeptical of her conclusion. I think the two capabilities probably are linked, but it's a weak link. You just might need a lot more samples and more confidence the samples were chosen randomly before the statistical relationship became noticeable. If so then in personal experience and practical life, the capabilities might as well be independent.

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