Intelligence, Math and Field

Posted on January 25, 2012
Filed Under Cognative Science, Science | 3 Comments

Razib has up a really interesting post on different fields and how intelligent people are in those fields. Specifically he focuses in on verbal skills and math skills on the GRE tests.  The graph of verbal vs. math was quite interesting – especially with physicists out in the corner. More interesting to me was the comparison between how biased towards one or the other one was versus intelligence. (Be careful not to confuse the graphs – I embarrassed myself doing that)

Physicists are surprisingly good in the verbal area. Not the top but quite high.  I’m not sure why that is. My theory is that the way physicists solve problems ends up utilizing a lot of verbal rather than mathematical reasoning. Typically the hard part in physics is figuring out the problem so you can make it mathematical. The math phase is often the easiest part. (To a physicist anyway)

Related posts:

  1. Follies of Economics
  2. XKCD on Physicists
  3. Gender, Nations and Math Performance
  5. Sean Carroll and David Albert
  6. Why Physicists Are Bad At Philosophy

Comments

3 Responses to “Intelligence, Math and Field”

I’m surprised Computer Programmers are listed as less verbal. I had expected programming skills to be related to language skills.

Now if only there were more physics who were also philosophers and history of science buffs we would be set.

LOL. So true.

I mentioned there how you upped the Phys Ed stats that year you taught some gym as well as science.

Leave a Reply