Ask me about being Valedictorian

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I know several engineers with 3.9X GPAs. Maintaining a 3.9+ in a tough major such as engineering is quite an impressive feat. Bragging about your grades in english is analgous to boasting about winning a race in the special olympics.


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Way too harsh. Most of these engineers would be not be near the top of their class if they had majored in English or literature of any type. And I'm assuming native speakers.

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I know a lot of engineers that were bored in English class. I know I slept through mine. So I have to agree with this one but not for the reasons you assume. Forcing an Engineer to major in English is like putting a former Marine that served in Iraq and is now playing college football in a balley dance class. It just doesn't work.

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You mean ballet, or belly?

If you mean skill sets are different, you're correct of course. If you mean that having one skill set guarantees or even implies having another, you're not.

Having poor to mediocre language skills is extremely common -- no less so among people with notable mathematical ability. It works the same way if you flip it around -- poor mathematical ability is very common among people with very good language skills.

The bias on this board, given its nature as a poker site, leans heavily toward celebrating mathematical ability, and its heroes tend to be people who are great at poker, which certainly leans more toward math than language. When asked the values of one skill set versus another, the self-selected forum members here are usually pretty darn happy to vote for themselves and not just affirm some sort of primacy for and celebrate their own skill sets, but go to war against the talents they may not have and therefore find necessary to denigrate. Egos are surely fragile things, and maybe it's easier over all just to not take chances on them.

In other words, I think most football players would fail miserably as either ballet or belly dancers.

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This discussion reminds me of a couple threads from a while ago with sklansky, pzhon, brucez, and others. The general feeling was that hard science types are more well-rounded in their education than humanities students. Here is a good quote:
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A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

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Here are the threads:
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I think you have just described the very obvious other side of the coin. Of course most people's spheres of knowledge tend to be narrow. There is little need to be even moderately conversant in high levels of both language skills and knowledge and mathematical/scientific ones. Jobs, especially high-paying ones, on the whole tend to favor specialization. Most people have only limited intellectual curiosity once they settle into their careers. I'd bet most of us have forgotten at least 99% of everything we've ever learned, and certainly not pursued any sort of high level understanding of many fields that are not directly job related.

I do think it peculiar that you characterize humanities students exhibiting the very same lack of rounded abilities that math/science types do as somehow distinguishing themselves for their ignorance, while the math/science types having the very same shortcomings are not noted for doing so.

Also, I don't think Sklansky is any authority on this. There's hardly a post in which he doesn't either flatter himself or set up others to do it for him.