For many people, writing is hard even if they are good at math. It is why Verbal and Mathematical SAT scores do not perfectly correlate. It’s a different talent, and it will indeed filter people who don’t happen to have it. Even bad writing is hard—and if you can’t bear to write badly and don’t have the talent to write well, it’s much much worse. It filters people who want to do their jobs well and don’t happen to possess author talent, because they’ll revise, and revise, and revise, staring at their work and feeling the dreadful pain of how bad it is… yes, it’s a needless filter!
I asked a professor about this. She’s works at the University of Chicago, in philosophy, but she’s friends with a math professor she met as a grad student at Berkeley. Here’s what she said, so far as I remember it:
The selection process for math programs, at least at Berkeley, was a little funny. It wasn’t so hard to get into the program, but there was a very serious filter, a set of exams, about half way through that weeded about 50% of people out. If you passed that, you could go on to get the PhD, but even then, you really need to prove something to finish. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit though, so you don’t have to be super-genius or anything.
Once you get onto the job market, you are filtered for a lot of non-math skills. These are skills having to do with the upkeep of the profession: teaching, being a conscientious faculty member, etc. You’re also expected to write well and clearly.
I asked if this caused math talent to go to waste:
It might. Empirically, its very hard to say, since undeveloped talent is probably invisible. But remember that good math departments get hundreds and hundreds of applications every year for no more than a dozen positions. Most of the time, they don’t have to make trade offs: they can just go for people who are talented and good writers. There just isn’t money to fund all the strictly mathematically talented people, especially if they need the support of writers. Also, I doubt the really off the chart brilliant people ever get excluded for anything like writing ability, though they tend to be good writers too.
So what I took away from this was 1) I was wrong in thinking that math departments don’t care about math-extrinsic skills. 2) I was wrong to think these don’t filter people out. It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
EDIT: I might as well add that, needless to say, writing ability was considered important to philosophy too, and a filter at every level, but that’s not surprising. She didn’t have anything to tell me about physics.
It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
As it happens, a few months ago I saw an interesting paper examining the consequence of the fall of Soviet Russia and the subsequent exodus of top Russian mathematicians (with all their unique results and methods, obscure to the West) into the US. The upshot was that the effect was to push out of academia a lot of lower-ranked American mathematicians—it turned out to be a zero-sum environment… “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post‐1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower‐quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the pre‐existing American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.
can’t bear to write badly and don’t have the talent to write well
Wow. This is how I feel about my own writing, expressed more clearly than I could myself. I take ages to write a single sentence because none of the phrasings my brain suggests sound like the kind of thing that I’d want to read.
If you wish to write despite this struggle, I recommend breaking writing into two tasks: dumping and editing. Basically, force yourself to ignore the “kind of thing I’d want to read” feeling for as long as it takes to generate a bunch of sentences. Then you can turn those sentences into readable sentences, in editing.
This handy page will make it significantly easier to ignore the editing urge.
I think I should ask for empirical input at this point: is it your experience that good mathematicians or scientists are filtered out of academic advancement and access to research money and materials as a result of a poor showing in skills extrinsic to their field? By ‘extrinsic’ I mean skills that are neither necessary nor sufficient to do mathematical or scientific work well.
Well, it’s needless only if bad writing turns out to actually not interfere with their ability to do their jobs well… e.g., if their job doesn’t involve communicating clearly, or if it does but the way their writing is bad doesn’t interfere with clear communication.
For many people, writing is hard even if they are good at math. It is why Verbal and Mathematical SAT scores do not perfectly correlate. It’s a different talent, and it will indeed filter people who don’t happen to have it. Even bad writing is hard—and if you can’t bear to write badly and don’t have the talent to write well, it’s much much worse. It filters people who want to do their jobs well and don’t happen to possess author talent, because they’ll revise, and revise, and revise, staring at their work and feeling the dreadful pain of how bad it is… yes, it’s a needless filter!
I asked a professor about this. She’s works at the University of Chicago, in philosophy, but she’s friends with a math professor she met as a grad student at Berkeley. Here’s what she said, so far as I remember it:
I asked if this caused math talent to go to waste:
So what I took away from this was 1) I was wrong in thinking that math departments don’t care about math-extrinsic skills. 2) I was wrong to think these don’t filter people out. It hadn’t occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
EDIT: I might as well add that, needless to say, writing ability was considered important to philosophy too, and a filter at every level, but that’s not surprising. She didn’t have anything to tell me about physics.
As it happens, a few months ago I saw an interesting paper examining the consequence of the fall of Soviet Russia and the subsequent exodus of top Russian mathematicians (with all their unique results and methods, obscure to the West) into the US. The upshot was that the effect was to push out of academia a lot of lower-ranked American mathematicians—it turned out to be a zero-sum environment… “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”
Wow. This is how I feel about my own writing, expressed more clearly than I could myself. I take ages to write a single sentence because none of the phrasings my brain suggests sound like the kind of thing that I’d want to read.
If you wish to write despite this struggle, I recommend breaking writing into two tasks: dumping and editing. Basically, force yourself to ignore the “kind of thing I’d want to read” feeling for as long as it takes to generate a bunch of sentences. Then you can turn those sentences into readable sentences, in editing.
This handy page will make it significantly easier to ignore the editing urge.
I think I should ask for empirical input at this point: is it your experience that good mathematicians or scientists are filtered out of academic advancement and access to research money and materials as a result of a poor showing in skills extrinsic to their field? By ‘extrinsic’ I mean skills that are neither necessary nor sufficient to do mathematical or scientific work well.
Well, it’s needless only if bad writing turns out to actually not interfere with their ability to do their jobs well… e.g., if their job doesn’t involve communicating clearly, or if it does but the way their writing is bad doesn’t interfere with clear communication.