You might have gone too far with speculation—your theory can be tested. If your model was true, I would expect a correlation between, say, the ability to learn ball sports and the ability to solve mathematical problems. It is not immediately obvious how to run such an experiment, though.
Sports/math is an obvious thing to check, but I’m not sure whether it quite gets at the thing Val is pointing at.
I’d guess that there are a few clusters of behaviors and adaptations for different type of movement. I think predicting where a ball will end up doesn’t require… I’m not sure I have a better word than “reasoning”.
In the Distinctions in Types of Thought sense, my guess is that for babies first learning how to move, their brain is doing something Effortful, which hasn’t been cached down to the level of S1 intuition. But they’re probably not doing something sequential. You can get better at it just by throwing more data at the learning algorithm. Things like math have more to do with the skill of carving up surprising data into new chunks, and the ability to make new predictions with sequential reasoning.
My understanding is that “everything good-associated tends to be correlated with everything else good”, a la wealth/height/g-factor so I think I expect sports/math to be at least somewhat correlated. But I think especially good ball players are probably maxed out on a different adaptation-to-execute than especially good math-problem-solvers.
I do agree that it’d be really good to formulate the movement/social distinction hypothesis into something that made some concrete predictions, and/or delve into some of the surrounding literature a bit more. (I’d be interested in a review of Where Mathematics Comes From)
You might have gone too far with speculation—your theory can be tested.
I think that’s good, isn’t it? :-D
If your model was true, I would expect a correlation between, say, the ability to learn ball sports and the ability to solve mathematical problems.
Maybe…? I think it’s more complicated than I read this implying. But yes, I expect the abilities to learn to be somewhat correlated, even if the actualized skills aren’t.
Part of the challenge is that math reasoning seems to coopt parts of the mind that normally get used for other things. So instead of mentally rehearsing a physical movement in a way that’s connected to how your body can actually move and feel, the mind mentally rehearses the behavior (!) of some abstract mathematical object in ways that don’t necessarily map onto anything your physical body can do.
I suspect that closeness to physical doability is one of the main differences between “pure” mathematical thinking and engineering-style thinking, especially engineering that’s involved with physical materials (e.g., mechanical, electrical — as opposed to software). And yes, this is testable, because it suggests that engineers will tend to have developed more physical coordination than mathematicians relative to their starting points. (This is still tricky to test, because people aren’t randomly sorted into mathematicians vs. engineers, so their starting abilities with learning physical coordination might be different. But if we can figure out a way to test this claim, I’d be delighted to look at what the truth has to say about this!)
You might have gone too far with speculation—your theory can be tested. If your model was true, I would expect a correlation between, say, the ability to learn ball sports and the ability to solve mathematical problems. It is not immediately obvious how to run such an experiment, though.
Sports/math is an obvious thing to check, but I’m not sure whether it quite gets at the thing Val is pointing at.
I’d guess that there are a few clusters of behaviors and adaptations for different type of movement. I think predicting where a ball will end up doesn’t require… I’m not sure I have a better word than “reasoning”.
In the Distinctions in Types of Thought sense, my guess is that for babies first learning how to move, their brain is doing something Effortful, which hasn’t been cached down to the level of S1 intuition. But they’re probably not doing something sequential. You can get better at it just by throwing more data at the learning algorithm. Things like math have more to do with the skill of carving up surprising data into new chunks, and the ability to make new predictions with sequential reasoning.
My understanding is that “everything good-associated tends to be correlated with everything else good”, a la wealth/height/g-factor so I think I expect sports/math to be at least somewhat correlated. But I think especially good ball players are probably maxed out on a different adaptation-to-execute than especially good math-problem-solvers.
I do agree that it’d be really good to formulate the movement/social distinction hypothesis into something that made some concrete predictions, and/or delve into some of the surrounding literature a bit more. (I’d be interested in a review of Where Mathematics Comes From)
I think that’s good, isn’t it? :-D
Maybe…? I think it’s more complicated than I read this implying. But yes, I expect the abilities to learn to be somewhat correlated, even if the actualized skills aren’t.
Part of the challenge is that math reasoning seems to coopt parts of the mind that normally get used for other things. So instead of mentally rehearsing a physical movement in a way that’s connected to how your body can actually move and feel, the mind mentally rehearses the behavior (!) of some abstract mathematical object in ways that don’t necessarily map onto anything your physical body can do.
I suspect that closeness to physical doability is one of the main differences between “pure” mathematical thinking and engineering-style thinking, especially engineering that’s involved with physical materials (e.g., mechanical, electrical — as opposed to software). And yes, this is testable, because it suggests that engineers will tend to have developed more physical coordination than mathematicians relative to their starting points. (This is still tricky to test, because people aren’t randomly sorted into mathematicians vs. engineers, so their starting abilities with learning physical coordination might be different. But if we can figure out a way to test this claim, I’d be delighted to look at what the truth has to say about this!)