Reading this makes me angry because of the things he so confidently gets wrong (always fun to have a dude clearly describe a phenomenon he is clearly experiencing as “mostly female”).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t QC an actual math prodigy, like was specifically well known for his mathematical ability? I would venture to say it’s non-obvious that he is the one experiencing a phenomenon attributed to people bad at math.
Additionally, prodigies are amongst the most likely people to experience this, because they spend so much of their early life being the best in the room. Math grad students aren’t comparing themselves to the 8 billion people who are worse than them at math, they’re comparing themselves to each other, field leaders, and dead people who accomplished more at a given age.
I think she meant he was looking for epistemic authority figures to defer to more broadly, even if it wasn’t because he thought they were better at math than him.
This was also my read (and, while I don’t have links onhand and might be misremembering, I think he has other twitter threads that basically state this explicitly)
to have a dude clearly describe a phenomenon he is clearly experiencing as “mostly female”
as “he makes a claim about a thought pattern he considers mostly female”, not as “he himself is described by the pattern” (QC does demonstrate high epistemic confidence in that post).
Thus, I don’t think that Elizabeth would disagree with you.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t QC an actual math prodigy, like was specifically well known for his mathematical ability? I would venture to say it’s non-obvious that he is the one experiencing a phenomenon attributed to people bad at math.
The phenomenon extends beyond math
Additionally, prodigies are amongst the most likely people to experience this, because they spend so much of their early life being the best in the room. Math grad students aren’t comparing themselves to the 8 billion people who are worse than them at math, they’re comparing themselves to each other, field leaders, and dead people who accomplished more at a given age.
I think she meant he was looking for epistemic authority figures to defer to more broadly, even if it wasn’t because he thought they were better at math than him.
This was also my read (and, while I don’t have links onhand and might be misremembering, I think he has other twitter threads that basically state this explicitly)
I read
as “he makes a claim about a thought pattern he considers mostly female”, not as “he himself is described by the pattern” (QC does demonstrate high epistemic confidence in that post). Thus, I don’t think that Elizabeth would disagree with you.