I understood him, when speaking of STEM fields and music/jazz, to be discussing pushing boundaries on existing knowledge. Most people in STEM just apply other peoples knowledge to build or test or make things. Some people have to have imagination to try something new, or see the same thing from a new perspective to create something new. There are a lot of different skill sets in STEM that take people on different career paths and trajectories.
Thanks, Amy. I grew up playing jazz and understand the analogy in the same way, but while I find it compelling in a poetic sense, I'm not sure it goes all the way through in the real world. For instance, there are musicians who play entirely by feel, can't read a lick, and happen to be some of the greatest, most innovative players I've ever encountered. How exactly does this translate to the physics lab?
The other piece that I found strained was the implicit notion that students who excel in one dimension must therefore be deficient in the other, and that by selecting for the first in admissions standards, you are effectively skewing the racial makeup of the student body.
How it applies in the physics lab would be in the asking of a new question (like Einstein did with his relativity thought experiments, even though his math skills sucked), coming up with a new way to test a hypothesis (Rosalind Franklin using X-ray crystallography to “photograph” DNA), or have a new interpretation on someone else’s work (obviously lots of examples of this, but noting it’s hard to go against perceived settled science that takes a different kind of thinker/contrarian ).
I understood the feeling vs experience thing a bit differently. In science there is knowledge and intuition, knowledge impacts your ability to solve the problem and intuition impacts how you solve the problem. Or if you rather, there’s the math skills that let you sit down and apply the formulas and there’s the imagination that lets you model the problem mentally. You really need both, but usually people are stronger in one than the other. Probably most people who are successful are good at both, but one is still a relative strength. I think his argument is that the testing only finds the knowledge, and ignores the value of the intuition.
Cheers, Amy. I think we're mostly on the same page, and I can certainly understand how something like intuition might be undervalued on the SAT, but I maintain that the metaphor is imperfect, particularly as Gates emphasizes jazz. In the end, all the great jazz innovators also had "chops" -- they weren't "non-musicians" of the Brian Eno ilk. Eno is a brilliant producer, but his talents are only manifested with the input of real players.
Much is made of Einstein's shortcomings as a student -- it is a trope of sorts, and indeed you and I both invoke it above -- but he also had serious math and physics chops, which were evident at a young age. I'm quite certain he would have aced the quantitative portions of a modern aptitude test.
The role of cultural diversity in the development of music is very real, but I think this gets conflated somewhat with the "dimensions of knowledge" argument. Gates mentions the influence of American music on Dvorak. Of course, it was the modes of Eastern music that helped propel jazz into the post-bop era. And the roots of American music itself lie in a wonderful amalgamation of diverse traditions. Going back to physics, however, I don't see the same potential for a set of diverse traditions to blend in the lab or the lecture hall. What exactly are those traditions? In my mind, this is where physics and music are different. Music sits at the base of human experience: most cultures have a rich musical tradition. Physics is esoteric.
So first, let me admit I am not at all a music person. In fact, I may be completely wired backwards with respect to emotional reactions to it. Also, I have no desire to speak for the professor, he clearly is very skilled at that. That said, I respectfully submit you may be taking the metaphor too literally. The professor seems used to for lack of a better word “dumbing” down physics to be understood by a general audience, and music is an analogy that a general audience gets…
Perhaps the SAT/GRE analogy is to reading music? You can pay an instrument by ear without ever.reading music and have amazing skill. It is my understanding that at one point schools rejected amazing musicians because they couldn’t read music. It is a lot easier to learn to read music than to learn to have a musical ear, so a lot of talent in this scenario went unrecognized. Similarly, I suspect not every mind-blowingly talented concert pianists could ever improvise. That’s okay! They are just totally different skill sets!
Similarly, he’s talking about moving physics forward… that doesn’t only take “concert pianists” it also takes the self learned, by ear musicians who don’t know enough about music theory to be constrained by it…? Of course in physics you need math, but contrary to your assertion that Einstein had serious math chops, it is my understanding that he did not (that his wife and research partners went through the tedious math proofs to prove his intuition, but who knows… everyone hijacks Einstein for their own pet theory). I heard his argument to be a simple warning that if we judge purely on math skills on tests we miss a whole lot of levels of thinking. I agree with this just from personal experience.
I don’t know that, per se it’s culture that makes the difference. I’m not sure if you picked the best at math from 5 cultures that you’d have the best team. I think you’d do best to pick 5 people that are all good at math and think differently. I think the issue is how you decide “good at math”. I think too often we have unnecessary binaries between capable and not, and I heard him hesitant to say a person is in the “not” category because they didn’t get a 800 on the math SAT. I could get out my personal soapbox… but that was the impression I got.
For you particular example, of people I am unfamiliar with… (sorry!) Brian Eno Ilk being a great producer but a less talented musician on his own is exactly the point! Science these days is based on teams, and to go back to the jazz metaphor, teams are what enable people working together to really shine. Study after study have shown diversity (not merely racial, but of experience) make for better, more productive groups and help to overcome groupthink.
All good points, Amy. I think we may have to agree to disagree on this one aspect even as we are mostly in agreement on the larger issue.
This whole discussion makes me think of one of Val Kilmer's first movies, "Real Genius", which explores the space between what might be called "measurable" smarts and the less tangible counterpart. Now, the science in the story is pure fantasy, and it has been mocked as such (in my opinion, unfairly -- it is 80s teen comedy after all!), but it draws on very real ideas about well-roundedness and social barriers to learning. In the movie, the character played by Kilmer has an epiphany that supposedly leads to a huge advancement in the science of lasers, and it is brought on by a spiritual breakdown of sorts.
In real life, I wonder how much scientific advancement is revelatory in nature, and how much can be attributed to sustained "outside-the-box" thinking.
Eli, I think perhaps there is a bias about thinking about individual super intelligent outliers. If you consider physics (and most science for that matter) is done now on complex and expensive equipment in fairly large teams, then diversity of viewpoint, thinking, and experience within that group becomes more clearly relevant. You know, like the adage, “it takes all kinds.” And if you know many scientists, especially physicists, they definitely come in some strong flavors… =)
I understood him, when speaking of STEM fields and music/jazz, to be discussing pushing boundaries on existing knowledge. Most people in STEM just apply other peoples knowledge to build or test or make things. Some people have to have imagination to try something new, or see the same thing from a new perspective to create something new. There are a lot of different skill sets in STEM that take people on different career paths and trajectories.
Thanks, Amy. I grew up playing jazz and understand the analogy in the same way, but while I find it compelling in a poetic sense, I'm not sure it goes all the way through in the real world. For instance, there are musicians who play entirely by feel, can't read a lick, and happen to be some of the greatest, most innovative players I've ever encountered. How exactly does this translate to the physics lab?
The other piece that I found strained was the implicit notion that students who excel in one dimension must therefore be deficient in the other, and that by selecting for the first in admissions standards, you are effectively skewing the racial makeup of the student body.
How it applies in the physics lab would be in the asking of a new question (like Einstein did with his relativity thought experiments, even though his math skills sucked), coming up with a new way to test a hypothesis (Rosalind Franklin using X-ray crystallography to “photograph” DNA), or have a new interpretation on someone else’s work (obviously lots of examples of this, but noting it’s hard to go against perceived settled science that takes a different kind of thinker/contrarian ).
I understood the feeling vs experience thing a bit differently. In science there is knowledge and intuition, knowledge impacts your ability to solve the problem and intuition impacts how you solve the problem. Or if you rather, there’s the math skills that let you sit down and apply the formulas and there’s the imagination that lets you model the problem mentally. You really need both, but usually people are stronger in one than the other. Probably most people who are successful are good at both, but one is still a relative strength. I think his argument is that the testing only finds the knowledge, and ignores the value of the intuition.
Cheers, Amy. I think we're mostly on the same page, and I can certainly understand how something like intuition might be undervalued on the SAT, but I maintain that the metaphor is imperfect, particularly as Gates emphasizes jazz. In the end, all the great jazz innovators also had "chops" -- they weren't "non-musicians" of the Brian Eno ilk. Eno is a brilliant producer, but his talents are only manifested with the input of real players.
Much is made of Einstein's shortcomings as a student -- it is a trope of sorts, and indeed you and I both invoke it above -- but he also had serious math and physics chops, which were evident at a young age. I'm quite certain he would have aced the quantitative portions of a modern aptitude test.
The role of cultural diversity in the development of music is very real, but I think this gets conflated somewhat with the "dimensions of knowledge" argument. Gates mentions the influence of American music on Dvorak. Of course, it was the modes of Eastern music that helped propel jazz into the post-bop era. And the roots of American music itself lie in a wonderful amalgamation of diverse traditions. Going back to physics, however, I don't see the same potential for a set of diverse traditions to blend in the lab or the lecture hall. What exactly are those traditions? In my mind, this is where physics and music are different. Music sits at the base of human experience: most cultures have a rich musical tradition. Physics is esoteric.
So first, let me admit I am not at all a music person. In fact, I may be completely wired backwards with respect to emotional reactions to it. Also, I have no desire to speak for the professor, he clearly is very skilled at that. That said, I respectfully submit you may be taking the metaphor too literally. The professor seems used to for lack of a better word “dumbing” down physics to be understood by a general audience, and music is an analogy that a general audience gets…
Perhaps the SAT/GRE analogy is to reading music? You can pay an instrument by ear without ever.reading music and have amazing skill. It is my understanding that at one point schools rejected amazing musicians because they couldn’t read music. It is a lot easier to learn to read music than to learn to have a musical ear, so a lot of talent in this scenario went unrecognized. Similarly, I suspect not every mind-blowingly talented concert pianists could ever improvise. That’s okay! They are just totally different skill sets!
Similarly, he’s talking about moving physics forward… that doesn’t only take “concert pianists” it also takes the self learned, by ear musicians who don’t know enough about music theory to be constrained by it…? Of course in physics you need math, but contrary to your assertion that Einstein had serious math chops, it is my understanding that he did not (that his wife and research partners went through the tedious math proofs to prove his intuition, but who knows… everyone hijacks Einstein for their own pet theory). I heard his argument to be a simple warning that if we judge purely on math skills on tests we miss a whole lot of levels of thinking. I agree with this just from personal experience.
I don’t know that, per se it’s culture that makes the difference. I’m not sure if you picked the best at math from 5 cultures that you’d have the best team. I think you’d do best to pick 5 people that are all good at math and think differently. I think the issue is how you decide “good at math”. I think too often we have unnecessary binaries between capable and not, and I heard him hesitant to say a person is in the “not” category because they didn’t get a 800 on the math SAT. I could get out my personal soapbox… but that was the impression I got.
For you particular example, of people I am unfamiliar with… (sorry!) Brian Eno Ilk being a great producer but a less talented musician on his own is exactly the point! Science these days is based on teams, and to go back to the jazz metaphor, teams are what enable people working together to really shine. Study after study have shown diversity (not merely racial, but of experience) make for better, more productive groups and help to overcome groupthink.
All good points, Amy. I think we may have to agree to disagree on this one aspect even as we are mostly in agreement on the larger issue.
This whole discussion makes me think of one of Val Kilmer's first movies, "Real Genius", which explores the space between what might be called "measurable" smarts and the less tangible counterpart. Now, the science in the story is pure fantasy, and it has been mocked as such (in my opinion, unfairly -- it is 80s teen comedy after all!), but it draws on very real ideas about well-roundedness and social barriers to learning. In the movie, the character played by Kilmer has an epiphany that supposedly leads to a huge advancement in the science of lasers, and it is brought on by a spiritual breakdown of sorts.
In real life, I wonder how much scientific advancement is revelatory in nature, and how much can be attributed to sustained "outside-the-box" thinking.
Eli, I think perhaps there is a bias about thinking about individual super intelligent outliers. If you consider physics (and most science for that matter) is done now on complex and expensive equipment in fairly large teams, then diversity of viewpoint, thinking, and experience within that group becomes more clearly relevant. You know, like the adage, “it takes all kinds.” And if you know many scientists, especially physicists, they definitely come in some strong flavors… =)