Hi, thought I'd drop by.
EQ: 66
SQ: 27
I assume everyone here is autistic? I am a 24 year old male mathematical researcher. My interests lie mainly in pure mathematics (graph theory, combinatorics of finite sets). [I like theorems like Menger's theorem on graph connectivity and the perfect graph theorem, the EKR theorem, the union closed sets conjecture of Frankl has to be the best conjecture for me.]
I am quite an emotional person. I cry all the time watching movies etc. Sporting events also, although the only sporting event that actually I remember making me cry was the finale of the F1 season in 2008 (formula one). Lewis Hamilton vs Felipe Massa, Ham wins at the last corner of the entire season by passing Timo Glock to take 5th/6th place, I can't remember.
Federer vs Nadal, Federer vs Roddick, in 2008 and 2009 resp. make me a bit emotional. I never get that emotional about team sports, only individual sports. Those are the Wimbledon finals, obviously.
I'm just going to opine/vent a bit (more). Mathematics has a reputation for autistic practitioners, although 95% of mathematicians are in no way autistic. The point is, the autistic strike rate is so low in the general population already, that a few% is (relatively) quite a lot.
I find it kind of foolish to argue against prenatal screening for autism on that basis [anyway, if autism disappeared overnight, mathematics as a discipline would be pretty much unchanged]. It should be a moral thing. Anything that reduces the diversity of people really bugs me.
Anywho, the test clearly does detect autistic or Asperger's tendencies. However it's still pathetically transparent, from my point of view. Particularly the "SQ" part. I know it says "don't think about it", but the questions are so obvious. It's like slapping you in the face, and asking you not to think about it. Impossible. I scored 27 on the SQ. If it had been on mathematics, I could have scored 100. Instead it was on everyday stuff like finance and accounting, which I neither know nor care anything about.
The EQ thing is pretty much the truth. The SQ test I answered honestly but it seemed pathetic. In fact "systemising" anyhow is a pathetic term. The idea that that somehow encompasses engineering, math, physics, biology is just stupid. It's so vague as to be meaningless. It's like saying figure skating and formula one racing both go round in circles; it tells you nothing about figure skating or about formula one racing.
Talking about transparency (in a questionnaire this is a bad thing), Simon Baron Cohen did a questionnaire and found that cambridge mathematics students scored average 22.4 vs 16.7 on the general student population. But like three of the questions in the questionnaire (that's 3 points) were like "do you like patterns in numbers?", which is like saying, "do you like maths at all?" That's 3 points right there. And we all know maths is a bit nerdy, so 19.4 vs 16.7 is nothing to write home about. I guess it reflects the infantile state of the science (not an insult, just the truth).
You have to ask, if a correlation is sufficiently weak, do we need to know? These kind of things can be self-fulfilling prophecies, do we really need people to scientifically "prove" that maths is nerdy? [It is quite nerdy, at least in England, France and to a lesser extent USA - in Europe generally, for example, most maths undergrads (although not profs) are women.]
06 Dec 2009, 9:59 pm
