<p>“They may be articulate-- they use vocabulary and complex sentence structures in their speech-- but the substance isn’t there; this is also known as bullsh**ing”</p>
<p>Ah, yes, I’ve heard this quite a bit – style over substance; Orwell describes this dichotomy in his “Politics and the English Language.” But I know of many people who are articulate/eloquent/all that jazz and who put much substance into their statements and arguments.</p>
<p>I still maintain that it’s possible to be mediocre in math yet show a strong sense of intelligence, critical thinking, and overall brilliance.</p>
<p>I used to think that I could get through any math without too much difficulty – but that was during a period of time when I hadn’t experienced much difficulty. I’ve since realized that even in higher math like calculus, I still come across things that I have difficulty grasping. As stupid as this may make me seem, before, I had difficulty understanding radians and it seriously hindered my ability to complete most of the work from the chapter. I could do certain operations that we learned in the chapter, mainly by mechanical memorization of steps instead of a knowledge of the deep structure of what I was doing. Why did I have such difficulty? Because I had preconceptions about radians and associated concepts that conflicted with what I was learning; I didn’t realize it at the time, and generally, people don’t realize that their own knowledge/assumptions are often the root of their inability to process new data.</p>
<p>In addition, there are certain things that make people “hate” math. For me, it’s making repeated mistakes (though I generally like math, just not certain parts). I usually get the material, but I may make constant mistakes. Perfect example: multiplying two matrices. Not the kind where you multiply each entry, but the kind where you have to multiply each entry in each row of the first matrix by each entry in each column of the second matrix, adding them together, etc. I abhor doing that, simply because my brain has difficulty “shifting” one matrix to multiply it with the other. To this day, it can take me a minute or two to multiply two (large) matrices.</p>
<p>At any rate, while I do think that competency in math is highly correlated with intelligence and that it and language constitute the main functions of the brain, I do not think that difficulty with higher math means that a person has difficulty with “higher levels of thought,” nor do I think that a math wiz is obviously intelligent, or that hating or disliking math is any sort of reflection of one’s abilities or character.</p>