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)
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)