i kind of shudder at articles like this. but i do see their value in a general sense.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/21/the-need-for-belonging-in-math-and-science/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

personally, i probably would have rejected math if the program was organized more like an arts program.

see, ironically, i probably should have been studying art rather than math, and would have if the program was less focused on building social relationships.

as it is, i wasted a lot of time with something i wasn't interested in because it was the only program i could find that accommodated my lack of social skills.

as it turns out, i'm not the greatest mathematician in the world. however, i think a lack of social skills is something i share with mathematicians much more insightful than i am. moving to make the field more social is likely to have the effect of pushing them out to something else, where they can explore things by themselves.

...because it's the quiet, contemplative, intellectual isolation that has drawn them into math in the first place.

so, they need to be careful with this. it has the potential to create a lot of harm and havoc.

it's sort of enraging, even. this is one of the very few paths that an introvert can follow in this society on the way to some kind of comfortable existence. can you goddamned extroverts just fuck off and leave them alone? why do you have to constantly be meddling in everything?

rather than bring in all of these horrific social programs that are going to make the introverts miserable, why not focus on ensuring that follower-types of extroverted people that rely on external validation to define themselves go into, say, accounting, instead?

it seems to me like the failure here was in pushing catherine good into the wrong field of study.

...and the headline should say "sociable, needy people do not belong in math or science".