[NickM]

I think you might be missing the point of the article: the study being cited isn't trying to establish the existence of a "language brain" or a "math brain", that's just the way the headline editorialized it to help people understand the conclusions.

The conclusion of the study was that linguistic aptitude seemed to be more correlated with programming aptitude than mathematical aptitude, which seems fairly interesting, and also fairly unconcerned with which specific physical regions in the brain might happen to be involved.

[godelski]

I understood it.

  > The conclusion of the study was that linguistic aptitude seemed to be more correlated with programming aptitude than mathematical aptitude

And this is what I'm pushing back against and where I think you've misinterpreted.

  > They found that how well students learned Python was mostly explained by general cognitive abilities (problem solving and working memory), while how quickly they learned was explained by both general cognitive skills and language aptitude.

I made the claim that these are in fact math skills, but most people confuse with arithmetic. Math is a language. It is a language we created to help with abstraction. Code is math. There's no question about this. Go look into lambda calculus and the Church-Turing Thesis. There is much more in this direction too. And of course, we should have a clear connection to connect it all if you're able to see some abstraction.

[seadan83]

> Math is a language.

Language is not math, therefore math is not language.

[godelski]

Logic doesn't follow.

There is no problem with A -> B ∧ B -/-> A

Here's an example. "I live in San Francisco" would imply "I live in the US". But "I live in the US" does not mean "I live in San Francisco".

Here's a more formal representation of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijection,_injection_and_surje...

[seadan83]

The word "is", maps to the logical "equals" operator. I agree with the example, but I don't agree it is relevant. There is no implies operator.

The statement "Math is Language", where A is Math and B is Language, maps to the logical assertion: "A = B".

If we are going to really be kinda twisty and non-standard, we could interpret the english "is" to be "is an equivalence class of". Which would map to your example pretty well: language is indeed an equivalence class of math, but math is not an equivalence class of language. Though, nobody is talking about implies operator or equivalence class here.. It's a "is" relationship, logical *equals*

[seba_dos1]

> The word "is", maps to the logical "equals" operator.

It very obviously doesn't. A square is a rectangle. seadan83 is (probably) a mammal. Math is a language.

[seadan83]

You point out the "is a" relationship, not the "is" relationship, they are different. [0]

Find examples with two singular nouns and just the word 'is'.

The phrase in question: 'Math is language' is an example, or something like 'food is love' is too. I concede you could interpret those last few sentences with poetic license to be read more like: "A is a form of B", or "A is a B" - though that is not what was written and this is not a place to expect that much poetic license.

*edit*: a minute later, thought of a good example. "ice is water". True that "ice is a form of water", but strictly speaking no, "ice is not water". I'll concede there could exist an implied "is a", or an implied "is a form of", but that is poetic license IMO.

[0] Google AI summarized it pretty well: google "logical "is a" vs logical "is"

> In logic, "is" typically represents an equality relation, while "is a" (or "is of the type") represents an inclusion relation. "Is" indicates that two things are the same or identical, while "is a" indicates that one thing is a member of a larger class or set of things

[prmph]

The point is that linguistic aptitude _is_ math aptitude, and vice versa.

From my experience, my ability to articulate myself well is bound up with my ability to abstract and detect patterns. It is the same thing I apply to crafting software, the same thing I apply to creating visual art.

I think high-cognitive-ability people segregating themselves into artsy vs mathy people has more to do with their experiences in their formative years.