"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:486dea67@news.povray.org...

> For some reason, we live in a culture where it is seen as "desirable" to
> not be cleaver.

I had something cleaver to say about that, but I'll let it pass.

> People who are good at football are regarded as gods,
> but anybody who claims to be good at (say) trigonometry is regarded as a
> pathetic failure of a human being.

There's a difference between being good at something, and being good at
something and not anything else.

> Yes... this is my life...
>
> Everybody hated me for being the "teacher's pet". Just because *they*
> were a bunch of thick idiots... :-P

Again, being a "teacher's pet" is quite different from being good at math.
It's the attitude and self-presentation, not what you may or may not know
about obscure subjects, that's key in social interactions.

> So the question arrises... why does the media always portray technically
> talented people as freaks and weirdos? And why does it constantly
> reinforce the idea that mathematics is "hard", and that only "geniuses"
> can comprehend it? Where did all this come from?

Math is not easy, but that's not the point. It's that socially clumsy people
tend to take solace in focusing their energies into solitary endavours like
math, chess, bug collecting... etc. That's fine as long as one is aware that
being good at math will not do anything about acceptance while the root
cause of the social awkwardness remains, so he does not raise false hopes
and end up even more bitter.

As to math itself, beyond the rudimentary, it's useless for most people in
their daily lives. Also, watching someone do sports is entertaining.
Watching someone do math is not, so it's hard to blame the society for not
putting math geeks on a pedestal.

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