Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Are professional pianists highly intelligent?

Pro pianists could be highly intelligent, but may lack proper socials skills.

Pro rock guitarists on the other hand could be of questionable intelligence, but have all the social excesses!!

@Mark_C
Wow! You even fail to provide evidence to that claim! I really hope your discipline is not in any of the sciences, engineering or otherwise logic-intensive fields. If so, I pity your employer

I pity someone who has nothing better to do than sit here and read this thread.

(That would be me.)

Atrys, you're being kind of blind here, and I suspect it's on purpose.

The thing in my above post doesn't need any "evidence," because what you said is plainly, simply, incorrect. It's a simple error of reasoning. Some things, y'know, are just incorrect, like 2 + 2 = 5.

Allow me to quote your original post.



No, it doesn't. But it also doesn't mean that the best of the best aren't necessarily also highly intelligent. As I state above, ascending Parnassus is no mean feat. Those that make it certainly are intelligent.



That category paints musicians with a rather broad brush, don't you think? I don't know for sure, but that category seems like a composite of a lot of different disciplines that may be considered under the umbrella of "The Arts".



The burden of proof is on you here. Show us specific data relating to musicians vs. mathematicians/physicists/engineers. The statistics quoted are far too broad and do not apply.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if he came in here and started arguing that.

But 2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2.

My condolences.


Agreed! But the overlap and quartile of the category is enough to extrapolate from (statistical hypothesis testing, etc)


I don't need to because that is not my claim. My claim is fully supported by the single link above. This is how easy it is: look at the table, consider the quartiles and the standard deviation.

I think many of you just don't understand statistics enough to realize their strength. I'm not an expert, but I don't have to be. Even a single upper division stats course teaches enough to understand the data here (and the methods that can be used to extrapolate).

The median hourly wage for musicians and singers was $23.50 in May 2012.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm

Does an intelligent person follow a career path that pays well or one that they love? The answer to this is likely the answer to whether professional pianists are highly intelligent.

Absolutely !!

And not "musicians" in general but "master pianists."

@carey
Yet another failure to understand what a standard deviation is, and how to understand statistical evidence.

I think I take back everything I ever said about re-upping old threads.

Perfectly said, Horowitzian.

As my 12th grade teacher noted when grading one of my less inspired English compositions, "happy generalizations!!"



That would depend on one's definition of "intelligence." Smart folks usually understand that there's more to life than $$$.

Ask me if I care. On second thought, never mind.

You can worry about it even less. It was a blind person talking about what he sees.

IBTL.

Well, I'm done with this one. I'm pretty sure we all know which person in this discussion doesn't understand statistics. Especially if s/he thinks that those incredibly broad numbers grabbed from a website are useful in any way. Basically all they tell you is the standard deviation and that 95% of the population is within two standard deviations. Tell us something we don't know. There is a time and a place to expect a certain level of mathematical competence from the reader; a piano forum is not that place.

And data is in a form that is difficult to manipulate if one wanted to plug it into statistical software (R, Minitab, etc) to do their own analysis (descriptive statistics, distributions, etc).



I do my best...

@Horowitzian
Lol! I don't know where you took your stats courses, but you definitely are not interpreting the findings comprehensively

(The only thing wrong with his post was that he meant 2 standard deviations.)

@Mark_C
There are plenty of other things he is not accounting for. I'm loving this confirmation bias as a platform for argumentum ad ignorantiam