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

Well, in this case you're talking to someone who knows quite a bit about the stuff and is quite proficient with it, and who's telling you that you're.....well, what I've already said.

A .gov generalization, certainly - but when figures are pulled from Music school websites we find the majority of master pianists must be quite wealthy - and if not, refer to the .gov site because you're actually just a "musician" (Loser!). As a generalization, I submit that piano expertise as a sure path to "wealthy" seems the more specious one.

Are professional oboe players highly intelligent? How about pro drummers? Do I sense a superiority complex oozing out of the fabric here -- and if so, is it justified? (Piano players are awesome Wile E. Coyote super-geniuses who always smell delicious and pick the right wine to go with gnocchi. True fact. )

Is that because he used some words that you don't know the meaning of (serious question). He knows what a standard deviation is...that's great...but that doesn't mean he's interpreting the findings correctly.

(I meant me, my friend.)

Well just means that you aren't interpreting the findings correctly.

Yeah, you are correct. That's what I get for posting when I should go to bed.



And where, praytell, are you interpreting them in anything other than the most general terms? It's pretty obvious you have nothing to say, and are covering it up by throwing around big words.

"Deviation" is a big word for you!?

How are you failing to realize:
- Categorical sampling (the categories are acute enough)
- Sample overlap (with pianist population)
- Hypothesis testing (the simple stuff: with z critical values and p value rejection)
- The quartiles (or even devaitions from the mean) of the categories in question
- And so forth

All of this material is covered in earlier-intermediate stats courses.

The only reason you think the link is not sufficient evidence is simply because you do not understand the evidence. It is therefore gibberish to you, and you then think it has no meaning here.

I love how no one can provide a single piece of evidence, and instead just try to "disprove" me with, again, no evidence.

Statistics show this thread needs a good locking.

None of which you've provided for us to back up your claims, so there's no reason to comment on it. The burden of proof is on you here. MarkC hinted at it above, but I'll just come right out and say it. You're full of it.



WHAT AN AWESOME THREAD!!!!!!!

Yes, according to the statistics.

@Horowitzian
Are...are you serious? I don't need to "back up my claims" because those are not claims. Those are tools in statistics. They are things that are known and used in the discipline of statistics. I'm not trying to "prove" them. They just exist.

I'm saying that if you understand these things, then it's more obvious why the data that I linked is valid.

That's because you just don't understand the evidence. [insert insulting remark with passive aggressive smiley face here]

You said initially:



Absolutely a claim. One that you have not satisfactorily demonstrated. Nothing you offer has any mathematical rigor at all. Let's see your descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing.

Ooo...hypothetical stats fight!

How strong is the correlation between "silly questions we wish were true" being redrawn via "throwing statistics at it" as a way to legitimize the silly?

Fifteen years of my life were in R&D (research & development) side by side with rocket scientists, physicists, etc. More of them than would be expected did not understand subject/verb relationships. I did not find any of them dullards because of a tiny missing bit of knowledge.

Anyone who is a successful professional pianist must have considerable (metric ton level) working knowledge, perhaps some might even say high intelligence - at playing the piano. But in the real world genius often behaves like too much gut bacteria. Sometimes it's essential to digesting what's on the plate but most of the time it just makes gas.

What are you going on about? That isn't a "claim"...that's the natural state of things. In a hypothesis test, consider this to be our null hypothesis (h not). Therefore our alternative hypothesis (h sub a) is that there is significant gain in a composite IQ.

Consider our statistic variable mu to be the sample mean. Comparing the sample mean to the population mean, it is not greater than 2 standard deviations from the population mean. Therefore we can accept the null hypothesis thereby discarding the alternative hypothesis.

But you don't even need an HT for this...the actual claim here is "piano skill = more intelligence". That is what needs to be proved because the null hypothesis is that nothing has changed.

It is a claim. How do you know being a master pianist does not correlate with high IQ? You have no clue.

@JoelW
It's not a claim because it is the null hypothesis...

Do you even understand what you are spewing? Both the null and the alternative hypotheses are assumptions for the sake of experiment. If you are positively asserting the null hypothesis then you're making a claim, in which case you bear the burden of proof, as does anyone asserting that the is a correlation. All claims require evidence.

@JoelW
That is not how hypothesis testing works...the null hypothesis is assumed to be true from the beginning because it states no change in the system....therefore the null hypothesis does not need to be "proved". It's how things are by default.

(sigh)

The null hypothesis isn't some "default" truth which must be proven false. Both hypotheses exist neutrally, until evidence supports one over the other. You must test before concluding, that's why they're hypotheses. If there is good reason to be believe that the alternative hypothesis is correct, you accept it, and vice verse with the null. You only accept the null hypothesis if the relationship between both phenomena is likely accidental.

I'd like to bring up a separate point in that I believe there is in fact good reason to accept the alternative hypothesis with regards to master musicians and intelligence. Every masterful musician I've ever met is quite intelligent, not to mention all of the masterful musicians whose personalities are captured in countless interviews and personal writings. Don't try to persuade me that there is no correlation. I don't buy it.