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The result is, that you can see the problem itself rather than being blinded by the selection of arbitrary pieces of possible solutions that you happen to understand. This is a failure mode I see often when non STEMies try to process technical knowledge.
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Say there's a dozen core concepts in a technical subject, like statistics. Let's say you have low technical aptitude in general, but it just so happens that you understand 3 things and are mystified by 9 things. Maybe you grok mean, standard deviation, and confidence interval
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You will tend to over-apply these 3 concepts in seeing things through a statistics lens. You cannot "see" artistically through statistics, because you didn't internalize enough of the science. Instead of art-and-science-of-X, you're stuck at partial-science-of-X.
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The error of assuming any STEMmie will magically know everything about any technical topic (trope of the Hollywood uber-geek) is the other side of it: projecting your own incompleteness of science-of-X into unreasonable mastery perceptions. That's not what STEM training does
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STEM training is anxiety inoculation. An engineer too may only know 3 of the required dozen core concepts to grok a problem. The diff is, they typically won't obsessively grip what they know in order to think. They stay with fuzzy views rather than trusting distorted ones.
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Most engineers I know are not intimidated by *any* technical area except for the ones that require truly esoteric math. But this does not mean they must suffer from either false confidence or fearful anchoring on what they know.
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Instead, they have a sense of where they are incompetent, but don't identify with their incompetence. It's just an area where they haven't put in the time to get competent. This means, incompetence does not blind the artistic eye or get them into "partial science-of-X" stuckness.
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Instead, good techies tend to have a meta-awareness of where they have, and have not, earned an "artistic eye" level of mastery, and pick their battles within those artistry zones (unless it's a learning project, in which case it's required to wander into partial-science zones)
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Replying to
This sounds a lot like the ideals of a liberal arts education. Except there the goal is to spread this attitude over the full domain of human knowledge. I see a lot of STEMmies shed this epistemic modesty when they touch on arts and humanities topics.
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Replying to and
I'll admit to strong bias here. I see a lot of high-ignorance immodesty within the humanities on their own turf. This has been one of the rotting effects of pomo-ization of social science/humanities. Language games becoming a substitute for domain legwork.
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I agree with some of those critiques. But as someone with a foot on both sides of the divide, STEM has its own issues. A totalizing impulse, a faddish enthusiasm for the new, too much reverence for math (the queen of all language games), blindness to institution effects, etc.
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