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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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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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Well I’d say the traditional liberal arts pre-dates that divide. Both cultures have their roots in it. I think you’re emphasizing an element of STEM culture that is most similar to the pre-divide mother culture.
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That I can agree with. To me a good sociologist for example, is someone with a rich understanding of the historical context of specific societies they've studied, with lots of qualitative and quantitative raw info. Not somebody who zips through town in a day and starts theorizing