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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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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:D you may have a foot in both, but it's clear which leg you're putting more weight on
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Well I do have an emotional instinct to root for the underdog. And I see the humanities and liberal arts side of the house in retreat everywhere (funding, prestige, respect in the discourse, etc). And when I look around I see negative effects of that imbalance.
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