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Comment by ltbarcly3 | Hacker News Reader

The humanities ARE easy.

This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math / Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English or Journalism.

Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in Physics???? HA!

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I knew someone who majored in Physics, let it go to their head, and took an introductory Linguistics course, dismissively saying it would be an easy A. They flunked the class, admittedly with no shortage of schadenfreude on my part. I also knew plenty of programmers who gravitated to CS in large part _because_ they wouldn't have to do much writing. People who were great at taming the computer but could barely string coherent sentences together, let alone meaningfully exploring the human condition. Something that turns out to be incredibly relevant when building software that, in some form or another, responds to and shapes that condition. If anything, tech as we know it is demonstrably suffering from a lack of exposure to the humanities.

What might look to you like "giving up" often more closely resembles "finding one's strengths". Not everyone is good at STEM, true, but then again that's not the problem with your attitude. It's the implication that having an aptitude outside of STEM entails some kind of intellectual deficit.

No, but I know very few STEMy people who can discuss human culture with any depth or nuance beyond the rudiments of modern liberalism or some undeveloped intuition for Enlightenment ideals. One of them is a programmer who got a degree in English. Go figure?

I avoided doubling up in a humanities precisely because the course load seemed like it would be too much. Give me a differential equation or Lie algebra any day. Engaging human beings in complex arguments is exhausting. Mathematics studies concepts simple enough to compress to a few pages of symbols. The difference is, I am as in love with mathematics as I am with English, or history, or philosophy. I can imagine manifold ways for a person to be duped into a STEM program at first (most of them being kin to the threat of economic uncertainty without a highly paid professional job) only to abandon it when they could not engage with the work enough to do it well.

Interesting assumption, but it could be that the humanities are more engaging than STEM fields, so people are likely to convert to them, but not go the other way. Maybe people are more likely to be unwillingly driven in STEM, but more likely to actively choose the humanities. All those silly assumptions explain the same behaviors. I'm sure that the situation is more complex than that.

It's not complex at all. There is a large group of people that try to major in STEM but find it too hard, or can't pass the math classes. This is often because they can't pass the tests. This is often despite substantial tutoring and serious effort, and multiple attempts to pass the class. The same person breezes through whichever humanities curriculum, and the 'Physics for Poets' class they have to take to satisfy their 'Quantitative Reasoning' requirement.

I can't say because I haven't seen the numbers on this. Even though I've got a philosophy degree I really need some solid quantification before I'll believe claims like that. For instance, do engineering graduates that do philosophy courses on average perform better in them than philosophy graduates?

edit: Also what's your take on why Freshmen have diverged from high-school students in recent years? What changed?

Anecdote N=1

I majored in comp. sci. minored in phil. I spent the majority of my time working through the technical classes, I kind of mailed it in for the philosophy classes, and got B's. I would have liked to spend more time 'trying' in the philosophy classes, but I really just didn't have it to spend. Some of them were really quite interesting.

I guess this doesn't really answer your question, because I know people got A's in the classes I got B's in, but it might provide perspective into why an engineering major didn't ace all their 400 level phil. classes.

I'd like to clear up at least one place where you and justin_vanw are talking past each other:

At many engineering schools, the humanities are a joke.

They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.

Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this perception.

I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.

I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal-arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the classes there was.

Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school, in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.

This makes a heap of sense! I think though that we are on the same page with this, that there are a bunch of complexities that it is very tempting to simplify away in explanations of the differences between the fields.

The sciences ARE easy. You don't have to learn how to write. (many, MANY science/engineering students end up picking this path because they cannot write). You don't have to read ANYTHING complicated. Every single thing you read has been tailor-fit to be as easy to understand as possible. Notation has been invented to make it easier for you to understand things. Everything that's explained to you in your entire academic career is god's truth with no room for error; you never have to doubt or think or reconsider.

>Every single thing you read has been tailor-fit to be as easy to understand as possible. Notation has been invented to make it easier for you to understand things.

Where in the hell did you go to school? I've never heard of science teaching being designed to make the subject easy.

It's not about the way it's taught, it's about the way it is. Mathematics is designed with the purpose of being the simplest way for humans to understand particular abstract concepts, some of which are necessary to understand natural phenomena. Most research is, in some sense or another, inventing tools or notation that make things easier to understand or calculate. Once they are easy enough to understand that all mathematicians can understand them, that's called a proof and becomes the language you use to understand science. So the very language is designed to be user-friendly for humans; there's an entire discipline and tradition spanning thousands of years of human history dedicated to it.

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