Comment by sidww2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sidww2 | Hacker News Reader

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> That's a standard technical person bias.

First of all - I wouldn't count being a businessperson as liberal arts.

One way you can look at it is how many people drop out of technical subjects because they find them too hard to move to humanities and liberal arts vs. the opposite. Anecdotally, for me the former number has been much larger. The latter number has been 0.

Similarly, I've had many technical friends who took liberal arts courses and generally did very well in them. I also have many liberal arts friends who took technical courses and did not do well in them. In addition, the technical people I've met have been much much more hard-working than liberal arts people. (An exception I'd make is creative arts - people I've encountered in that field have generally been extremely hard-working. Also no one I've met has moved from say math to music because they found math too hard.)

Now it might just be because liberal arts people just don't like the technical subject matter on average as much as technical people like the liberal arts subject matter. But even if that's true, one is then right to choose technical people over liberal arts people.

Lastly, I also know liberal arts majors who are smarter than many technical folk I've encountered but I'm talking about the general trend here.

To me, this sounds very anecdotal; it doesn't match up with my experience (also anecdotal).

Remember, not all courses are made equal. I went to a tech school, and transferred after my first year to a high tier liberal arts school. I had a much harder time with a 050 level into liberal arts course my second year, than I did with a 400 level course on Poetry (of which I didn't have any sort of background in). I found the liberal arts courses at the tech school were aimed towards tech students - meaning, in that specific case, many of them felt somewhat watered down.

I would be willing to guess that, as a frequenter of Hacker News, you're more likely to be more active in a tech oriented circle. Growing up, and at college, I was more active among humanities oriented folk; my experience was that the tech folk were good at one thing (whatever they studied) and otherwise just played lots of video games, while the humanities students did every thing + 1.

So, all in all - my point is that anecdotal evidence is just that. Technical people can have a broad understanding, but it doesn't mean they do. Same goes for Liberal Arts.

You're making the assumption that being able to perform well in tougher classes at school means that you are smart.

People drop out from technical studies into humanities because they did not perform well academically in their technical studies. Just because a group of people can perform better at school than another group of people are not smarter. One group is better at school. And school is not an indicator as smartness. Just because a class is harder does not mean that the people who do well in it are smarter. Performance at school is not a direct indicator of smartness.

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