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Leave engineering and the hard sciences, though, and a lot of courses are just mind-bogglingly trivial to pass.

the problem is that everyone wants to cozy up to the hard sciences because it makes you look more legitimate. blatant scientism has infected higher education.

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I wasn't aware this was a controversial point. Every humanities class I've been in had a textbook full of sciency sounding words that don't actually exist (the authors made them up). Most professors I've talked with have said this happened in the 60's and 70's when people first realized they would get more grants if they included a lot of math and science vernacular in their grant applications.

it's true, just look at the papers of less-hard disciplines nowadays ... more math ... more symbols, greek vars, less illustrations etc

if you can't convince, confuse them

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