Difference Between Stem vs. the Humanities

1 points by epr19 3 years ago | 1 comment

Here's my hot take: Math, cs, engineering, etc is about the technicalities, while the humanities/"softer" social sciences is about the big picture/point of it all.

Discussions like these inevitably devolve into "STEM is better than the humanities, humanities is better than STEM". Both have worth in their own ways, so that's a silly debate. The biggest proof for the above is that in STEM, people get more specialized the more experience they have (a specific proof in number theory, for example), while in the humanities, people grapple with bigger and bigger questions through their chosen medium (using the topic of feminism in America to comment on the ways we all grapple with identity, for example).

Does that sound right or is this dichotomy trivial and nonexistent?

jleyank 3 years ago |

I only took history in uni back then, but both science and history courses were similar. First-year courses were seminar/overviews, or math-light science courses. As I progressed through the system, the science courses sprouted math while the math courses became too difficult to consider. The history courses became more and more specific to an area (European vs. Asian vs. US-ian) or to a time (Middle Ages, post-1700). By my last year, things like quantum chemistry were the subject matter (and I had run through my electives by then).

Perhaps words vs. equations is a distinction that might be preferable. In science, there were memorization (organic chem nomenclature) or mathematics (physical chemistry). Physics went from sliding wooden blocks to thinking about time dependent forms of what's being covered in chemistry. English involved a review of the motivation of characters (took a year of Shakespere), "is Hamlet mad?", etc. History was similar, with "was Hitler unique or inevitable?", discussion of the post-WWI issues that led to the mess that was the 20th century, etc. You can call this larger picture, but the details were critical - why rather than what or when.

And, to hold their departmental funding, non-major STEM courses were at the level of "red stars are cooler than blue stars" (Astronomy for poets). Perhaps calculus is now assumed to be taught pre-Uni, but it was 1st-year materials with derivatives in the fall and integrals in the spring. And the history courses had a 5-10 book reading list (Orwell is real pertinent) while English had the Pelican Shakespere.