Which is easier?
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@otfrom I think there's a subset of humanities and engineering thinking where the two disciplines are expressions of the same thing and thus easier to move between, and subsets of each that are massively divergent and incommensurate.
@otfrom I might also gently push back on the question's initial state assumption that a humanities person doesn't know maths and vice versa.
@cford I completely agree on that. I just need to remember that different disciplines have different training and expectations though and that we aren't all the same
@otfrom Totally, I think training is a very good lens. If you're trained in deductive thinking (can happen in humanities), you're maths-ready. If your humanities practice is of the mystic, associative variety, you're not.
@cford what do you mean by "mystic, associative variety"?
@otfrom Subfields that argue by analogy, like Jungian psychology perhaps. Where the build of ideas is aesthetic rather than an argument in the philosophical sense.
@otfrom Perhaps post-structuralism too? Though that depends on the way you do it.
@cford weaponised post structuralism has proven very effective as a way of disrupting one's enemies, and I think the bottom up approach is a good way to think again about things (I'm a fan of bottom up empirical approaches like post modernism that don't try to fit things to existing frameworks)
@cford I'm thinking about the space where we do engineering that supports an argument ("data science" for example)
@otfrom Teaching an engineer how to express themselves in their native language
@otfrom Math CS as a higher number of people on the spectrum who have rigidity. That rigidity is a plus with logic, but it makes it hard to explain how to adapt to different audiences
@otfrom see also: Reading Buses ban on hiring of bus drivers to drive buses, due to the profession's reputation for being sour misanthropes
Instead they hire people with healthy customer service attitudes and teach them to drive buses, which is much simpler than the other way round
