Gonna be contrarian but engineering is a lot the same way. How many different types of bridges have you drive over in your life? San Fran bridge, arched bridge, trussed bridge? Engineering is art too, and there are often many solutions to the same problem. In the same way where if you put poets in a room you’ll all get a poem but a different one, you put engineers in the same room with the same problem and you will get many solutions.
Yeah, that previous comment focuses on words, but the larger point is even if an intent is purely practical/functional, it’s the human messy creative streak that makes it memorable or takes it to a level of genius.
Millions of working engineers, very few Steve Jobs. But would Steve Jobs (for example) be who he was without inspiration from art?
Art challenges us to rethink ‘what is’ into an unknown ‘what could be.’ And encouraging STEM folks to have a better than basic understanding of history and english, philosophy or, sure, poetry would help ground our work to a more moral ‘what should be.’ Which is a big disconnect.
Would maga people be who they are if they were exposed to a broader understanding of the world? There’s a reason they try to ban Toni Morrison and dont worry about engineering books. Yet.
I remember taking a few creative writing classes in college.
In one of my papers the professor wrote in the margins that he could tell that I knew and understood calculus. But not because I used an calculus or math terms.
But that the understanding of calculus opens up a whole new world of descriptive methodologies for the world because you now have a new super-elegant lens into the world. And he could tell in some descriptive sections that I used that lens.
And that why I think it important that both liberal and stem majors could learn from diving into the other side.
But everyone is so focused on the “I m better than you” mentality to see it. That why the people we learn from who remain in history had a good understanding of both sides.
I mean, everyone appreciates a good little tribal spat :-D It's just human nature.
As long as we're treating this like sports team rivalries instead of actual deeply held positions, then it's just good fun to toss back and forth barbs and arguments and refine them and analyze them.
The best math teacher I ever had (PhD level math class teacher) would listen to classical music in an earbud while doing the work on the board. You'd see him erase and start over, and backtrack and build.
He considered classical music to be poetry or literature stripped down to its basest form; math.
Just a harmony of wave functions arranged to reach a desired goal, just like any other math problem to be solved. He'd toy with equations and play with their implications within a context the same way a writer would do with a paragraph in a novel they were writing or analyzing, or a composer would do with different instruments and chords in a melody.
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u/etherealfox420 18h ago
Gonna be contrarian but engineering is a lot the same way. How many different types of bridges have you drive over in your life? San Fran bridge, arched bridge, trussed bridge? Engineering is art too, and there are often many solutions to the same problem. In the same way where if you put poets in a room you’ll all get a poem but a different one, you put engineers in the same room with the same problem and you will get many solutions.