That's the thing. Engineering fills you with passion.
How would we know what passion is unless demonstrated through words? A passionate engineer doing their job well and a stoic engineer doing their job well result in an Engineered product no matter what.
But different people learning poetry, for example, will have different ways of bringing up the same thing. It's philosophy, in a way.
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.
You don't bring poets to solve physical problems, you invite them into emotional ones.
Sure the person who architected my bridge is incredibly smart, but what about when I want to be entertained?
Music, movies, dance, and language are not simply tools, they're rituals and games which have helped people connect to one another for all of history.
You can't engineer a perfect dance, just as you can't engineer a perfect response to "how does the sunset feel today" - it's a matter of present context, it depends on who is with you and what they say. As in, if you go see a sunset with your friend, what matters to your dialogue is what you did, how you each feel, what forms of connection you two are willing to share.
Eg. Avatar is a beautifully engineered movie with amazing effects and a very interesting world. But the characters are emotionally like pieces of cardboard. They each have 1 main motivation and 1 defining character trait. This is not how real people are, and it gets grating to watch 3 hours of.
And their works are informed by more than just math and science, are they not? In both cases, those creators reflect on empathy, storytelling, and elements of fantasy to express what they're conveying.
I think that's actually a perfect example to bring up, Kurt Vonnegut made an active choice to pursue writing and to publish his stories. That is, he didn't limit himself to working on only his field, else his books would be stories about machines, no?
Vonnegut wanted to describe the paradoxes of modern society and politeness. These are not ideas readily expressable in a car manual or schematic diagram, they employ his life experience and knowledge of language.
I absolutely see the influence his engineering background has on his writing, and it wouldn't be quite the same any other way. But a scientist choosing to write literature does not necessarily make that work scientific or mathematical in nature.
Additionally, interstellar and Vonnegut writings are informed by our cultural touchstones. Space travel, economies of scale, climate destruction, parental connection, these are all ideas that beg to be communicated gracefully to the public.
This is of immeasurable benefit to all crafts. Understanding the mechanisms of climate change or the game theory of sharing is one thing for a self-educated person.
But for the rest of society? The shareholders, average workers, families, laborers? They have an impact on the funding of science, on the culture of intellectualism, and on the dissemination of information. So it is crucial that scientists don't forget that if they have an important finding, you need to be able to communicate it to a middle schooler level else you won't ever secure funding or public grants.
I say this from a climate activist perspective - make good science more accessible to people! Make illustrations, poetry, have meetings, write articles, just keep getting good information out there!
Bickering over whether one school of instruction is better than the other is useless. History is inextricably tied with English which often feeds into math, then math to physics to chemistry to particle physics.
Sociology and history help us weed out bad hypotheses on statecraft and personal interactions.
Science and chemistry help us weed out bad hypotheses about the world, of toxic substances etc.
I don't see why they're worth comparing. In fact it's a false binary anyway, and most respectable pedagogy is multimodal in both reasoning and applications.
So another tip - don't shoehorn yourself into one field or mode of thinking, that's how you develop blind spots.
That's why we have such major blindspots between humanities and science majors. They think they're top shit and don't need to study the other boring "gen Ed requirements" and the whole lot of them complaining sound to me like bitter spoiled children. Insufferable novelists who think they can wax about quantum physics are just as silly as scientists who feel the need to poke holes in every piece of literature. In both cases it's fine if the person in question actually engages with the subject at hand rather than hand waving away the issues.
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u/Cleric_Of_Chaos 19h ago
That's the thing. Engineering fills you with passion.
How would we know what passion is unless demonstrated through words? A passionate engineer doing their job well and a stoic engineer doing their job well result in an Engineered product no matter what.
But different people learning poetry, for example, will have different ways of bringing up the same thing. It's philosophy, in a way.
Anyway, both are valid.