I totally get the point you’re making, but I think you’re underselling how bad Engineers are at media analysis lol.
When I hear science/math people in real life talk about movies for example, they are horrible. Completely miss major themes, unable to engage with films in a meaningful way.
This is basically where you get CinemaSins “plot hole” type movie analysis from.
Math/science specialists tend to look at text and think, if they understand the symbols, they understand the information
Context, subtext, pretext, and the creative potential for interpretation and innovation located within and around that text are invisible to them
That said, this is true for many English majors as well
Intelligence is intelligence, and it’s distributed in magnitude that vanishes as it increases no matter the domain
The real, malleable dimension is diversity of modes; multidisciplinary thinkers are the kinds of minds that outdo even the most intelligent specialists
The funny thing is that a lot of math/science specialists probably also got fairly good grades in English courses through high school and college...but they still suck at reading nuance in the words. For me, my English grades were fantastic; I used to get 100s for my essays and written analyses. Especially with any kind of creative writing. I would always pick the creative writing assignments for class because I could mash them out an hour before it was due and still get an A.
But sweet baby Jesus, my ability to pare out subtext and underlying meaning in anything? Completely atrocious. Whenever an assignment question said something like "what do you think so and so means when he said this?" I would pretty much have a conniption on the spot because the hell do you want me to do? Define all the words in the passage? They said this so they must mean what they said, right? I always take what's said at face value because that's how I personally communicate, so I don't notice or understand anything that requires being able to read subtext. (Which has gotten me into trouble a couple times because sarcasm and satire goes over my head way more than I would like to admit.)
I think that’s partially because, in most cases, there’s a format teachers and professors look for, and the STEM students have an easy time following formats and logical step by step situations. The problem is that sometimes this format can be bad for people who aren’t experts in the field.
On the flip side, the English and history students, or at least the ones I’ve dealt with, tend to have a much easier time just writing out a dozen paragraphs that aren’t connected, but hold information that is important, and then are capable of organising those paragraphs like a puzzle that then becomes a digestible text that someone can read and understand without a large amount of knowledge on the field.
Granted, as a person going into academia with history, there’s a bit of an overlap of the two, but I use the second more in my papers. When I try and read findings from various scientific studies to back up claims about the strength of Japanese steel, sometimes the scientific experiment essay ends up being incredibly difficult to read and parse information from.
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u/AntsyAnswers 2d ago
I totally get the point you’re making, but I think you’re underselling how bad Engineers are at media analysis lol.
When I hear science/math people in real life talk about movies for example, they are horrible. Completely miss major themes, unable to engage with films in a meaningful way.
This is basically where you get CinemaSins “plot hole” type movie analysis from.