Systems Explain STEM vs Culture Style

In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement included [CP Snow’s 1959] The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War. (More) 

Yet its main part is only 30 short pages, and this is its main content: 

Intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. … literary intellectuals … scientists.  … Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes hostility and dislike …

Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful … [and] shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. … [Re social problems] scientists … are inclined to be impatient to see if something can be done: and inclined to think that it can be done …Literature changes more slowly than science. It hasn’t the same automatic corrective, …. considerably more scientists in [UK &US] come from poor families. … 

If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. … [Science] argument, [is] usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons’ arguments … use words in senses … [that] are exact … doesn’t contain much art …[except] music … [and] colour-photography. … [of] novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all.… 

The other side? … still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. … if asked to “describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the response is cold [and] negative” … those questions … regard[ed] as being in the worst of taste.… have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.

A related conflict arose in 1996: 

Physicist Alan Sokal’s hoax article, … in the cultural studies journal, Social Text in 1996. …  unleashed an academic mayhem surpassing even that of the earlier [two cultures] controversy. In the Science Wars, the battle was fought between those who lined up behind the banner of postmodernism, relativism, and anti-foundationalism, as ideological or epistemological positions representing themselves as antidotes to the supposedly ‘totalitarian’ effects of ‘grand narratives’, the metaphysical systems of modernity arising out of Enlightenment philosophies and models of enquiry (including science), on the one hand; and those who argued for the incontrovertible association of progress, truth and justice with the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment philosophies of reason, and the defence of positivist method, on the other. (more)

This distinction is also closely related to how I see myself as differing from my podcast partner Agnes Callard:

We differ by generation, gender, and especially in our intellectual backgrounds and orientations (me vs. her): STEM vs. humanities, futurist vs. classicist, explaining via past shapings vs. future aspirations, and relying more vs. less on large systems of thought. Before talking to Agnes, I hadn’t realized just how shaped I’ve been by assimilating many large formal systems of thought, such as calculus, physics, optimization, algorithms, info theory, decision theory, game theory, economics, etc.… Philosophers like Agnes … [who] rely on few such structures beyond simple logic can expect their arguments to be accessible to wider audiences, they must also expect a great many incoherences in their analysis. Which is part of why they so often disagree. (more) 

Snow got so much attention for his short shallow analysis because he pointed to a distinction that is quite recognizable, and yet not much analyzed. As it seems to me that it remains under-analyzed, and as my last post looks at a related distinction, let me take a shot at it in this post. 

We humans have many systems of thought. Such as our systems for reasoning about travel times, or organization financial accounting. Each system allows related concepts to be more clearly defined, and better measured. Systems support stronger claims, with quantified estimates and degrees of confidence, and standard calculations and arguments, with standard ways to settle disputes. 

Systems allow for more complex analysis, further from direct experience, using longer chains of reasoning. Such systems and their applications can be improved, and can more clearly be shown to have improved. And systems support finer and more complex divisions of intellectual labor. 

The world of thinkers can be split into those who rely more versus less on established systems. Those who rely more on systems can be more precise, numerical, agree more on claims, and better evaluate each others’ abilities. Systems people less need metaphor to understand each other, and less need alliances, prestige, and social skills to coordinate with each other. 

While systems of thought tend to make stuff easier to see, understand, or control, “culture” is our name for stuff where these things are harder; in “cultural” areas, our systems don’t work so well. Culture thinkers thus have to get used to vaguer definitions, weaker claims, qualitative concepts, and more disagreements and differing perspectives.

They often manage many overlapping related concepts none of which is clearly more fundamental than the others. They use shorter chains of reasoning, and find it harder to evaluate individual performance, or to estimate overall progress. They have a simpler division of labor, rely more on anecdotes, intuition, emotion, and aesthetics relative to explicit calculation, and rely more on alliances, prestige, and social skills to manage coordination. 

This distinction is associated with a lot of hostility. STEM folks tend to see culture people as sloppy, bullshitty, and tribal, while culture folks tend to see STEM folks as boring, narrow, having poor social skills, unable to navigate non-system concept spaces, and too trusting of their systems’ key assumptions. 

While culture is hard to see, we do seem to notice that it varies with place, profession, and generation, and so cultural folks are seen as tied to such units. They tend to be loyal to their units, and advocate for them, and their accepted value is tied more to such units. And while we do have systems to deal with values (e.g., economic efficiency), they are less widely accepted, and more easily contested. Thus culture folks more embrace distinctive value stances, often basing their arguments on shared values within their subcultures. They are more willing to celebrate and blame others. 

A perception of progress and specialization encourages systems thinkers to focus on recent more technical writings in their areas, while culture thinkers look more to older classics and prestigious and eloquent recent writers. Systems thinkers more accept the inequality that they can more easily see, while culture thinkers seek more of an appearance of egalitarian treatment of each other. 

It seems to me that this systems account does pretty well at accounting for many correlates of the STEM vs culture distinction. What do you see it as missing? 

Added 3Apr: In comments, Aratae points out:

This seems to match up with … the biggest non-straight-G portions of IQ are ‘shape rotation’ and ‘verbal fluency’ and with the Simon Baron-Cohen line of systematizers vs. empathizer model.

On that last point, Wikipedia says: "

Baron-Cohen and associates assert that E–S theory is a better predictor than gender of who chooses STEM subjects. … extended into the extreme male brain (EMB) theory of autism … [as] below-average empathy and average or above-average systemising.\

In comments, Nicholas.Wilkinson points us to McGilchrist, which I summarized as:

McGilchrist says that compared to the left brain, the right emphasizes: surprising over predictable, implicit over explicit, context over particulars, unknown over known, intuition over logic and rationality, natural over artificial, metaphorical over literal, connoting over denoting, real over hypothetical, ‘aha!’ over anticipated, hard over easy to verbalize knowledge, non-verbal over verbal communication, and reacting to over controlling.