Science nerd or humanities nerd?

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Ohhh, that is exactly what drove me up the wall about the humanities too. I loved creating my own stuff - creative writing in English and painting/drawing/sculpting in Art - but couldn't stand the 'interpretation' side of either. Why, I wondered, did everything have to have some hidden meaning? I never could figure out how to reliably get an 'A' for essays where I had to interpret a work because making it up made me feel so uncomfortable, like I was being dishonest.

Science appeals to me because it is mostly quantitative. There are ways to measure things precisely.

And yes, I agree that the two disciplines can overlap. If you can write well, for example, it helps a lot with scientific papers. Creative thinking is useful in science, and you can use science to inspire fiction or art.

"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol."

I love science, I think doing science when knowledge has run out is more creative than any form of art.
Humanities is good too, I don't want to study it, but I like history documentaries and books, and anthropology is interesting, and I am sure there are many interesting topics in various fields that I don't know much about.

I can kind of cheat on that by reading or listening to a bunch of people's interpretations and pick my favorite. You can find a lot on YouTube and sparknotes.

I am basically a Humanities type.

But I am really fascinated by ideas of Physics, Astrophysics and Quantum Physics.
Unfortunately I am not good at Mathematic Calculations...

I am all of the above, though I seriously doubt I am a "savant":

- I'm working on my PhD in experimental biology.
- I am a published poet.
- I'm a synesthete, and sometimes I can see certain mathematical patterns instantly without calculating... but those are fairly rare and specific, and I still calculate them afterwards anyway, because it's called being a rigorous scientist. LOL
- Although I'm on a grad-school hiatus, I write and illustrate comics, and have competed in nation-wide competitions.
- I'm a published scientific illustrator.
- I play somewhere around 15 different obscure musical instruments (about 5 standard ones). I used to play as a side-job, but took a break since grad-school
- I can't dance worth anything, but I love martial arts, and was ranked at the national level in forms for my style
- I enjoy ceramics, including making my own musical instruments
- I also really like history, particularly ancient history, Buddhist art history, and history of minorities in the US

So... I don't know. People say that these are dichotomous things: art versus science, history versus math, etc. As far as I can tell, perspective in one leads to insight in the other. More and more the edges of human understanding are at the interface between these human-invented categories. I feel like my job is to fall into these cracks and see what is going on. Does that make me weird, even for someone on the spectrum? I'm ok with that.

Not at all. Many Aspies are quite accomplished. Just depends on how things work out and how your condition expresses itself. Does it enhance or detriment your situation?

Had I been better at social interactions or executive functions, I would be running a major corporation by now. I was being groomed at 31 to move into a VP or better position. Totally fubared that and every other opportunity because I can't make heads or tails of people.

And, I completely agree that all studies inform another. I'm just deciding to go into the sciences as a focus. Tired of the mess that 'people' are. Not giving up the art. That's a 'humanity'. Just no longer the main goal anymore. And, that's left me floundering as well.

I find the question interesting because history is a 'humanity' and I do study history for trends and such. The old, "Those that do not remember the past are doomed to repeat the failures" type of thing. But it is not a study. Just a mild interest because I see a lot of repetition in societal cycles. Art is a humanity and is my profession.

But, for now, I want to move into the sciences as completely as possible.

I did not start this thread with the idea that it should turn into a war between humanities nerds and science nerds in some kind of a contest for which is the better. It all comes down to the individual, their aptitude and what stimulates them. If science and mathematics is best for you, then that's the field(s) you belong in. If the humanities is best for you, then that's the field you belong in. (And if you can do a double whammy, more power to you!) All these fields need people to do research in them. I don't understand why someone would "hate" the humanities the same way you would hate another human being, when the humanities is a field of study and an object and as such cannot respond to your hatred. I understand why someone would "hate doing" the humanities, for the same reason that I "hate doing" maths, because I am useless at it and it does not interest me. But that's a totally different kind of dislike. Statements like "Science and maths do not get pissy. They do not lie to me. They do not let me down. And, when I let them down, Maths and Science does not mind at all" make no sense to me because of the extreme anthropomorphising of non-sentient objects like fields of study. You are talking about people here, not about interests.

My special interest is the humanities and I do not hate science and mathematics. I actually enjoy those aspects of science and mathematics that I am able to understand to the limits of my limited ability therein. British polymath Michael Scriven in his book "Reasoning" (McGraw-Hill: NY, 1976, page 5) writes: "I have found the rigidity of established science to be so extreme as to refute every claim for the objectivity of the 'scientific method' as advertised by most of those same scientists in their introductory lectures. Closed-mindedness and prejudice are about as rampant among scientists as anywhere else. True scientific method is open-minded, self-critical, flexible. Scientists are, in short, not as reasonable as they would like to think themselves." So the alleged "correctness" and "exactness" of science is not so correct and exact after all, and scientists are just as capable as "arsty-fartsies" of being "pissy" people. I'm not getting the feeling of a whole lot of "open-minded, self-critical, flexible", of "true scientific method" in the approaches to the 'fields department' on this thread when in fact all the aggravation experienced was and is due to the reprehensible behaviour of human beings. I read Scriven's book "Reasoning", even though I honestly did not understand a lot of it, because I thought that it would assist me in the research I do into my special interest--the humanities.

The aforesaid anthropomorphising would in part be explained by the fact that some people in this thread have had bad experiences with HUMAN BEINGS who are in the humanities or with specialists in that field of research. I can understand disliking all the human beings with whom one has had bad experiences (I know I do with typical Aspie all-or-nothingness), but their contemptibility comes from their personal faults and their lack of ethics and not from their field of study. Why identify one with the other? It militates against logic. The humanities does not equal the human beings who have made it their field of study. And I also get the feeling that the humanities on this thread is being narrowly and inaccurately confined and defined as either "the fine arts" or "artsy-fartsy" people or both. The fine arts is only one tiny section of the humanities. What about things like history? History is an humanities field. And remember that the people in the humanities field who fail you and have failed you have also failed ethics, and ethics is an humanities field. And the humanities is not all just opinions. Many degrees of exactitude are indeed required in the humanities, such as in grammar, and grammar is an humanities field. And then what about the cross-overs, like the field of linguistics, which partakes both of science and of the humanities?

I wish that people on this thread could just be happy with their special interest in their chosen field and support each other. Live long and prosper!

I didn't excel at any subject in school. In fact, I was amongst the worst at science and geography.

It's a misconception to infer that anyone on the spectrum who functions reasonably well is a savant at something. I am quite proud of stupidity.

For me, there is a big gap between science and any other interest.
I grew up doing art and music and like them a lot, but the prime interest is science which leaves no space for other interests anymore.
Ideally, I would do art and music too, but science is much more interesting to me that I would almost never choose to do something else over it.
Amongst scientists, there is spectrum of narrowness of interests, and there are some who pursue other interests, and some who stick to science.

I hated math in school but was fairly decent at it until calculus I gravitated more to literature and creative writing. I also hated interpreting others' writing and ideas in school, lol. Even now on the test that I took to diagnose me with an ASD (hopefully the last IQ test I will ever take in life) my highest scores were on the verbal section but I also did fairly well with verbal word problem solving... go figure. My weakness remains numbers and geometrical shapes.
So, I would say humanities for me.

Both ?...
I can enjoy both, but I'm more selective in humanities. I find topics where I can make a more or less direct link with science especially interesting (that said, all topics I can imagine have that link). The thing is, I'm more or less an anthropic mechanist. I like reasoning using biology, physics, math, although all of these approaches never prevent me from finding magic and spirituality in the universe, even when all the mystery has been solved. If that makes sense.

Last edited by MissAlgernon on 21 Feb 2016, 4:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's a little bit like me. I was good at math until I got to calculus -- I could do it, but it never came automatically as it did before. I continued in science, but always had a foot in the humanities as well (major in science, minor in Classics).

Part of the shame, I think, is that the "interpretation" stuff in art and literature is sometimes all that's taught in schools, and so analytically minded kids don't gravitate to the humanities. The analytical kids should be taught about poetic meter, and grammar, and linguistics, and source-studies, and all sorts of good stuff like that.

I look for humanities within the hard sciences most days, journals & press are quick about discounting the empirical finding that there are people in all those labs although the journalism does bring their work to a world stage. Handling such a volume of clunky technical information is always a humanizing happenstance, my desk is all for storage now that science fills up my waking life, the human thoughts flow with the pace of the work. Humanities began with curiosity, or so I prefer to believe.

While I am definitely a science nerd, I have always been very strong in history. I am definitely not strong in foreign languages or art, as my sister has those talents. In high school, I would often set the bar on history exams (as well as science/math exams), which did not make me very popular. As an undergrad, I would occasionally fit in an odd history class as a break from my usual routine of physical science classes/labs. That does not mean that they were watered-down classes that could be easy to earn an A in. American and Japanese history just clicked for me for some reason. I took them just as seriously as I did my science/math classes. The funny part was that after taking said classes, the history professors would often approach me about going into that direction because I did so well in them. I did take enough of them to qualify for a history minor (along with physics and math) for my Bachelors Degree. I like history as a subject area, but my true heart lies within the physical sciences.

I prefer to dabble in humanities than indulge in too much generic sweet.