I am an arts major. My primary major in Geography, however, will likely lead me after graduation down the path of data analytics. One of my lecturers, a full Professor, who is not trained in the burgeoning billion dollar field of Geographical Information Systems, once made a rye joke during a lecture that most of us will end up in the IT or data analysis sector \u201cbecause there is where the money is at\u201d. Geography is also one of the few departments in FASS where a sizable chunk of the lecturers (one-third, to be precise) are STEM-trained \u2013 whether in Physical Geography, Earth System Sciences, or (Geographical) Information Systems. One of those professors who got their PhD in Information Systems once told a room full of Geography graduates who chose the social sciences that one \u201cmust learn some hard skills in University\u201d. The room collectively, but silently, contemplated skinning him alive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Arts students, for our part, hold similar prejudices.\u00a0 STEM students, as per popular stereotypes, are rigid, computational, close-minded, and naively simplistic in their ability to understand anything as complex as the human mind and the societies they live in. I have\u00a0personally heard, during a discussion on the philosopher Hannah Arendt, that the STEM-educated technocrats and their zombie-like simplemindedness\u00a0are “the chief cause of genocides and authoritarianism”.<\/p>\n We Arts majors take an unhealthy amount of pride, as\u00a0a friend once put it to me, in learning to be humans that are truly free in mind and spirit. To her, our mission statement was in our name: the \u201cLiberal\u201d in \u201cLiberal Arts\u201d is derived from the Latin for \u201cfree(man)\u201d.<\/p>\n It certainly feels good to be rooting for the home team, to be rooting for your people. But the arbitrary anti-philosophical passions of tribalism seem awfully out of place when discussing how people from STEM and the arts should associate with one another. Take this headline from the Financial Times: “With Theresa May in Number 10, the joke is no longer on geographers<\/a>” It’s byline was even more hyperbolic: “Notebook: Her arrival in Downing Street is symbolic of the subject\u2019s renaissance.”<\/p>\n And it certainly feels good to know a major world leader was educated in the same field of study as you.\u00a0But I am not entirely sure we should be celebrating the murky history of how the only world leader with a Geography degree got her job. I mean, Michael Jordan has Geography degree but what does that even mean, other than that Liberal arts majors are desperate to prove their worth in the age of tech startups.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Sentiments like this, however hyperbolic, is perhaps a way for us to resist constantly being told we are second-tier in a STEM-first country, a position regularly solidified by articles like\u00a0this<\/a>,\u00a0this<\/a>, and\u00a0this<\/a>.<\/p>\n Singapore is a place where everything about education is die-casted into a quantifiable indicator, from the academic worth of a student to the economic potential of a graduate.<\/p>\n There is simply a zero-sum game; if forcing students to take 30, rather than 20, Modular Credits in general education modules led a noticeable decline in\u00a0future employment prospects, how many Singaporeans will still believe it still be worth it to take that extra 10 credits of (typically arts) general education modules? To put it another way: why would arts students choose to take CS1010S, and be ranked on a curve with STEM undergrads?<\/p>\n On that note, it would be interesting to analyse whether Tembusu students ballot for modules which speak to their majors. I certainly did. Dr Connor\u2019s Living and Dying in the Internet Age <\/em>fit my niche of the digital humanities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is a certain thrill and a certain sense of wonder when our majors meander close to the borders of the other side and waving to the minutemen defending their own fields of studies.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a certain magic when we attempt to make different disciplines speak to each other. Sometimes collaboration is easy; other times, it boils over into a bitter civil war, as had happened between the quantitative and qualitative scholars in the academic study of politics.<\/a> \u00a0A more public version of this feud occurred when The New York Times launched broadsides against upstart data scientists \u2013 particularly statistician Nate Silver\u2019s FiveThirtyEight \u2013 for failing to forecast Donald Trump\u2019s victory in the Republican Primaries<\/a>, and later, General Election<\/a>, of the 2016 US Presidential Elections. Nate Silver responded rather feistily.<\/a><\/p>\n The bottom line of Nate Silver\u2019s defence? FiveThirthyEight\u2019s approach is not one of pure math. FiveThirthyEight, Silver argued, spends most of its resources on the traditional on-the-ground journalists who provide meaning to the data points.<\/p>\n Data and statistics, in other words, can show that Trump had a 30% probability to win, but the humanities are needed to illustrate the meaningless number of \u201c30\u201d \u2013 albeit with less parsimony. But humans are nevertheless not easily de-constructible.<\/p>\n Both sides lose out when both sides choose to silo themselves from one another. Before computer science could be developed Bertrand Russell must have developed a mathematical notation for philosophical logic systems. We cannot understand how Facebook is so dominant a company without understanding what\u00a0how its algorithms manipulate social relations and an individual’s cognition and habits. For this, you need the humanities<\/a>.<\/p>\n The distinction between STEM, the humanities, and any other field is a purely imagined one. It only carries weight, stereotypes, and antagonisms only because we will see it to be. It may seem intuitive that there is a distinction, but the deeper you scrutinise any of the edge cases, the more porous the distinctions become. Poetry about scientific concepts is beautiful when approaching as a science, or as a work of art, but the true beauty leaps out when one understands both.<\/p>\n The (liberal) arts and sciences exist in a dialectical back and forth where one problematises the parsimony that the other strive towards. Both are needed, and progress in one is the progress of the whole. This is evident in the social sciences. This distinction is also reflected between the “pure” and “applied” sciences. A Tembusu fellow once summed up, to me, the magic of mixing disciplines in one word: “alchemy”.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tembusu.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/665282_4927007462140_194710961_o.jpg\")
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