This "two cultures" [1] attitude is, sadly, incredibly pervasive. The idea that there are two kinds of people, two kinds of education, and thus two kinds of car

This "two cultures" [1] attitude is, sadly, incredibly pervasive. The idea that there are two kinds of people, two kinds of education, and thus two kinds of careers—one in the arts, one in the sciences—is a product of irredeemable stupidity and must be resisted. Consider the following list of people, most of whom we should all be familiar with. - Aristotle was concerned with understanding the natural world; with logic and mathematics; and with ethics, how to live a good life, music, the theatre, and more. - Leibniz developed the calculus, symbolic reasoning, and ideas about computation. He also wrote about law, ethics, and religious disputes. - Bertrand Russell made major contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language and mind, as well as being a prominent public intellectual and peace campaigner. - Saul Kripke developed Kripke semantics for modal and intuitionistic logic, as well as making major contributions to the philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology and metaphysics. I'm sure everyone here can think of many more examples, and no doubt your personal interests will influence your selections (as mine obviously have). My point is that an interest in, and the ability to make a major contribution to the arts or sciences in no way precludes making a contribution to the other. Yes, writing a proof is different to building a web service, which in turn is different from writing a book on Spinoza or studying the family dynamics of drug addicts. But the classes of people who do these things are not disjoint. We live in a world of specialisation, but that doesn't mean we have to live in a world of separation; that we cannot have broad interests and broad capabilities. When I was a child I learned about the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, but I also read the Iliad. There's no contradiction there, so why do so many people subscribe to the idea that people who do the latter can't do the former, or vice versa? There is nothing contradictory in being able to write well, derive logical proofs, appreciate literature and disassemble a computer (or a car!). The call for mutual respect is appreciated, but surely we should demand more: a denial that this divide should exist in the first place. One small nitpick, about learning fundamentals rather than practical skills making it harder to get hired. Even assuming it to be true, I don't think it cuts at all cleanly across the Arts/Sciences divide. A good understanding of complexity classes is not something I would call practical, i.e. able to be applied directly to so-called "real world" problems. My guess would be that it might make one hireable, in that employers might value the kind of mind which can comprehend such things, but that the number of places hiring people to use that knowledge directly is probably extremely limited. The problem that arts students might be facing is more that their skills are hard to quantify than that they are more concerned with fundamentals. [1] The term "two cultures" comes from C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures