
The Two Cultures - DanI-S
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
======
rayiner
> "Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of
> them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold:
> it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific
> equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

I'm not convinced that either of these is really important for a general
education. I think educators fixate on romantic ideals of what is important to
know while ignoring the subject matter that is relevant to ordinary life.

Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about
ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra.
It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context,
string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical
data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or
world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at
work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.

I lament that I spent so much time "learning" in school and have so little to
show for it. I know about different kinds of cloud formations, which extinct
native American cultures lived where, the difference between the soil
composition in different parts of the country, spectral lines in different
gasses, etc. This is trivia.

I see the argument made by Snow as simply lamenting that there is under-
emphasis on one particular set of romanticized unnecessary knowledge and over-
emphasis on a different set. Most of physics, chemistry, etc, are neither
directly relevant to your typical person nor readily digestible as being
illustrative of more general principles that are relevant. A core educational
curriculum would be better served teaching more fundamental concepts directly:
scientific method, statistical methods, data analysis, etc.

~~~
zerohm
I wish every high school made it mandatory for children to learn how to
balance a checkbook and the implications of dept (time value of money).

~~~
Mikeb85
Isn't this common sense?

~~~
jamesbritt
In retrospect it certainly seems like common sense. In practice I've met a
number of not-stupid people who do not follow any sort of methodical recording
keeping in their che ckbook and who do not understand the actual cost of
having credit card debt and incurring interest that remains unpaid over time.

I'm surprised when someone tells me that are keeping money in a checking or
low-interest savings account rather than paying off credit card debt. For
whatever reasons they believe this is a common-sensible thing to do.

~~~
tbrownaw
_I 'm surprised when someone tells me that are keeping money in a checking or
low-interest savings account rather than paying off credit card debt. For
whatever reasons they believe this is a common-sensible thing to do._

Because the amount of money you "have" (for spending, emergencies, whatever)
is what's in the checking account rather than that plus the remaining credit
line on your card, and there's an element of fear/panic about running out (and
I guess getting hit with overdraft fees). That fear/panic means that logic
suddenly doesn't apply.

------
3rd3
Feynman referred to this issue at the end of his second Messenger Lecture:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0xTfdt6qw&list=PL71D034A47B...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0xTfdt6qw&list=PL71D034A47B46E643&feature=player_detailpage#t=3022)

Transcript:

.. To summarize, I would use the words of Jeans, who said that "the Great
Architect seems to be a mathematician". To those who do not know mathematics
it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest
beauty, of nature. C.P. Snow talked about two cultures. I really think that
those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this
experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once.

It is too bad that it has to be mathematics, and that mathematics is hard for
some people. It is reputed - I do not know if it is true - that when one of
the kings was trying to learn geometry from Euclid he complained that it was
difficult. And Euclid said, "There is no royal road to geometry". And there is
no royal road. Physicists cannot make a conversion to any other language. If
you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to
understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in
one form; we are not so unhumble as to demand that she change before we pay
any attention.

All the intellectual arguments that you can make will not communicate to deaf
ears what the experience of music really is. In the same way all the
intellectual arguments in the world will not convey an understanding of nature
to those of "the other culture". Philosophers may try to teach you by telling
you qualitatively about nature. I am trying to describe her. But it is not
getting across because it is impossible. Perhaps it is because their horizons
are limited in the way that some people are able to imagine that the center of
the universe is man...

------
netcan
_" The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a
dangerous process. Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded
with much suspicion"_

------
rubidium
For a PDF version of the lecture, see here: [http://s-f-
walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/2cultures/Rede-lecture-2...](http://s-f-
walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/2cultures/Rede-lecture-2-cultures.pdf)

This is quite a gem. I'm surprised I haven't seen it before.

------
cstross
Key point: for decades in the UK, school education forked at age 16 -- the
point at which you specialized. Prior to age 16 you'd be studying for exams in
6-10 subjects: originally 'O' (ordinary) levels, then GCSEs. (School leaving
age was 16.) If you wanted to continue and eventually go to university, you
then went on to study for 2 years for 'A' (advanced) level exams -- roughly
equivalent to year 1 or 2 at a US university. (British taught university
degrees were typically 3 year courses.) However, this was intensive enough
that typically you'd only take 3 or 4 'A' level subjects. This forced early
specialization -- dropping either all science or all arts subjects.

(This system ran from the late 1940s through the 1990s, subject to fine-
tuning. So, for example, in 1981-83 I was taking four 'A' level subjects:
physics, chemistry, biology, and 'general studies' (a vague attempt to shoe-
horn the entirety of the liberal arts field into one quarter of the student's
time).)

------
lkrubner
Much has been written about this article. For instance:

\----------------

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5273453/Fifty-years-
on...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5273453/Fifty-years-on-CP-Snows-
Two-Cultures-are-united-in-desperation.html)

Such was the intensity of debate that it might be supposed that these were
age-old themes: but in fact, the idea of separating academic disciplines into
groups known as science and humanities was no older than the 19th century. The
term "scientist" was only coined in 1833, and it was not until 1882 that
another Rede Lecturer, Matthew Arnold, discussed – under the title of
"Literature and Science" – whether or not a classical education was still
relevant in an age of great scientific and technical advance.

\----------------

There are also many themes in this article that are specific to Britain in the
1950s:

\----------------

Snow compared Britain unfavourably with the US and USSR, in terms of numbers
of young people who remained in education to the age of 18 and above. The
British system, he argued, forced children to specialise at an unusually early
age, with snobbery dictating that the children would be pushed towards the
"traditional culture" and the professions, rather than science and industry.

Arnold was responding – with infinitely more courtesy than Leavis – to an
earlier lecture by T H Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his rumbustious
defence of evolution, who argued that science was as valid an intellectual
training as the classics.

It was not a popular opinion. As late as my own childhood in the Sixties, the
bright boys were expected to read classics at Oxford, and the less bright
steered towards the labs.

\----------------

I think 2 things are worth remembering about any such debate:

1.) as a civilization becomes more advanced, the people in it tend to become
more specialized. If you grew up in 1700, it was perhaps possible to read all
of the classics, in literature (Homer) and medicine (Galen) and philosophy
(Aristotle) and physics (Aristotle) and math (Euclid). But nowadays it is
impossible to study every branch of knowledge to any meaningful depth.

2.) for all of the obvious disadvantages that come with specialization, there
are also many advantages (indeed, that is why specialization exists). A modern
potter has a fantastic array of choices regarding materials, which did not
exist even 50 years ago. A historian today must pick a narrow speciality, as
there are now many millions of documents to look through to be considered an
expert -- indeed, I have a friend who has specialized in the American Civil
War, and he once said "If you have only read 1,000 books about the American
Civil War, then you are just an amateur." And in the old days the village
blacksmith might have known how to make both a hoe and a horse hoof shoe but a
modern mechanic needs to specialize regarding devices (cars? domestic
machines? textile plants? telecommunications?) but then also pick a sub-
specialty (if a car mechanic, then foreign or domestic? Perhaps a few
particular brands).

There is an economic benefit to specialization. I worry that gets forgotten
when this debate comes up.

~~~
msluyter
Specialization is something I often wonder about. Consider the following
analogy: the sum of human knowledge is represented by a giant circle (though
not necessarily perfectly circular in shape). Anything inside the circle is
that which is known; anything outside is unknown. You're born in the center,
and as you learn, the set of what you know extends towards the edge. As you
mentioned, at some point in time, you could know all of the circle; now you
can only know some subset of it. If you're a scientist or whatnot, you
actively move the edge outward.

My question is, will we ever reach a point where it takes so long to move from
the center to the edge that we'll eventually stop making progress? In
mathematics, it already takes considerable time to reach the knowledge
boundary (30 years or so?) Will we reach a point where it takes greater than a
lifetime? Or, is it possible to jump to the edge by skipping some foundational
knowledge (could you do higher math without knowing, say, calculus, for
example?) What are the risks of doing so? And ultimately, how does a complex
society hang together when each person has (at most) knowledge of a tiny
subset of available knowledge?

~~~
rprospero
I'd argue that, as advances are made, it becomes easier to move faster through
the circle. It's not that you're skipping foundation knowledge, but you're
just learning one core piece. Instead of learning the area under an
encyclopedia of curves, you learn integral calculus and you're done. Instead
of memorizing thousands of rules involving the interaction of various charged
objects, you learn Maxwell's four equations and you're done. Or, you could
learn geometric calculus and then only need to learn one four-symbol equation.
Instead of learning thousands of different circuits to accomplish thousands of
different tasks, you learn one Turing machine.

Knowledge is constantly increasing, but we're also continually finding that a
large amount of our previous knowledge was redundant. I once saw a great
article, that I wish I could find again, list off a series of scientific laws
that could all be derived from nothing but unit analysis. The circle grow
larger, but our steps do as well.

~~~
mturmon
Good point. There are algorithms for manipulating Roman numerals that used to
be taught, but that no longer are. And really, little is lost.

People used to practice at long algebraic exercises (e.g., trig manipulations,
or tricky integrals) that are no longer considered worthwhile. Just give it to
Mathematica. It's like medium-sized linear systems -- sure, you could solve it
manually, but nobody does, or even remembers all the shortcuts and tricks that
used to be so important.

A brief and vivid essay on this is "Forget it" by the late Isaac Asimov:
[http://readanybooks.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov37/27283.html](http://readanybooks.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov37/27283.html)

------
matthewtoast
Mentioned in this article is "The Third Culture" by John Brockman of Edge.org.
That book is worth a read, even nearing 20 years in publication. It introduces
the ideas of several fascinating scientists (among them Dan Dennett and Lynn
Margulis) whose work manages to transcend the stated "two cultures," bringing
science to bear on what were traditionally seen as "humanist" problems and
vice-versa. These are thinkers who've taken responsibility for bringing their
ideas directly to the public, rather than waiting for writers, journalists
and, ahem, "insight pornographers" (if you follow HN) to do it for them. I
first read it after obtaining my English degree, and it felt like I'd been
shot with a sudden antidote to a haze of intellectual nonsense. I wonder how
well it contrasts against the current trend in glossy pop science, which I
suspect may be the flip-side of the same coin.

~~~
rmk2
The idea of a (re-)integration of the two sides of Snow's dichotomy (alongside
a critique of the concept of "The Two Cultures") can be found in Herbert
Marcuse's essays[1]. There, Marcuse talks about the sciences' funding by the
military-industrial complex and the position of the humanities as a
potentially regulating (e.g. ethical) moderator to curb an overbroad influence
on the sciences by forces outside the disciplines (or system).

[1]: Herbert Marcuse: _Bemerkungen zu einer Neubestimmung der Kultur (Remarks
on a Redefinition of Culture)_ , in: Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1965.

------
rokhayakebe
I think most of our problems come from the misuse and misunderstanding of two
words: debate and dialectic. Western culture DEBATES every effing thing so
much so that presidential candidates have a series of publicized DEBATES where
they each defend their plan to lead a nation.

If we were instead taught to have DIALECTICS and frankly try and remove the
word DEBATE from our dialogues, we could start to solve big problems as the
author suggests. However everyone is darn convinced their knowledge is
superior.

Of course the irony is that it appears scientists are (in general) more
dogmatic then any other group.

------
rmk2
Well, thankfully that problem will soon be solved in England! The government
has enacted a programme that should soon bear fruit, thanks to the
introduction of "impact" and weighing publications in a new, innovative,
carefully considered and consensual way. Soon, it will be the country of one
culture (since only biased pundits would dare to say: the country of no
culture), finally correcting the horrible mistakes of the past!

------
lkozma
There is also a follow-up "The Two Cultures of Mathematics" by Timothy Gowers.
I found it a crystal clear explanation of the differences between the schools
of "problem solving" and "theory building" \- and particularly of what really
motivates "combinatorics".

[https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf‎](https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf‎)

------
everyone
Personally I think something is either rational and evidence based (or at
least _attempting_ to be) or it is not. I would posit that this divide seems
apparent simply because scientists and humanities people are for some reason
grouped together in the same institutions. Imagine if half of CERNS facility
was given over to say, cheesemaking, I'm sure a similar dichotomy would be
commented upon.

------
rch
"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the
empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the
place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings
of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

\-- [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/)

------
ArekDymalski
Very inspiring. I just wonder if it's just the tone of Wikipedia article or
does this lecture really suggests that science > humanities?

~~~
rmk2
Why do you think it was posted here, without comment, just as a simple
wikipedia link? The whole point is that it is widely understood as the
quintessential idea of the sciences finally overcoming the constraints
enforced upon them by the obsolete humanities. The whole emphasis on the
_modern_ and _technological_ development paints exactly that picture, tying
the science/humanities dichotomy firmly into a progress narrative which
necessarily means that the modern (sciences) will have to overcome (and thus
leave behind) the old, i.e. the humanities.

~~~
DanI-S
I posted the article. I don't feel that it makes sense to say that one side of
the dichotomy is superior to the other. The main point is that the dichotomy
is false.

~~~
theoh
Note that the recently identified "technical middle class" in British society
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom#Technical_middle_class)
seems to capture the science side of the dichotomy. The lack of cultural
capital of the technical middle class is a problem for their status, in
traditional terms, whereas lack of scientific knowledge in other social
groupings is not.

As Flanders and Swann put it, "One of the great problems in the world today is
undoubtedly this problem of not being able to talk to scientists, because we
don't understand science. They can't talk to us because they don't understand
anything else, poor dears."
[http://www.nyanko.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/fas/anotherhat_first....](http://www.nyanko.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/fas/anotherhat_first.html)

~~~
marcus_holmes
I was taught Latin, badly, at a British boarding school for, but never
mastered it and was 'demoted' to the woodworking class after a year. I also
spent my free time in the computer room learning to program on a Commodore Pet
(I still remember the number 32768 primarily because it's the start of the
video memory page; vital if you're going to poke ascii values into the display
page). In later life I was made to feel ignorant by my inability with Latin,
and my ability to speak C,C++,Pascal, Basic and Assembler was largely ignored
or derided, even when needed. I've always found my knowledge of woodworking
and programming massively more useful (and therefore valuable) than a decent
grasp of a dead language, but my more 'cultured' friends disagreed and
condescended. Now, however, I'm beginning to perceive a level of discomfort
amongst my more 'cultured' friends, that while an understanding of Latin is
absolutely required for an intellectual life, an understanding of javascript
might be needed to. Be interesting to see where this goes.

------
bchjam
"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the
empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the
place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings
of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

[http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/)

------
rasengan0
1992 Neil Postman [http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg](http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg)
Introduction "In 1959, Sir Charles Snow published The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution..."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly)

SOS

------
maerF0x0
Read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance for an enjoyable (500pg) way to
explore these "two cultures".

------
peter303
In my life a see a large assymetry between the cultures. A fiar number of
scientists/engineers I know are good in the arts, theater, music etc. I dont
se as many humanities types as familar with science. I observed this MIT,
Harvar,and Stanford where I have degrees and took courses.

------
revscat
This seems to ignore a rather important the a rather important third culture:
the free-market capitalist. Why was this not mentioned? It is certainly an
important one insofar as western culture is concerned, and has risen to become
far more important and influential than the other two.

~~~
potatolicious
I don't think capitalists are a separate category in and of themselves - they
invariably belong in one camp or the other.

Elon Musk is a scientist. Andy Warhol is an artist. Both are known for savvy
and shrewd capitalistic exploitation of their talents.

A capitalist who is neither scientist nor artist is not much of a capitalist
at all, for he/she has nothing upon which to capitalize. All business, at the
end of the day, is the exploitation of an art or a science to fulfill a need.

~~~
revscat
Mitch McConnell. Michael Bloomberg. The Koch brothers. Vladimir Putin. The
NSA.

There are many, many political actors which shape Western culture that this
essay does not account for.

------
graycat
Snow's _Two Cultures_ was something I loudly cheered when I first read about
its points and for years afterward.

But now the book and the OP strike me as not well considered.

Net, the 'humanities' have a role much more important than is commonly or
easily described. It took me a while to understand this point.

Sure, as an insecure a young nerd facing the world, both nature and society, I
wanted 'control' of my life, in particular, 'security', and for those wanted
the power of 'truth' and didn't want to settle for anything less solid than,
say, plane geometry or, in a pinch, mathematical physics. Of course then only
some of this could I articulate.

So, something like 'The Song of Hiawatha' with "By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water ..." seemed to me as mostly nonsense and
gibberish and at best maybe something lightly entertaining but nothing like
the 'truth' for the power I was seeking. And maybe I was correct, but I'm
reluctant to return to that poem to be more sure!

Eventually I concluded that (1) there is a lot about the world, where I was
trying to get control and security, that was too complicated and subtle for
mathematics and/or mathematical physics to do me any good and (2) that part of
the world was so important to my life that, even though I didn't have solid
tools to address it, I still had to handle it in some sense.

Maybe 'The Song of Hiawatha' wouldn't help me handle those complexities, but
eventually I discovered that some parts of the humanities could to at least a
useful extent.

Generally my central criticism of the humanities was that, in strong contrast
with mathematics and mathematical physics, and, really, most of engineering,
technology, medical science, medicine, and even law, the humanities (1) did
not make clear just what they were claiming was true and (2) for any claims
nearly never provided convincing evidence. While these remain valid
criticisms, amazingly in places the humanities can be important nevertheless.

Still, I was often torqued at the humanities: E.g., in, say, the English
departments, a common claim was that English literature had a lot of good
knowledge of people and would help readers understand people. I concluded, and
still do, that _maybe a little_.

Once I discovered the E. Fromm, _The Art of Loving_ , awash in real practical
expertise, well considered and formulated, about people, I concluded that
Fromm was a good example of progress on information for understanding people.
For more on love specifically, actually some of the relevant articles on
Wikipedia seem quite good -- at least in places they have explained some of
what I figured out more or less independently, at enormous cost, and added a
lot more.

So, it is possible to get some understanding of people, but for this purpose I
would mostly set aside English literature as too thin and/or even misleading.

For understanding people, I'd say that the most important contribution of
English literature to understanding people is that some people like English
literature.

The crack in my scorn that got me started with the humanities classical music.
A brilliant person once said, "Music doesn't mean anything.". Well, maybe,
maybe not, but it still can be useful for someone wanting to understand people
or even themselves, amazingly.

Classical music was able to 'reach' me in part because there were usually few
or no words to take literally and, thus, argue with.

Well, it turns out that classical music has something of a _language_ ,
especially about human emotions. If want to understand people, the biggest
chapter is human emotions.

Classical music is an example of a common definition of _art_ as in _the
communications, interpretation of human experience, emotion_. Well, it can be
easy enough to find parts of classical music that are quite effective meeting
this definition of art. So, here there is some progress in understanding
humans.

One description of much of the media is _vicarious, escapist, fantasy,
emotional experience entertainment_ which sounds next to worthless for the
audience and, maybe, is, but we can reduce this description to _vicarious
emotional experience_ and, then, learn about people by feeling their emotions
\-- and art has a lot of this and, thus, can help a person understand people.

For some value for the audience, good art is supposed to be _universal_ and,
then, often a person in the audience can see where the art is describing
things much as in their life from which that person can conclude, "I'm not the
only one who has encountered such a thing. That thing is not unique to me.
Whatever I did to make that thing happen, others did the same, and maybe some
of the main causes are not really from me.".

E.g., a few weeks ago I did a search for a girl I knew and fell in love with
in high school. Yup, the Internet showed me a scan of a high school annual
with her picture as a Homecoming Queen candidate. To me she was always the
prettiest human female I ever saw in person or otherwise. Then many of those
days with her, decades ago, came back to me as if they were last week. She was
my first love and, apparently, burned into my brain -- I can no more forget
her than I can forget my own name.

Well, we were young: We saw each other for 18 months and started when she was
just 12 and in the seventh grade and I was 14 and in the ninth grade.

I was a nerd, socially awkward, and not good at understanding the emotions of
a young woman, and we were both afraid of rejection. So we were to afraid to
communicate clearly and accumulated quite a list of false beliefs about each
other that had us making mistakes in our relationship. At one point, some of
her mistakes got me to draw some seriously wrong conclusions, and I walked
away from her. I don't think that there was anything seriously wrong, and
everything wrong was based just on mis-communications, My heart was broken,
and I later discovered that so was hers.

Then there's Wagner's opera _Lohengrin_ , first performed in 1850, about a
knight, Lohengrin, of the Holy Grail who marries sweet Elsa. Yes, the Wagner
"Bridal Chorus" or "Wedding March" music is from their marriage in that opera.
Elsa is misled by an evil witch, makes a mistake, and Lohengrin is forced to
walk away from his new bride.

So, _Lohengrin_ told me that I was not the first guy to walk away from the
young woman he loved and that such things go back to at least 1850.

Also, Lohengrin and I made similar mistakes: We asked too much of the
understanding of our women and should have had arranged a less 'brittle'
situation.

Nerd guys: Listen up here and learn.

As good art communicates emotions about the human experience, members of the
audience can begin to learn more about other people.

The best art, in the humanities, can be astoundingly effective in
communicating about humans; we don't want to be without the results; and
technical fields are so far no substitutes.

Took me a while to see these points.

~~~
com2kid
> we don't want to be without the results; and technical fields are so far no
> substitutes.

True enough, for now. Once our understanding of human psychiatry is more
complete, a much more accurate model will hopefully be possible. Of course
getting a true understanding of another's mental state at any point in time to
simulate the model forward to predict their next behavior will be the hard
part. Even doing such forward prediction with the (compared to biological
brains) toy computers we have today is already almost impossible if one wants
absolute certainty.[1]

Of course one can view all artistic observations of human behaviors so far as
a sort of an indirect empirical guide to human behavioral patterns.

Although it is often to the frequent irritation of those of us not blessed
with a natural abundance of social skills that those who have the
understanding allowing them to write down such observations are also often
unable to understand that others do not possess their same social talents and
that therefore many unspoken assumptions need to indeed be spoken up of.

[1] Computers are of course 100% predictable, short of a true random #
generator plugged into the side, but there is a large gulf of difference
between "theoretically doable" and "here is a state frozen 8GB 3.2GHZ desktop
PC, tell me what is going to happen next without booting it up."

~~~
graycat
Yup.

> many unspoken assumptions

Yup. And had I known that, been able, in verbal, emotional, psychological, and
social skills, to have acted on it, and done so at all well, then as soon as
that girl I knew in high school, starting when she was 12, was out of high
school and I was out of college, we would have gotten married and my life
would have been much different and quite likely much better.

Side point: High school first love is not necessarily just a joke, just an
unwelcome threat of too much _emotional involvement_ , an unmarried pregnancy,
or something just to be thrown away. In particular, a lot of high school girls
will get married at the traditional time, in June after their high school
graduation, so that from age 12 to marriage she is short of time to learn
about young men, find some good catches, pick one, build a relationship, after
trashing a few, _go steady_ , and get engaged, all in time for her high school
graduation.

To nerd boys talking to girls: Don't just play _Anatomy 101 Hands on Lab_ ,
contact comfort cuddling, caring about her and protecting her, _joining_ your
life with hers, etc. and in addition be sufficiently articulate and clear
with, right, a natural language, e.g., English, to eliminate "many unspoken
assumptions". Else your communications can be poor leading to
_misunderstandings_ , that is, she can accumulate a list of things about you
that are wildly false, and similarly for you about her. Then after a few weeks
of you two acting on those misunderstandings, your relationship can be in real
trouble. That's what that girl and I did; there was actually nothing really
wrong, but the misunderstandings ruined our relationship.

Realize some emotions she likely has: First being a girl, her emotions are
likely more intense than yours. E.g., she has emotions about pregnancy, if she
gets pregnant some really strong, good emotions if she wants to be pregnant
and some really strong, bad emotions if she doesn't. Second, learn to read her
emotions in her facial expressions. Sorry, guys, even if you are a normal male
and not a nerd, from birth she is an astoundingly talented and devoted reader
of facial expressions while you are thinking about the posts in the crib, how
the latch mechanism works, how to escape to get to the toy firetruck on the
floor (not really a joke), and how to control it via C++ code. She does a lot
of communicating with facial expressions. Third, with her strong emotions, and
because she is a girl and generally more vulnerable to "the hostile forces of
nature and society" than you are, she tends to be afraid. Indeed, serious
_anxiety disease_ is much more common for human females (maybe 4:1) than in
males. So, one thing you should do, and that you might get hugs, kisses, and
more for, is to help her with her fears, i.e., provide her with some
_emotional security_. The relationship is not all about hands on lab. Fourth,
one thing she is afraid of is being rejected by you. If you are a mean guy,
then you may be able to exploit this to your (likely only short term)
advantage and manipulate her to be intimidated, subordinate, subservient,
subjugated, etc. (you don't really want that, do you?). If you are a nicer
guy, then you will give her some of the highly coveted _emotional security_ of
letting her know you are not about to reject her -- right, she might take
advantage of this, feel _entitled_ , take you for _granted_ , and abuse your
effort. To know, read her emotions. Fifth, to help her with the emotions
closer to your relationship, use the famous three little words, "I love you",
sometimes a lot. And, "say it with flowers" or some such things. Else she can
be afraid that you are drifting away from her. Sixth, realize that she's a
mammal (not just a joke about her bust line) and, like all baby mammals (even
though she is not exactly still a baby) she does not (emphasize this with
flashing letters and some huge font size) want to feel alone -- for her to
feel alone can be just terrifying to her. Indeed, one reason for cell phones
is so that girls can continue to gossip while _mobile_ , and they gossip (may
I have the envelope please) so that they don't feel alone, so that they feel
acceptance and approval from membership in a group that they get by bringing
the group juicy tidbits of gossip (read some D. Tannen, long at Georgetown) --
built one of a heck of cell phone and smart phone industry. Seventh, when
everything does _hit the fan_ , slow down, calm down, back down, relax, count
slowly to 20, maybe type in all your thoughts and review them 24 hours later,
maybe even days later, etc., and see how to correct the situation. In all of
this, be highly aware of her emotions. Did I mention the importance of her
emotions? Maybe use some _reflective listening_ techniques ("What I heard you
explain was ...; is this about right?") also intended for good parenting of
children and likely also useful if you are CEO of a startup.

There's more. Maybe I will get a blog and post a more complete and better
organized presentation.

But for this thread, at least for now, some parts of the humanities can be
crucial for understanding people.

