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“I remember William Rusher, who used to publish National Review, writing about how he had to tell a colleague that “there is no concept so simple that I can fail to understand it when presented as a graph”. That made me feel the two cultures divide, for sure. But it’s perhaps not as stark as the classic C. P. Snow formulation: there are plenty of scientists who appreciate literature and the arts, and (as McPhee notes), there are plenty of people who know more about the humanities who find that they enjoy scientific topics once they’re exposed to them.
My two cultures, then are the people who can appreciate science and the arts, versus the people who can appreciate only one of the two. (I’m leaving aside people who can’t appreciate either one). So there are one-mode-only folks like the lawyer who wrote above (or William Rusher), and the corresponding scientists and engineers who might never pick up a book or appreciate a painting.”