The Hierarchy of Smarts: Engineers Thinking They’re Better Than Writers and Psychologists

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I’ve spent half my life in a haze of half-formed thoughts, philosophical musings, and scraping together the bare minimum to make ends meet.

And there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way: The world has a sick, twisted idea of what counts as “smart.”

The engineers, the physicists, the chemists—they’ve made themselves the royalty of the intellectual world.

They sit on their thrones of hard data and equations, looking down on the rest of us—writers, psychologists, philosophers, artists.

To them, we’re the “soft sciences,” the ones who deal with the messy, subjective parts of life.

But I’m here to tell you: there’s nothing soft about the human condition. If anything, it’s the engineers who are soft, wrapped up in their tidy little boxes, trying to solve problems that have been solved a thousand times before.

Meanwhile, we’re over here, trying to figure out what the hell it all means.

The Engineer’s Mental Cage

I’ve known my fair share of engineers. In fact, some of them have been friends. But there’s this subtle arrogance that comes with the territory, this belief that the world can only be understood in numbers, in formulas, in terms of what can be measured.

Engineers often don’t get it. They live in a world of certainty, and they want to drag everyone else into it with them. They see themselves as the true intellectuals, because they build stuff that works, that has a purpose—something you can see, touch, and use.

They believe that their job is to fix things, that solving practical problems makes them somehow superior.

“You deal with ideas, I deal with reality,” they’ll say, as if their hands-on approach somehow invalidates the issues we deal with every day.

And sure, they’ve got their place. I’m not going to knock that. Bridges need to stand. Computers need to compute. And yes, their world of measurable outcomes is important.

But here’s the thing: you can measure a bridge, but you can’t measure a soul.

You can map the stars, but you can’t map the human heart. That’s the shit that keeps us up at night—the stuff that isn’t quantifiable, the stuff that doesn’t fit into neat, tidy categories.

They call it “soft,” as if there’s something inherently weak about the things that can’t be weighed on a scale.

Writers, psychologists, philosophers—they’re the ones who try to make sense of the chaos that engineers like to ignore.

They’re the ones who ask why when everyone else is too busy asking how.

But because we can’t slap a price tag on our work, because we don’t solve equations or build skyscrapers, we’re dismissed.

We’re the underdogs, the dreamers, the “layabouts” who waste time pondering questions that have no answers.

The “Hard” Science Illusion

Let’s get into this idea of hard science. It’s a term that has been bandied about like it’s the ultimate badge of honor.

Engineers and physicists talk about it like they’ve uncovered the truth of the universe, as if their cold, mechanical understanding of the world is somehow the only valid one.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret: every truth is just a lie we’ve agreed to believe. The scientists, the engineers—they’re no different. They’ve built their little empires based on facts they’ve constructed, not discovered.

It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that science is the only way to understand the world. And it’s a myth that’s perpetuated by the institutions that have the power to control knowledge.

Think about it: the moment we started to view the universe as a machine—a cold, calculated mechanism—the magic of existence was sucked right out of it. The soul? Gone. The mystery? Erased.

We were left with equations and data points and the belief that if we just keep plugging numbers into the system, we’ll eventually solve everything.

But what happens when we reach the limits of that approach?

What happens when the formulas break down and the data no longer holds the answers?

When engineers and scientists get to the end of their understanding, they don’t know what to do with the questions that come next.

And that’s where we come in—the writers, the thinkers, the dreamers. We’re the ones who ask. We’re the ones who refuse to accept the world as a mere calculation.

The Forgotten Soft Sciences

But let’s get back to the soft sciences for a moment. I’ve had enough of the arrogance.

Writers, psychologists, and philosophers—what do we do that’s so bad?

We don’t have the glory of creating monumental structures or cracking the codes of the universe.

But what we do have is the ability to dissect the human soul, to understand the things that make us tick.

To ask the questions that engineers are too afraid to ask. Why do we love? Why do we hate? What is consciousness? What is meaning? And where does it come from?

Take psychology. It’s a field that’s constantly fighting to be taken seriously. It’s about the human mind—the thoughts, the desires, the inner workings of who we are as people. You can’t measure that in a lab, you can’t quantify it with a computer, but it’s still one of the most important fields there is.

Sure, psychology doesn’t have the same certainty as physics, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s in that uncertainty that the real answers lie.

And literature—oh, literature. There’s nothing soft about it. It’s the thing that helps us understand the human experience, that puts us in someone else’s shoes and lets us see the world through their eyes.

Writers shape our culture, challenge our assumptions, and ask us to confront the very things we’d rather ignore.

They make us feel things. They make us think. And for all the engineers and scientists who think they have it all figured out, I’d argue that it’s the writers who have the real power.

They shape the future through ideas. Engineers might build the roads we walk on, but writers build the worlds we live in.

It’s Simple…

Imagine you’re trying to understand a puzzle. Engineers—well, they’re the ones who build the pieces, the ones who make sure the puzzle fits together. They’re good at it. They know what they’re doing.

But the puzzle’s always the same. It never changes. Writers, though, we’re the ones who ask: What if the puzzle didn’t have to fit together at all? What if we made a new puzzle? Or, better yet, what if we just threw the puzzle out and made something else entirely?

That’s the kind of thinking the engineers don’t get. They’re too busy putting their puzzles together to think about why we need them in the first place.

Counter-Evidence: Shaking the Cage

But I won’t sit here and pretend that the engineers are entirely wrong. In fact, there are plenty of voices—some of them even in the scientific community—that have started to question this hierarchy.

Thomas Kuhn, for example, argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science isn’t this perfect, linear process of discovering absolute truths. It’s messy. It’s subjective. It’s shaped by culture, politics, and human error.

He pulled the curtain back on the myth of scientific objectivity, and what he showed us wasn’t pretty.

Then there’s C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, which critiques the rift between the sciences and the humanities, but also highlights how that divide hurts us all.

The world is not just atoms and equations; it’s culture, it’s thought, it’s emotion. Snow argued that the refusal to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities is ultimately damaging to society.

It’s that same tunnel vision that keeps engineers from seeing the bigger picture.

That Feeling…

But even as I write this, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s all meaningless. We’ve created this hierarchy. We’ve placed engineers and scientists on pedestals, but in the end, what does any of it mean?

The universe doesn’t give a damn about our measurements. It doesn’t care about our need to categorize everything into neat little piles. So why do we keep pretending that the answers to everything can be found in a lab?

It’s a nihilistic reality we’ve built for ourselves.

We’re chasing after things that don’t matter, filling our lives with calculations and formulas, when the real questions are far deeper than that.

The cold, hard truth is that there’s no answer, no equation, no formula that will give us what we really want. We’re just wandering in the dark.

We can choose to keep wandering. Or we can choose to ask the bigger questions. We can choose to embrace the uncertainty, the messiness, the ambiguity of life. That’s the real fight. Not between engineers and writers, not between science and art—but between those who accept the darkness and those who dare to ask why.

Because, in the end, that’s the only thing that might save us.

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