Week 1 | Two Cultures

Daniel Simons, https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo

Much like our experience with the Invisible Gorilla experiment, it is easy to miss so much outside our narrow field of vision. Last quarter I took four math courses as a fourth year math major and never left south campus whenever I was on campus. Not one thought or concern about north campus crossed my mind. Taking the north-south campus divide as a metaphor for the Two Cultures, I conjecture that the situation is similar outside UCLA. People work hard in their respective fields to produce results and advance their careers by meeting the standards set by the senior professionals in the fields who earlier went through the same process; they have little mental resources left to bridge the interdisciplinary gap unless their field is interdisciplinary to start with. As I have learned painfully in my course of study, it takes tremendous effort to learn and master things in one field. 

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/in-group-bias

Add to that unfortunate state of affairs our tendency to divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups. As demonstrated in the Robbers Cave experiment, where experimenters randomly divided boys into two groups in a summer camp only to see them start competing as if they were actually part of rival tribal factions, we divide ourselves into political left and right, artists and scientists, humanities majors and STEM majors, and of course north campus and south campus. There certainly are differences between the groups that we identify with, but oftentimes the differences gratuitously translate to disrespect and disparagement. My guess is that if we had mutual respect and open-mindedness all along, communication would flow between groups and C. P. Snow would not have lamented about the divide among intellectuals in The Two Cultures. Alas, we are not perfect and we need the Third Culture to help bridge the gap as advocated by Professor Vesna. John Brockman, however, in his Wired interview refers to his own description of the Third Culture with scientists as main players. I wonder if that means we have yet another divide in the Third Culture itself.

By Klem - This vector image was created with Inkscape by Klem, and then manually edited by Mnmazur., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3213322

Graham-Rowe, Duncan. “John Brockman: Matchmaking with Science and Art.” WIRED UK, 3 Feb. 2011, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/matchmaking-with-science-and-art.

Konnikova, Maria. "Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict." Scientific American, 5 Sept. 2012, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/revisiting-the-robbers-cave-the-easy-spontaneity-of-intergroup-conflict/

Sherif, Muzafer. “Experiments in Group Conflict.” Scientific American, vol. 195, no. 5, Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc., 1956, pp. 54–59, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24941808.

Snow, C. P. “The Two Cultures.” Leonardo, vol. 23, no. 2/3, The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 169–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/1578601.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 121–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577014.