How many times have you been in a conversation that ended up on a somewhat technical or scientific topic and then had half the participants turn their heads in disgust. “I’m a humanities major, I don’t want to hear about that.” Why do they do this?

Can you imagine if a friend started talking about the election and I said, “I’m a programmer, I have no interest in politics.”? I basically can’t imagine a topic that I would be so averse to that I would immediately tune out of a conversation about. I even enjoy Folahan’s drunken rants on hermeneutics and Joyce and Nabokov. I would never, ever want to talk to someone who would lower themselves by turning away a conversation on one of these topics. So why do so many people, even those allegedly given a liberal education at Stanford University, shun topics of a scientific nature so vigorously?

Actually I don’t really care about the answer to that question. I just want them to stop it.