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The niche criticism of Astrology that it undermines personal responsibility and potential by attributing actions to the stars. This came to mind because I was thinking about how reckless the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is as a idea. While there is some degree of hemispherical lateralization, the popular idea that some people are intrinsically more "logical" and others more "intuitive" is not supported by observations of lateralization, but also inherently dangerous in the same way as Astrology in that it undermines the person's own ability to choose.
Amplifying that, and I don't know for sure, but I suspect that whether your interest is in the liberal arts or STEM, the very same qualities or abilities predispose you for excellence in both. It is dangerous them to tell people that they are intrinsically, as in the physical structure of their brain limits them to one or the other. After all, as Nabokov quipped to his students:
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Why can't there be a poet-scientist[1]? Why can't there be a musician-astrophysicist[2]? A painter-mathematician[3]?
Well there ought be, there can be, and there are.
- ^
Vladimir Nabokov's influence on Russian and English literature and language is assured. Many people also know of the novelist's lifelong passion for butterflies. But his notable contributions to the science of lepidopterology and to general biology are only beginning to be widely known.
https://www.nature.com/articles/531304a - ^
When Queen began to have international success in 1974, [Brian May] abandoned his doctoral studies, but nonetheless co-authored two peer-reviewed research papers,which were based on his observations at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May#Scientific_career - ^
a book on the geometry of polyhedra written in the 1480s or early 1490s by Italian painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_quinque_corporibus_regularibus
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