Presented As Opinion

I often label myself an autodidactic polymath; but my first formal higher education was in mechanical drafting, which is engineering lite.  All the math, none of the humanities!

I am constantly encountering this truth:

My best friend is a lawyer, bright, gifted, ... PhD in law; bored with his job, he decided to study engineering. After his first quarter, he came to me and said that the two "C"s he'd achieved in Engineering Calculus 101 and Engineering Physics 101 were the first two non-A grades he'd ever gotten in college, and that he had had to study harder for them than for any other dozen classes he'd had. "I now understand", he said, "why engineers and their like are so hard to examine, whether on the stand or in a deposition. When they say a thing is possible, they KNOW it is possible, and when they say a thing is not possible, they KNOW it is not. Most people don't understand know in that way; what they know is what we can persuade them to believe. You engineers live in the same world as the rest of us, but you understand that world in a way we never will."
I don't think that you have to love math to be an engineer, but you are going to have to learn it. That means that you're going to have to do the homework, correctly. Mistakes and "close enough" are the ways to build bridges that fail.

Many times I've said stated something flat-out.  Time and again I encounter someone who won't understand the answer because they don't do math.

Engineering types, when they state opinion, will qualify the shit out of the statement.

"I prefer the FAL to the G3."

But statements of fact aren't.

"The FAL fires a 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge."

Am I wrong?  Well, then refute it with fact.

Often times these statements of fact don't include proofs for even laymen because you've either done the work and understand it already or no amount of explaining will bring you up to speed because you didn't learn math.

There's an entire universe closed to you because of it and it's something to be ashamed of, not proud.