[electrondood]

For me, the intimidating bit and source of "math anxiety" is that there's only one right answer. You either get it or you don't. At the time, I had a fear of failure and this caused a lot of stress, especially at the chalkboard in front of the class.

I preferred humanities, where there was wiggle room and you could bullshit your way around the gray areas. That all ended when I became a dev, where failure is nearly constant so there's no time for feeling bad about it.

[kandel]

mathematicians: Humanities are stressful because you don't know what's the right answer!

[hgsgm]

Good academics fear the difficulty of good humanities. Bad academics enjoy having the excuse.

This is why "humanities" in general have a terrible reputation, but the individual people who've done great work are respected.

[Tainnor]

As someone who has studied both humanities and "hard" subjects, I'd definitely say that I respect really good researchers in the humanities just as much as I would a Fields medalist, but there's a much lower bar and there's a lot of shoddy research being done (as well as really bad students who just coast by somehow, something which is much harder to do in math-heavy subjects).

Then there's also the problem that there's not even a clear consensus on what great research is in a "soft" field. I might find someone highly accomplished, but someone else might think the opposite. With maths, either someone proves a theorem or they don't, there's almost no middle ground (Mochizuki notwithstanding).