E.O. Wilson Sounds Off on the Trouble With STEM

Oh man, in my experience the problem was exactly the opposite. I would talk to biologists who would propose an utterly insane mechanism or demand a molecule with impossible properties for their analytical purposes (hey chemist can you make a thing that does exactly this under these constraints for me).

Or once there was a physicist doing biophysics that spent weeks obsessing over an interesting discovery he's made using AFM, that ordered structures appeared when he had prepped it slowly, disordered structures when he prepped it quickly.

I told him he'd forgotten to get rid of the bulk salt from the sample.

It was constantly a problem that interdisciplinary research was encouraged but interdisciplinary knowledge was not (because that is hard)

> pre-college it's plausible to me that a hopeful biologist is best served studying the parts of biology they like effortlessly

Yes, but it's probably accurate to say that any hopeful xist is best served by studying the parts of x they like effortlessly. Sadly not how high school education typically works.

I'm still more partial to the math/physics side of STEM than to biology, but it took me until late in college to realize that I was much less partial to it than I'd always assumed. I could probably have been quite happy working in bioinformatics or neuroscience, for many of the same reasons I enjoy physics and programming.

But my early exposure to biology in both highschool and college was "sequential" in a wholly meaningless way that pushed me towards the aspects I liked least. Anatomy and cell microbiology are not actually prerequisites for learning about population ecology, nor is macrobiology a real prerequisite to basic neuroscience.

It feels like physics/mathematics/engineering education is substantially better at allowing students to engage with the topics they like most, then develop supporting knowledge as they need it to progress further. That drives engagement in the field as a whole, but it also makes the secondary learning easier and more useful. The linear "map of the cat" approach to teaching biology is often a bigger cause of 'hard sciences' snobbery than the actual differences between fields.

I think he oughta check his neurotypical privilege.

This kind of infinite regress of A being the pre-requisite of B can be pretty off-putting. It's essentially analogous to mandated "yak shaving", but in a more structured form. Pretty quickly once loses sight of the original inspiration and it's associated joys.

As someone who enjoys multi-disciplinary learning and holistic understanding, what works for me is a kind of spiralling spaced repetition. I keep alternating my attention over a bunch of topics, each time going a little deeper and making more connections. In the later stages, this manifests as a comprehensive and integrative understanding, but it is very difficult to measure partial progress or feel confident in the earlier stages. It is also challenging to communicate with people who have learned the topic in a linear manner and prefer to think that way, especially if they aren't patient or open-minded.

Getting bogged down with gatekeeping "requirements" (as if to cross off prerequisites on a checklist... What does it even mean to check off a topic?) is an easy way to get bogged down. Experience gives me a measure of confidence to push on with my flitting between topics with the faith that enough pieces will eventually come together.

I also like some things Edward Kmett says in his talk "Stop treading water".

Thank you for the succinct description of '“science fandom” rather than scientific thinking'. This perfectly expresses my trouble with most scientific discourse nowadays. Many people brandishing "science" as a tool to win arguments instead of thinking scientifically, and often can't explain the scientific method.

That, and the constant appeal to authority (fallacy) of "scientists say..." are my biggest pet peeves.

This problem isn't easily solved, unfortunately, because scientific thinking is difficult and not for everyone. If anything this amplifies the responsibilities placed on scientists to communicate their findings and caveats as clearly as possible to the public.

That's what bothers me about the whole idea that if everybody beams a coder the world would be a better place. STEM is an important of education but there are plenty of other things that are as important. that coming from someone who has an engineering mind but I know I wouldn't the world to be run exclusively by people like me.

I like the phrase “science fandom”.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea that we too often learn whether things are good or bad without learning why.

It gets discussed most with politics and ethics, where people can revile a past movement while happily reinventing all of its beliefs. But the same goes for "science fandom", where 'science' is the good thing which knows settled facts, rather than the actual investigative process that discovered them. Or too for replication-crisis academia, where everything from peer review to significance testing are treated as ritual barriers to getting published. (Not just by publish-or-perish; people like Wansink seem to genuinely have no idea why they need good methodology.)

My old school district has repeatedly cut funding for science, non-core tech classes from programming to computer art, and any sort of 'extra' content from accelerated classes to non-teacher experts. (For years, they had a floating "science demonstrator" who was one of the best and most scientifically-minded educators I've ever met. Not anymore.) Meanwhile, there's constant talk about how teaching students to be at the cutting edge of STEM is a major priority. They've rationalized that divide with things like 'science and technology studies' (meaning Powerpoints about science topics) and 'STEAM' (I'm all for arts education, but it's basically being used here as a broadened slogan to avoid talking about science).

Outside of one great physics teacher, the most science-minded class I remember taking was actually a machine shop class. Giving up the STEM talisman and taking on inherently open-ended problems like "it's making a funny noise" did wonders for getting people to think inquisitively and logically.

> “science fandom”

See also Scientism [0], especially in the sense Popper meant it.

The place I keep getting stuck is trying to understand how we went from skepticism meaning, "I will neither believe, nor disbelieve, without evidence" to something more like "if the thing doesn't confirm my (probably very limited) understanding of our (definitely limited) understanding of reality, the thing should be dismissed, if not mocked."

I get the value of things needing to be proved — which, in context, just means "the theory still works", not the "it is known" that notion seems to have become — in order to be believed, but the one just doesn't follow from the other.

My guess is tribalism. When people are mocking things, they're doing it to advertise some kind of tribal affiliation, or enforce some tribe's norms.

EDIT: Phrasing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

And sometimes with good reason. If someone comes up with evidence based research that, say, blacks are less intelligent than whites, should that be supported? Science does not exist in a vacuum.

> In Sociology, surely there must be some Statistics course.

I a look at my local university's requirements - I knew that Stats was a requirement for psychology (my minor), but oddly enough, it's apparently not for sociology. That's bizarre.

I do agree with you on the rest though - for the longest time "Science" was "Natural Philosophy" - arts and science were all a mishmash, and as an arts student you see that progression far better - there's a focus on the methods of thought of before and of now, as opposed to a science education, which is a progression of complexity in regards to the current state of the science. I don't know if you spend much time looking at what came before, unless those ideas or models still can hold true.

>In Physics, it is almost impossible not to make use of History timelines for the sake of understanding the evolution of ideas. But that's that.

History is treated as an interesting pastime, there are a lot of physicists who enjoy it but understanding the "evolution of ideas" is not useful for work.

I think math majors in many universities do have to take a History of Mathematics course. I do wish it was taught in more subjects. 'History and Evolution of Computers' should make a good addition to the undergraduate CS program, where I think many useful, practical solutions come from revisiting approaches tried in the past.

Also interesting would be a course charting the step by step development of a large, significant software project like the OS/360 or any thing like that from conceptualisation, to design/ development, management of process, people and documentation, maintenance, user experience, etc. How software grows and evolves and transforms, how various people and actors influence that process.

Has our society reached a tipping point, where we're establishing a consensus, correctly or not, that there's a "scientific" way to do nearly everything? Adopting "data-driven approaches" to every industry; optimizing each decision; cargo cult science indeed.

A social movement where hearts and minds and investors believe that data is more important than intuition, that design is more important than luck, and that talent is more important than guts.

The "learn to code" thing is not making fun of the humanities - it is making fun of people who write overwrought think-pieces and listicles on advertising/billionaire-vanity supported publications, who are finding their markets sag. Many of them have been heaping scorn on the nerds for decades; it's hard not to chuckle with a little glee at their comeuppance.

Part of the scorn for humanities in the tech crowd comes from the unrelenting attack by the humanities (journalists) on our field for the past decade. A day doesn't go by where the New York Times/Atlantic/WaPo doesn't attack developers, Facebook/Uber/AirBnB, the internet, "tech bros"...

I don't think Feynman had to deal with anything like that.

> I also think we sometimes overlook the triumphs of the humanities because they look so different than those in the natural sciences. While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945.

Unless you want to claim a name for it, I'm going to start to cite it "as noted in an online forum...". It's a very good observation.

Love the quote and the idea about the bomb and Stanley Kubrick too but you can make a good case that it was Herman Kahn's work at the RAND Corporation and the adoption by the US of 2nd strike capability on his recommendation that kept the world from a nuclear war. You can call that the Dr Strangelove saved the world theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn

I was born in the early 80s, went to school in the US and Germany, and really cannot connect my experience with yours. If anything, there was a universal attitude that math and science were harder, while the others were easy to pass with just enough engagement in class.

But the dominant theme of my recollection would really be that there just wasn’t any such narrative of “the humanities” vs “tech”.

The altruism things is actually pretty easy to understand with one simple fact: it takes way less energy to destroy something than it does to create something. So if you can have an arrangement where everybody agrees to just go about their business and create things, rather than constantly trying to destroy other people and their things, then it's hugely beneficial in sum. The caveat is that the viability of such an arrangement depends on an ecological niche not being at capacity; the game not being zero sum, in other words. If you're playing a zero sum game, then things become nasty and brutish pretty quickly.