A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM | Hacker News Reader

A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM

chronicle.com

29 pointsclebio14 comments

10 days ago, 60 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19856874

The way I approach STEM with my own child is not preaenting him with a series of challenges but as a set of tools and opportunities.

I do expect to encourage him to engage in competitions like science fairs and Math Olympics, but my experience with those is that they are fun, yield good discipline, and the team activities are just as good at developing team skills as any sport.

"Interview with E. O. Wilson" might be a better title here.

If your goal was for 1% as many people to click on it. STEM is a cultural marker and people want to know if it will go up or down in status. Both for their own status and to know if it will help their kids. "Interview with E.O. Wilson" only attracts people who are interested in raising or lowering the status of evolutionary biology, which is much smaller because most people know they will get in trouble if they pick the wrong side.

I've always felt STEM as yet another compartmentalization of people that create from the business side that manages to own all of the profits from said object/process the STEMs create. A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions, so why is an MBA level education not a critical component of a STEM education? Seem like a critical oversight, or intentional for some odd valued reason.

Science Technology Engineering and Math aren't just for business, but I think you mean that the business managers end up owning their product?

MBAs seem mostly centered on the US (some in Europe, but much less in Asia) business experience. I haven't noticed that it's made the US much more successful, but it is important to have the MBA tool set to fairly get money out of the US banking/venture system.

In other places the business might hire a CFO to do the money-work rather than making them CEO or requiring it of your VPs. So although an MBA might be useful in many business contexts (especially in the US), I don't think id make it part of STEMB.

On the other hand, I will say that I agree with you (and Wilson) on the idea that selfish MBA leaders make use of collaborative (STEM) workers all too often. Where I disagree (I think with both) is that while research/science can be a wonderful thing on its own, having a broad basis particularly in highschool/undergrad is more useful to allow the full flowering of knowledge and creativity. Depth first is better for chess and an MBA may help you win the money game... but not necessarily for discovery.

I'm not saying Science Technology Engineering and Math are just for business; I'm saying a knowledge of business is essential to achieving large ambitions.

The knowledge of business isn't the same as MBA. And plenty of large ambitions work out pretty well without either.

Business knowledge and/or MBA's are only relevant for large ambitions if those large ambitions are actually not large ambitions but rather large amounts of money instead, which in itself is without intrinsic value.

You don't need to understand business to be an engineer, meaning you can fix something an engineer can be expected to without knowing a damn thing about business.

Also, business is just not interesting for some people. I am one of them and I'm glad I wasn't made to agree with something I don't believe in, in order to be what I do believe in.

And then you only have a job. With any sort of business education (even on the job training how to operate a business) turns an engineer occupying a job into an independent professional capable of striking out on their own.

> A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions

Funny how many billionaires are out-there without an MBA.

> Of the top 100 people listed by Forbes as the world’s richest, a grand total of 16 have MBAs. The highest-ranking MBA is Michael Bloomberg at number 11

https://www.businessbecause.com/news/making-the-headlines/52...

> Funny how many billionaires are out-there without an MBA.

The OP said "business education", not MBA. That article points out that a number of the top 100 richest who do not have a MBA do have a bachelor's degree in business administration (e.g. Warren Buffet) or dropped out of business school (e.g. Steve Ballmer). So it's not as cut and dried as that.

I think the issue might be that the exceedingly vast majority of people have no chance of becoming a billionaire and a lot of it is down to luck. On the other hand, an MBA might allow someone to become a millionaire while they are still young enough to enjoy it.

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