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alexander2002

STEM has eaten the world (in a good way!)

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In a bad way. If we didn't have such hubris maybe we wouldn't have fed the capital with our souls?

It’s not hubris that caused that, but the quite reasonable desire not to live in mud huts.

I think you know I didn't mean it like that. The esprit de corps of STEM and the humanities, the view of society.

I hate to inform you "Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields" has applied to STEM just the same as the humanities.

I’ve noticed that, but I think it hit the humanities in the 1980s and arrived at STEM more recently. It’s just the MBA-driven financialization and enshittification of everything.

But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.

It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect. People noted that the college educated earned more, so assumed that expanding college will confer that same status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high school and look the other way even if they don't match the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high school diploma instead of giving the previous high school graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage premium for having studied English literature or psychology or communication at some low tier college.

Some people just don't seem to understand that the value of a credential rests entirely on the fact that other people don't have it.

In part, but that wouldn't be enough. The value is that only/mostly people with certain skills and talents have it.

Partially. If everyone can read and write, this doesn't make a certificate of being able to read and write meaningless. Well, it makes the certificate meaningless. But the skill is still there and it's good that everyone has it.

STEM has the same issues as humanities when it comes to academia, but the difference is that for graduate students, there's often (although not always) a straighter path into industry.

Keep down voting stem haters.

People here don't hate STEM, they just understand that STEM is not the only thing that matters.

If you want the reader to do something, it's polite to say please.

It's worth noting since the STEM explosion the world has gotten more violent and inequality has gotten much worse. They might not relate but perhaps they do.

That's just economics burying obvious problems under the rug.

Economics has become a clown science to me personally, because you can even tell them that you have a method to accomplish everything they claim happens automatically through a handful of policies and they will laugh you out of the room, while they keep juggling (and sometimes dropping) chainsaws and telling you that you just need to hold them right.

I'm not sure that I get your point but I dig your style. I too am skeptical of economists especially after reading the Nassim Taleb books. Elaborate friend.

The mistake you're making is confusing confidence for intelligence and insight. Taleb has a few good ideas but most of his writing consists of arguing against strawmen and making invalid assumptions about fields where he lacks any practical experience. It's mainly suckers who admire his writing.

I'm actually not a follower of Taleb although I do like his, "talk mad shit" style of engagement. In many ways I agree but this isn't speaking to the point of my previous comment.

Citation needed. The rate of violent deaths per capita worldwide is at a historically low level.

https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence

If you have a crush on me I'd suggest sending a PM.

Has it, or has the Internet just made problems much more visible?

Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.

Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't necessarily say anything about overall trends.

It seems like violence likely has not gotten worse globally, although it has increased in some specific ways that scare first-world dwellers. I think inequality though has indeed increased.

Inequality has increased, but not in the way most people assume. Almost everyone is materially better off than their prior-generation equivalents. It's just that some people (typically, those closest to the source of the improvement) have seen significantly more improvement than average.

That isn't true. Social institutions have declined and the welfare state has receded in most of the United States. The illusion that marginal increases in the availability of technology much of which has been showed to tacitly lower one's quality of living (consider social media's effect on the self image of teenagers) has somehow resulted in a better quality of life for many is myth you tell yourself to justify you living better than most.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

https://www.rand.org/education-employment-infrastructure/pro...

You are rebutting a point I didn't make, unless by "available technology" you mean things like food, electricity, medicine, etc. You are also making huge unjustified assumptions about who I am and why I believe the things I do.

I know your type.

Ah, but do you know your own?

https://nassimtaleb.org/2015/06/one-page-answer-to-pinkers-n...

It has gotten worse statistically. It's not just optics. This is critical as much of the western world is still living in the illusion that, "liberal democracy (the great civilizer) is that last form of government." Tell that to a Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Chinese, or Turkish person.

Where do you date that "STEM explosion"? The Scientific Revolution (Newton's time), or more the quantum and atomic age or the computer tech age or what?

There were plenty of wars in the middle ages and the nobles and peasants weren't exactly equal either.

STEM =/= science. The STEM explosion I'm referring to is the big push there's been since I was a teenager to rush high schoolers and young adults into, "hard science" programs in the hope that expanding scientific literacy would result in greater economic prolificity notwithstanding that this correlates with a reduction in funding for the humanities and literature departments. Over time and combined with immigration policy this has led to an oversaturated market for engineers, technologists, and researchers AND decreased public demand for emergent literatures, literary criticism, and philosophy.

There's a reason Jordan Peterson is so famous especially on the, "new right." There's a reason people take medical advice from the JRE program. There's a reason half of Americans believe in angels. It's because we don't have the institutions and incentives require to create something better than Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. That's the best you get with the current set.

Tangentially related; there's a better, "science" lying in waiting:

https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd...

The number of humanities graduates ballooned and there were no jobs for it. Also, generally the humanities turned in a direction that the wider population doesn't approve of. Just one example is ugly architecture, ugly paintings, unstructured poems, messy novels etc. Deconstruct everything. Ok, that's a nice hobby but scarcely a job. Engineering keeps the lights on. It gives opportunities to anyone who is willing to learn it. A smart working class kid can more easily learn C++ than all the cultural elite signifiers that get you well-paying jobs in things like law. STEM is an equalizer as opposed to fashion-based, taste-based fields. Even during a difficult job market time, you still have better chances with technical and engineering skills than with expertise in literary criticism or some obscure historical period or art form.

JP is firmly coming from academia (got famous with his lecture videos taught at Harvard and U of Toronto), "the institutions created" him. You just disagree with him, but that's not the same. He's not some outsider to academia.

Academia became very dishonest and people noticed. Maybe the replacements are even worse, but the trust will be very hard to gain back. It's very easy to destroy prestige and consensus and takes long to build it up. Of course self-reflection cannot be expected at all. I don't expect it.

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