BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

Except you didn't study STEM, didn't go to a STEM university, don't read STEM journals and have literally no idea of what you're talking about.

Pretty sure that on the whole it was humanities graduates directing the slaughters, it was someone with a history degree who directed the bombs should be made and someone who studied for a law degree who eventually dropped the bomb on japan.

Stalin enrolled at the Gori Church School, a place secured by Charkviani. Although he got into many fights, Stalin excelled academically, displaying talent in painting and drama classes, writing his own poetry, and singing as a choirboy. In August 1894, Stalin enrolled in the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, enabled by a scholarship that allowed him to study at a reduced rate. Here he joined 600 trainee priests who boarded at the institution. Stalin was again academically successful and gained high grades. He continued writing poetry; five of his poems were published under the pseudonym of "Soselo" in Ilia Chavchavadze's newspaper Iveria ('Georgia'). Thematically, they dealt with topics like nature, land, and patriotism. According to Stalin's biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore they became "minor Georgian classics", and were included in various anthologies of Georgian poetry over the coming years. As he grew older, Stalin lost interest in his studies, his grades dropped, and he was repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious behaviour. Teachers complained that he declared himself an atheist, chatted in class and refused to doff his hat to monks.

Hitler later dramatised an episode from this period when his father took him to visit a customs office, depicting it as an event that gave rise to an unforgiving antagonism between father and son, who were both strong-willed. Ignoring his son's desire to attend a classical high school and become an artist, Alois sent Hitler to the Realschule in Linz in September 1900. Hitler rebelled against this decision, and in Mein Kampf states that he intentionally did poorly in school, hoping that once his father saw "what little progress I was making at the technical school he would let me devote myself to my dream".

I think the world has had enough of ethical humanities graduates TBH

Probably engineers shouldn't subcontract ethics to people who supposedly know what they're talking about.

One of the engineers at work was trying to convince us about how terrible it is to work there despite them being among the best paid. His proof was that his clique of other engineers are also miserable. He was taken aback when I posited that it's because engineers are miserable bastards in general.

Maybe somewhere else. They don't take any risks, have loads of freedom, and seem to resent having to do things that improve life for others.

uziq wrote:

except there is basically no ethics or reflection in STEM at all. it almost always goes to lawyers trained in ... humanities ... or philosophy departments to wiggle out the questions in academic journals. AI, biotech, etc. are all hot topics in stanford humanities departments. if scientific research was integrated with ethics and philosophy, we'd never have nuclear bombs and scientists wouldn't have been handmaidens to the military throughout history. chlorine and mustard gas, biological warfare, nukes ... yeah a real ethical discipline over there.

pure sciences never ask the 'why' part of developing new knowledge or technologies. they observe and describe, and induce from there. what, how questions. there's never some reflective scientist chap putting away his nobel prize pet ambition and saying, 'wait, why the hell do we even need this anyway? does it enrich human life?'

i'll grant that applied sciences involve some everyday thinking about those issues. like, for instance, engineering 'speculation' and 'ethics': hm, can i patent this? can i make money out of this? will this get me a prize?

at lest oppenheimer was well-read in world literatures. it gave him a conscience. and feynman! he played the bongos! so arty and cool

No ethics? We all grow up within the same culture learning right and wrong from our parents and peers. This doesn't go away just because you choose s STEM path in life. Does STEM attract more people on the spectrum whose compassion might be lacking? Yes. Are they given power? Rarely outside of startups.

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

of course being an engineer or being an architect requires problem solving and creativity. but don't dress it up like STEM majors are all going into jobs where they are constantly having to think abstractly and devise new solutions. they are basically gathering data and doing numerical solutions, whether it be in engineering firms or as actuaries. that shit is gonna get automated. i doubt someone like jay even understands half the math underpinning what he uses in his day-to-day job using matlab or whatever. the future is definitely no brighter for STEM majors than humanities grads on that front.

Not automated, but outsourced. Many of the big design firms in New York now outsource rendering of their CAD drawings to India. The PE just does the initial layout and review before sending it out.

My job, thankfully, can't be automated or outsourced.

And yes, I understand the math.

lol i was just baiting you. you emerged like a bear from a den.

re: ethics in a general society, yes, of course 'scientists are people too!', but doing highly abstracted, mental work means that people cannot easily foresee the consequences of their work. sometimes it's too much to even expect an 'expert' in a field to have the context or imagination to see the ramifications or unintended outcomes of their research. and, besides, my point is that the ethics come from outside the STEM field, and if you want to appeal to a 'general' culture, well our legal sense of right or wrong and our deeply held cultural beliefs are ... the province of the humanities. so you're just sort of reinforcing my point. i'm not saying scientists are amoral. i'm saying professional research does not require one to consider various ethical or even theological arguments.

science, rationality, 'instrumental' knowledge, however you want to phrase it ... is a narrow framework, highly effective of course towards its own ends (i.e. the scientific method). but 'instrumental reason' has a (runaway) logic of its own and that does not encompass ethics, moderation, slow contemplation. sometimes the ethical argument invoked is crass and unsuitable, a poor adaptation of humanistic ideals or philosophy. look at how terribly utilitarianism has been misapplied in the sciences throughout history. look at eugenics. there are all sorts of 'scientific', 'rational' arguments that are basically unethical as we generally agree to the term, which of course find their support from those with deeply held irrational prejudices, autists, misanthropes, etc. and then there is the class of argument cloaked in 'objective', 'dispassionate' scientific thinking, which are really just one person or one group's own ethical biases presented as inalienable 'fact'. dilbert is a specialist at that line of argument.

dilbert claimed effectively that the 2nd half of universities' civic cachet is bogus, because all of the reflection, passing on of wisdom and ethical pondering is done in STEM departments. i see very few ethics units taught on engineering courses (amusingly, he thinks i went to a university with 'no STEM whatsoever', even though... every serious university literally comprises a huge science and math faculty, and plenty of inter-disciplinary collaboration between them).

dilbert thinks that humanities departments are just full of people reproducing interpretations of chaucer. the fact that middle english is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction of activity in humanities faculties notwithstanding, it's just inane to think that all philosophy students do is rehearse and regurgitate a few lines and get given a stamped piece of paper as a result. the analysis of contemporary life as well as history is what, ultimately, informs our sense of the good, the right, the desirable -- all those ancient greek shibboleths. when you appeal to 'our general sense of ethics', that's not something that was dropped off by an alien civilisation from the skies. it's the result of a broad liberal-humanist tradition, worked out over centuries of thought and argument, and which has explicitly been nurtured and nourished in ... universities (and prior to that monasteries, academies, ritual castes, etc)

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-15 04:25:14)

the US degree system is fairly novel in that it requires undergraduates to minor in other subjects, but if you think that a post-doctoral scientist working in genetic engineering is really getting much benefit from their sophomore reading paper assignment on Steinbeck, i'd say that's pretty laughable. it's a good system for letting students gradually decide what they want to specialise in, but it's not producing philosopher-scientists.

technical writing has no relation whatsoever to 'the humanities' as an academic field. useful for employment, certainly, but it's about equivalent to sending a secretary on a typist's course.

i'm also not surprised that most found essentially a book report assignment taught at a technical college 'uninspiring'. not quite a lecture given at cornell, is it?

in general i agree it's a Good Idea to expose students to other sides of the academic coin, though, yes. but it's just not quite the same topic as discussing high-level science and the production of scientific knowledge. 19 year olds are not the group we're talking about, here.

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-15 04:29:09)

the concept of ethics pre-dates medicine by a long shot. in any case, arts/humanities and sciences were not divided in the early history of medicine. aristotle was a naturalist.

i don't know how to counter 'they're not complex subjects' or 'you don't do anything useful'. there are plenty of STEM graduates doing unproductive work, they're not all leading massive public infrastructure projects, most fall into the sump of faceless corporate work with the only purpose being to generate a profit, the same as most humanities graduates. and the works of husserl or spinoza require plenty of logical acuity and 'intelligence' to parse. people have different strengths. unsurprising that you write off something for which you have no discernible talent as 'easy' and 'negligible'.

you have a very elevated and noble vision of the average STEM graduate, as opposed to, say, the average person who goes into management consultancy with a 2:1 in maths and spends their lives advising companies how to fire workers effectively and maximise the board's bonuses. how many STEM graduates even end up working directly in scientific research or for an engineering/tech firm?

https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/news … -stem-jobs

The study finds that the majority of science graduates choose not to – or are unable to - work in highly skilled science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) occupations at any time in their careers.

“We found STEM graduates were more likely to work in teaching and management than in key ‘shortage areas’ such as science, engineering and ICT. Unlike in areas such as education and health, many workers in the science sector moved out of highly skilled STEM jobs as their careers progressed and there was no evidence of older workers moving into STEM careers later in life.”


In the medium to long term, STEM graduates did not have a better chance of entering graduate-level employment than those studying non-science subjects.
Although higher proportions of STEM students entered graduate jobs shortly after graduating, students with degrees in other subjects had caught up by their late twenties.
In fact, computer science and engineering graduates had above average rates of unemployment six months after graduating.

undergraduate education for most, whether in the sciences or the humanities, is just a means for someone to springboard to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and a salaried job. let's stop prating on about 'real work'.

lol again at claiming that four people with absolute power who were likely psychopaths with verrrrry interesting biographies can somehow invalidate the claim that the humanities is concerned with ethics and broadening humans' imaginations and sympathies. how many mass shooters have STEM degrees? make u think

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-15 05:11:44)

DesertFox- wrote:

Maybe somewhere else. They don't take any risks, have loads of freedom, and seem to resent having to do things that improve life for others.

So what are they engineering?

Maybe they just have a shitty manager.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I don't know, how many mass shooters have STEM degrees? I can't find any.

Las Vegas - Degree in business administration
Orlando - Technical qualifaction below a degree
Virginia Tech - "Cho enrolled as an undergraduate major in business information technology, a program that included "a combination of computer science and management coursework offered by the Pamplin College of Business." By his senior year, Cho was majoring in English."
Sandy Hook - High school education
Sutherland Springs - High School education
Luby's shooting - High school education
El Paso - High school education

Feel free to keep going, maybe it will dispel your prejudice and you'll learn to research evidence and put together arguments before making blanket statements you can't support?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shoo … ted_States

Otherwise do you really think its coincidence that four people with absolute power who chose to commit mass slaughter had backgrounds in the arts?
Pretty easy as a psychopath to hide out in a nebulous field, much harder when you have to get things right.

Otherwise you really don't need a degree to have a grip on ethics, I'm sure all the information anyone needs could be summarised on one side of a piece of A4.

i was thinking of the batman theatre guy who was in neuroscience?

lol at emphasising in bold that cho was studying english ... at VIRGINIA TECH. that's a bit like jay 'i've mastered an english degree at naval college' galt.

none of the four people you are going on about, let alone hitler or stalin, were 'artists' or had 'backgrounds in the arts'. they were hardly humanities patrons. both feared and hated artists and intellectuals and hugely stymied their intelligentsia. both saw art in a narrow sense as a tool to promote a political message. hence socialist realism and the literal death of art in the soviet union for about 30 years. you can hardly make them out to be wicked, evil humanities icons. hitler was a failed dauber who couldn't paint and got pushed into architecture (no good at  realistic hands, great at straight lines!). stalin was in a seminary, again.

why did they have that educational background? it probably has a lot more to do with historical context and background, what was the norm for people of their background and class at the time. STEM was not a massively established field like it is now. most people did not go to university to narrowly study physics or engineering until the post 1950s. you're being a tad ahistorical there. only a tiny minority of people went into academia, in any case, and people like hitler and stalin were not 'university people'. they essentially went to the technical schools of their time, for the children of well-meaning petit bourgeois or country pastors. to try and make out that they are paragons of 'humanities education', as if they were the sons of gentry being sent off for a liberal-humanist education at a centre of learning, tra la la, is pretty rich.

besides, don't you think that part where they attained 'absolute power', had more to do with their evident amorality and despotism? no, stalin's cruelty was surely formed at a quiet seminary for farmers' prodigal sons in the backwoods of russia.

this whole argument is so fucking retarded. it's like when people smugly point out that 'hitler was an atheist, you know'. MAKE U THINK - all atheists are amoral!!!

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-15 16:38:01)

this truly is one of the most retarded discussions in a while. it is NOT good analysis. you are reading into the biographies of some of the worst dictators in human history and concluding that ... the 2-3 years they spent as young adults designing buildings or studying to be a priest is the culprit? it's bad and fallacious thinking even by the standards of cod-psychology, let alone as serious argument.

unsurprisingly, you have taken my point, that STEM does not have an adequate ethical or legal framework in place to cope with the onwards rush of scientific 'progress', or at least that ethics woefully lag behind the pace of development, on a strictly personal and human level, as if i'm saying 'all scientists are bad people! boo boo!' you're being very fucking precious to mention hitler, stalin and truman when what i'm talking about is the more general observation, that things like gene editing are being pursued with very little ethical direction and are barely being contained by the law as it stands at present. new scientific knowledge is always and routinely presented as 'ethic-less' or 'value-less', as disinterested research which has no political aim, etc., whereas really the real-world ramifications of such things can be pretty terrifying and dystopian.

that career lawyers can be shameless and cynical, are casuistic or sophistic, etc., and can defend evil as quickly as prosecute it, is not my point. again we are not talking about the individual motivations of characters so much as the point that our sense of what is 'justice' in as a whole, jurisprudence and what have you, is derived from philosophical and humanistic principles rather than scientific ones. you don't go to court and plug the data into a computer to receive a verdict from a computer. ethics and law are premised on completely different ways of thinking, such as ideal behaviour and a sense of what is just, which are not strictly 'rational' or 'scientific thinking'. hence my point about utilitarianism creating quite ugly human outcomes which are hardly desirable. the broadly humanistic, liberal, secular ethics that we have now - that which you say we can 'fit on a side of a4 paper' - is not the result of rationalism, or game theory, or some scientific process. it's a concatenation of idealistic, sometimes quite irrational, not to say outwardly christian and theological, thinking.

as other people have said, you have some very elevated and quite caricatured view of scientists, as these noble, beleaguered souls, much put upon, doing saint's work, and beset from all sides by malefic shysters, frauds, people who don't do 'real work', people who 'fake it' and 'prolong pointless careers'. you effortlessly glide and elide between your political bug-bears over bureaucrats or whatever and the thought that everyone in a sinecure or profit-seeking role everywhere must be a humanities graduate. weird reading. it's just so fucking bizarre that you think the manhattan project staff were these poor conscience-stricken darlings, being pushed around by .... humanities psychopaths? that's a pretty hot take of the US military hierarchy. i mean i'm sure douglas macarthur was really formed by his reading of virgil and shakespeare ... US generals being well-known for their thespianism. let me guess: von braun and all the other scientists who helped the nazis to develop weapons 'did nothing wrong'? blameless scientists, just doing good science, pushed around by psychopaths ... how can you expect scientists to take any responsibility for their work in this big bad world, full of sharp-toothed seminarians?

and of course, no scientist works or pursues prizes because they want to 'benefit themselves', or their own vainglory, regardless of the cost or outcome of their work. no scientist is possibly ego-driven. they are all disinterested elohim in search of transcendent truths. right. you sound like jay rewriting your own biography when you talk that cant about 'benefiting their community rather than themselves'. i'm sure that's why you got into engineering when you were 17/18 years old, and not at all because it was the path of least resistance for your own talents, or promised a nice comfy well-paid career. you just wanted to help the world!!! not be selfish like your friends going to study economics!

the mind boggles.

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-16 01:29:15)

the humanities as an academic discipline have been there to elaborate and reflect on ethics, yes. STEM faculties, not so much. they produce scientific knowledge.

i'm sorry but citing stalin and hitler as examples, because one fancied himself a painter as a teenager and another attended a religious seminary, as absolute refutations of the 'point' of the humanities, is absolutely laughable. so two people ... who didn't study humanities at university ... have invalidated the civic mission of liberal-humanistic education ... forever and throughout time?

OK dilderp.

not to mention the fact that i never claimed that someone who studied the humanities would then be an ethical person for the rest of their lives. that's not how education or human behaviour works. presenting an academic environment is not the same as life-long social conditioning. do you actually interact with real human beings in your day-to-day life ffs?

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-16 05:09:51)

uziq wrote:

i feel really sorry for anyone that thinks ANY art can be made by AI. the entire point of art is that is expresses something slightly ineffable about humanity. you look at art because in some way it gives you a window into another human being's complex interior world, and in so doing it broadens and enriches your own.

if you think a 'novel' is just a technical process of putting 120,000 words together in a syntactical and logical progression, with something amounting to a plot and a few characters standing in as object x, y and z in a formula, then you are reading very very very shitty novels.

what was it wittgenstein said? 'if a lion could speak, we could not understand him'? ...

I like to imagine the eventuality of it.

Imagining an AI seated in a synthetic copy or reproduction of the human brain. Would its artificiality as an inorganic thing, or possibly comprised partly or fully of manufactured organic components, really hold it back? What if it had the developmental experiences of normal human beings. What if it was a copy of an individual's mind, carrying on upon activation.

I think usage of the term "AI" might eventually become restricted to specifically limited applications.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

uziq wrote:

i feel really sorry for anyone that thinks ANY art can be made by AI. the entire point of art is that is expresses something slightly ineffable about humanity. you look at art because in some way it gives you a window into another human being's complex interior world, and in so doing it broadens and enriches your own.

if you think a 'novel' is just a technical process of putting 120,000 words together in a syntactical and logical progression, with something amounting to a plot and a few characters standing in as object x, y and z in a formula, then you are reading very very very shitty novels.

what was it wittgenstein said? 'if a lion could speak, we could not understand him'? ...

I like to imagine the eventuality of it.

Imagining an AI seated in a synthetic copy or reproduction of the human brain. Would its artificiality as an inorganic thing, or possibly comprised partly or fully of manufactured organic components, really hold it back? What if it had the developmental experiences of normal human beings. What if it was a copy of an individual's mind, carrying on upon activation.

I think usage of the term "AI" might eventually become restricted to specifically limited applications.

that's an interesting thought experiment in a sort of metaphysical/ontological sense, but it will never happen. it's an abandoned philip k dick short story.