I'd like to once again point out that many STEM people I've talked to or listened to when this stuff comes up stress that they themselves aren't geniuses (some may cite being poor students when they were at school), and don't feel confident providing "concrete statements" on matters outside their own expertise, even closely adjacent, even if just a different area of more or less the same field.
Does it not bother you that humanities people don't have this self-doubt or restraint?
We've had a long procession of govt ministers now who likely did not continue maths or science beyond high school, yet have no compunction whatever about using the country and the people for complex multi-variable experiments they couldn't even define let alone predict the result of.
It is also hilarious that someone with a PhD in economic history could not have predicted that presenting a budget with tax cuts, spending increases and no borrowing would shatter confidence and he'd be out of a job.
It was definitely present in IT courses, the atmosphere of superiority. Attitudes not promoted by the professors, but not discouraged either. One of the (many) reasons I got out was the ladder of toxic computer people ahead of me. Maybe I could have wormed my way up into a cozy corporate position, but at what cost.
I haven't really noticed it in IT, not compared with electronics and software/firmware engineers. While everyone else is juggling multiple tasks and projects they'll only ever focus on one - which they'll routinely fuck up with schoolboy errors.
"Yes the PCB is on respin 23.2 and the software has been compiled 237 times, but I'm too important to spend any time fixing my last set of fuckups - I have to focus"
humanities people have plenty of self-doubt and restraint.
how many times do i have to quote the basic, elementary statistics to you?
the proportion of people who go through any sort of elite education, humanities or otherwise, destined for the halls of power make up a tiny (and highly problematic) minority in the UK. we are talking several hundred people per year from britain's best public schools. of course they are entitled and do not show self-doubt or fucking restraint! that's what a £50,000/year boarding school environment from the age of 8 will do to a person.
the eton/charterhouse/harrow/rugby/marlborough/etc lot are a fraction of a fraction of the total intake at oxbridge each year. of course, they're over-represented in the university Unions, in the political scene, and sail straight on to whitehall or SPADland or thinktanks or junior posts with MPs. is that problematic? absolutely. but what in the FUCK does that have to do with the discipline of history or literature, tout court? you do know oxford enrols about 12,000 undergraduates a year, right?
using the country and the people for complex multi-variable experiments they couldn't even define let alone predict the result of.
dude ... society and politics are not agar-plate experiments. even if you had all the data, you couldn't devise a formula with your STEM brain to generate the 'right' outcome. that's just not how it works. even when narrowly confined to the field of economics, attempts to rationalise and model knowledge in a scientific fashion has frequently come up a cropper. at a certain level of complexity, it just doesn't work like maths or physics, my guy. what you're advocating for is the sort of scientific managerialism, or technocracy, that the soviets tried. and which many marxist-leninist governments in latin america once tried. they even built vast supercomputers and cybernetics systems in order to try and compute this stuff. the idea that society is a 'problem' to be 'solved' by autistic quants like yourself is LAUGHABLE. you do not understand the social, or indeed human, aspects of the field at all.
It is also hilarious that someone with a PhD in economic history could not have predicted that presenting a budget with tax cuts, spending increases and no borrowing would shatter confidence and he'd be out of a job.
agree ... which just goes to show how controversial and conspicuous that post-university thinktank land is. kwarteng was in bed with the hedge funds and opaque thinktanks like the IEA. to a laughable extent. he was attending parties and functions with them almost every day in between making his major decisions. in short, he is long down the road of ideological brainwashing, and/or totally bought and sold by material interests. he still gets paid something like £60,000p/a by his former employer, hedge fund manager crispen odey. something that would have got him in hot water in the very near future if he had remained in post. THAT is far more relevant than the PhD he studied for when he was in his early 20s. ffs. he's a middle-aged man with with a lifetime of influences and networking. THAT is how politics and power operates dilbert. he's not still under a hypnotic spell put on him by his undergraduate tutor. for fuck's sake! how are you so dense on this topic?
but what in the FUCK does that have to do with the discipline of history or literature
Maybe places like Oxford should do the right thing and stop creating easy courses for and giving degrees to these vegetables. Its on a par with college football - we know you're here to network and get your foot in the door with a think-tank, just pay your money and here's your certificate.
tout court
I'm going to ignore that
the idea that society is a 'problem' to be 'solved' by autistic quants like yourself is LAUGHABLE. you do not understand the social, or indeed human, aspects of the field at all.
Thats exactly what it is. Isn't that the whole point of PPE? If they were actual worthwhile courses examined properly and not three years of partying rounded off with a couple of mediocre essays dashed off while drunk Britain wouldn't be in this predicament would it?
But no you're right, someone who has studied Pontius Pilate in depth has a much better chance of handling a modern industrial economy than an economist or an industrialist.
PPE isn't the same academic rigour as humanities, though. i have told you, countless times. that PPE is a course made almost explicitly for elites. it's no different to elite universities offering low-rigour, enrol-if-you-got-the-cash postgraduate degrees in 'business' or 'management'. it's the exact same grind.
you trying to smear half of all university-level knowledge and endeavour just reveals your own ignorance and haplessness. none of these people are earnest humanities academics, dilbert. they're ambitious children of elites who go to university and take a course that will facilitate their careers in politics and public life.
and, no, PPE isn't about 'solving' society 'like an equation'. you seriously do not understand how the non-scientific branches of research work. it's genuinely mystifying. you can't answer an essay question with the 'categorically right answer', ffs.
and no PPE graduate would study pontius pilate? what in the hell for? i can't think who would, in fact, except for some niche sub-branch of roman historian?
also why are you still ranting about PPE when the health secretary has a PhD in chemistry. you aren't very good at actually paying attention to any datum that inconveniences your argument, are you?
PhD'd STEM experts are seemingly totally inept at managing their brief. what's the great malign ill with her education there, doc?
PPE isn't the same academic rigour as humanities, though. i have told you, countless times. that PPE is a course made almost explicitly for elites. it's no different to elite universities offering low-rigour, enrol-if-you-got-the-cash postgraduate degrees in 'business' or 'management'. it's the exact same grind.
So why is a supposedly respectable institution like Oxford offering it? So much for academic rigour, it taints everything else.
no, it doesn't. only in your eyes. everyone else can see it for what it is: an elite finishing school.
all elite institutions have these courses or adjoined institutions/schools. didn't trump go to wharton business school ffs? i guess that means every person with an MBA from there is a dumbass because it's 'tainted'.
all this undergraduate determinism is just autistic thinking of the highest order, anyway. a person could be a double-starred first top candidate in their youth and still fall under malign practices or influences in their adult working life. that's how life works dilbert, FFS. a politician's outlook and character aren't set in stone when they're 19 years old and reading university-level texts for the first time. there's a whole intervening lifetime of career experience, networking, socialisation, etc ...
your focus on this 'early life and education' section on politician's wikipedia is really a bizarre fixation of yours. i think you can know a politician much better by following the money trail, and asking who are their paymasters and influence peddlers. normally it leads to the fossil fuels industry, or somesuch lobbying groups; and normally they're kowtowing to some media baron or other in exchange for political support. what oxford and tweedy dons have to do with this form of democratic realpolitik (and corruption, really) is beyond me.
no, it doesn't. only in your eyes. everyone else can see it for what it is: an elite finishing school.
all elite institutions have these courses or adjoined institutions/schools.
Er, no they don't.
It would be like Imperial saying - 'Well, you can do Aeronautical, Mechanical or Chemical Engineering, or you can spend three years watching clown-porn - you'll get a certificate just the same'
imperial is an institution limited to the scientific disciplines. it’s not the same as a large international research institution like oxford. it used to be a mining college ffs, and has only expanded to encompass the sciences and technology more broadly in the last 125 years.
if you can’t see why extrapolating out your own niche university to every institution is problematic, that’s on you. as it stands, every western country has elite-tier institutions which offer courses akin to PPE or have adjacent business/law schools for political aspirants.
you’re basically acting affronted that caltech or MIT don’t have PPE courses. well duh? they’re specialised science institutions, shitforbrains!
imperial is an institution limited to the scientific disciplines. it’s not the same as a large international research institution like oxford. it used to be a mining college ffs, and has only expanded to encompass the sciences and technology more broadly in the last 125 years.
i'm not referring to how new your university is (both of our first alma maters are basically contemporaneous and became part of the same federation, after all). but your unwillingness to recognise the simple truth that imperial is a different 'sort' of institution to a traditional university is dumb. it started as a technical/polytechnic college and became one of the world's best scientific centres. no shit that you don't have any historic connection to politicos or lawyers or theologians, like an ancient university would.
PPE is a new course for a new technocratic era. i'm not claiming any different. i'm just pointing out, quite obviously, that these elite institutions have always been – simultaneously – centres of academic excellence and finishing schools for little lords and sons of gentry. it's the same in harvard-yale and the old colonial colleges in the states. they are inarguably some of the best research institutions in the world – but also finishing schools for the bushes et al. why you can't accept this quirk is beyond me.
I'd like to once again point out that many STEM people I've talked to or listened to when this stuff comes up stress that they themselves aren't geniuses (some may cite being poor students when they were at school), and don't feel confident providing "concrete statements" on matters outside their own expertise, even closely adjacent, even if just a different area of more or less the same field.
Does it not bother you that humanities people don't have this self-doubt or restraint?
We've had a long procession of govt ministers now who likely did not continue maths or science beyond high school, yet have no compunction whatever about using the country and the people for complex multi-variable experiments they couldn't even define let alone predict the result of.
It is also hilarious that someone with a PhD in economic history could not have predicted that presenting a budget with tax cuts, spending increases and no borrowing would shatter confidence and he'd be out of a job.
When I went over to arts, the atmosphere of stuffy superiority to outright know-it-all-ism I saw in STEM was absent. Nobody there was grumbling and scuffing shoes at having to take math. STEM guys rolled their eyes at English requirements. An aura of pretense there about being a more valid subject because HaRd ScIeNcE or whatever. I'm sure not everyone felt that way, but it was definitely air pollution.
The 'restraint,' as you put it, is definitely present outside of the STEM people I mentioned in my previous post. You put a lot of focus on politicians. But these represent a thin slice, and also hail from STEM. If we're cherry-picking, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering. Margaret Thatcher educated and worked for a short time as a chemist. An especially good sign when a ScIeNtIsT whose application was once rejected for *checks notes* headstrong obstinacy worms their way into politics /s. IIRC, you're not a fan of either of these politicians.
wiki wrote:
The aftermath of the milk row hardened her determination; she told the editor-proprietor Harold Creighton of The Spectator: "Don't underestimate me, I saw how they broke Keith [Joseph], but they won't break me."[79]
scientists and engineers frequently don’t exercise restraint even in their own professional domains. how many examples are there of disaster, human or environmental or otherwise, when those lot are left to self-regulate?
dilbert talks about professional bodies of accreditation in engineers as if that’s got everyone on their best behaviour at all times. as if money and greed and laziness and negligence and power and corruption and all these things don’t sneak in to non-arts pursuits at all – to say nothing about engineers (such as himself) being just as capable of nurturing toxic political ideology or dodgy social ideas (ahem ahem 'scientific' racism and eugenicism). it’s just laughable. shall we replace the parodic, stereotypical (cod-)humanities exemplar johnson with the stereotypical (cod-)scientific eugenicist? that would be such a better outcome for democratic society.
how many times has the automobile industry been affected by mass recalls and scandals? how many buildings have burned down or collapsed because someone shorted the testing and regulations? even prestigious, internationally renowned engineer cadres like VW aren't immune from this.
less sensationally, but arguably more damaging in the long view: look at the consequences of poor self-regulation in the chemicals industry, or in agribusiness, or in pharmaceuticals. you’re telling me there wasn’t a single scientist or engineer with a conscience who could have whistleblown about Teflon? about organophosphates? about neonicotinoids? about Oxycontin? a lotttt of STEM people involved in the R&D (and management levels) of these industries. a lot of people seemingly whose silence, or complicity, has been bought and sold.
zoom-in to granular detail on any one of those above case studies and you will see catastrophic failures of self-regulation and restraint in science. take neonicotinoids, for example. we left it to agribusiness and major chemical companies like bayer to safety test and risk assess their own marvellous replacements to the environmentally toxic previous tech. what’s the result? fast forward 2 decades and we are facing the collapse of insect life on the planet and the largest-scale extinction event arguably ever. wow; noble science!
or what about dupont chemical when faced with evidence that it’s ‘forever chemicals’ were coming off their utensils and ending up in groundwater and human bodies, in high quantities. faced with an existential crisis – a class action lawsuit and a PR bomb that would have sunk them forever – they instead sued the farmers with dead herds of cow into oblivion, muzzled dissent, and paid off the local regulators. we don’t even know what their latest replacement chemical formulas do because it’s proprietary. we just have to take their word for it that it’s safer than the last lot.
the moral brilliance of science! untainted by money or greed or power!!! and i'm not arguing, here, that science shouldn't have given us better pesticides or improved crop agriculture: i'm saying that many bright scientists involved in the regulation and approval of this stuff, in the political aspects of managing their field, people who weren't directly employed by corporations like bayer, could see that the statements of its safety and evidence supplied were insufficient and still gave it a pass because of the power+influence+reach of said corporations. because of the consensual pressure. these are precisely the sorts of difficult, political decisions, working in the shaded grey areas, away from the brilliance of black/white, right/wrong answers, that dilbert thinks STEM experts can handle no problemo.
a long catalogue of systemic failures within a self-regulating STEM brain industry to 'exercise restraint', here.
very silly argument. book and paper production are very green industries now, recycling rates are very high, green-planting initiatives are the norm. cleaning up the ecological impact of the publishing industry is triflingly easy in comparison to, say, agri- and petro- chemicals. most major publishers saw the way the weather was blowing and went green in the early 2000s, which probably attests to how relatively easy the transition was. to say nothing of the huge expansion of digital publishing.
14% of annual deforestation is due to the demands of paper goods (which goes way beyond publishing and book production). of that, over half is re-forested thanks to current schemes, with this proportion growing year-on-year. what you're not going to like hearing is that the majority of deforestation at present is for extractive industries, such as the fossil fuels industry you're invested in, and for things like land clearance for cattle/crop raising. that includes your beloved vegan-friendly options such as palm oil and soy, before you get all high-and-mighty about cattle (the economic lifeblood of your state, need i remind you).
why even finger-point at book production in response to, erm ... a mass extinction event of the biggest living group on this planet. lmao, great sense of perspective there my guy. 'what those chemical engineers do sure is weird!' the publishing industry isn't responsible for putting chemicals in your (and your great-great-great-granddaughter's) bloodstream.
Chemical engineers are a weird lot to be sure.
you do this an awful lot whenever a counterexample is made to you about STEM's fallibility. it's the 'no true scotsman' fallacy. 'yes, but thatcher wasn't a real chemist, after all'. 'ok, well chemical engineers are an exception, anyway'. 'therese coffey must be an especially stupid PhD'd chemist, not like the others'.
the simple and intractable fact is that there are countless examples of failures of oversight, self-regulation, or even basic observance of the law in engineering and science/industry. it is every bit as vulnerable to human temptations and folly. STEM eggheads aren't immune to the stink of money or the lure of power. i don't see any real examples, from how they conduct themselves and run their own internal business in their self-regulating industries, to suggest they'd make exemplary political leaders.
quit with this marvel universe bullshit about 'evil humanities leaders' and 'noble benevolent STEM geniuses'.
scientists and engineers frequently don’t exercise restraint even in their own professional domains. how many examples are there of disaster, human or environmental or otherwise, when those lot are left to self-regulate?
Was speaking of "restraint" in terms of "unwillingness to drop 'concrete opinions' outside expertise or specialization," but yeah these are problems.
I'd like to once again point out that many STEM people I've talked to or listened to when this stuff comes up stress that they themselves aren't geniuses (some may cite being poor students when they were at school), and don't feel confident providing "concrete statements" on matters outside their own expertise, even closely adjacent, even if just a different area of more or less the same field.
Does it not bother you that humanities people don't have this self-doubt or restraint?
tl;dr, no it doesn't bother me because it isn't an issue I see a lot of outside of STEM snobs.
FWIW, I see barely any STEM snobbiness on Reddit anymore. Maybe in certain corners but in the mainstream? Not really.
I don't know if it is the result of millennial STEM people being humbled by post-college life or if the userbase of reddit just diversified. I am leaning towards the latter. I don't think people ever really change.
Spoilers, but they literally give it away in the first paragraph.
Why on earth would you want to drop a hypothetical super-lethal covid on China for your weird, petty, conspiracy theory driven revenge? That shit would just spread to other countries.
This kind of article is irritating. They word the headline in the worst possible way to get attention, but then without reading any further people latch onto that and then decide that lavender oil and not vaccines are the way to go or whatever.
