Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus It's arguably worse than that. Those areas certainly suffered less than the humanities; but it's not like the shifting percentage of "tech" that involves actually designing useful tools vs. the adtech and dark patterns on the consumer side and SaaS feeding frenzy and VC valuation fluffing on the business side has been pretty to watch. Nor has the shift in incentives for people with decent math away from physics and toward exotic derivatives and quant stuff.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus I'd argue that STEM often grows the other ones as a bi-product very reliably:
- higher wages and lower work load means more free time to explore humanities
- analytics and result/growth focused mindset popularized by STEM applies to humanities just as well
- humanities being more of a hobby subject protects it from commercial negativityWe should actually do _more_ STEM. I'd really just complain about "business degrees" as these are just useless outside of a class or two.
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This is a bit of a stretch, but feel like your thesis is well illustrated by the recent big hit IMAX spectacle production of Homer's epic Greek poem.
Rather than rely on classics scholars to produce something that hued to the essence of this classic literary form, they created a tedious Cliff notes summary with wooden vocabulary and made up 21st century nonsense morality themes.
Feel like the film was made targeting a mass audience incapable of appreciating art.
@mastodonmigration @thepurpleoctopus And Elmo’s version will be even worse.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus
, and anyone who disagrees with you has clearly never worked with a bunch of engineers who tried to solve human problems with More Code. -
Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus I agree with the sentiment, but is that failing globally or somewhere specifically? Any sourced per-country graphs with trends somewhere?
At least in my little part of the EU, we seem to graduate significantly more (more then double) non-STEM (e.g. agriculture, politicians, business, administration, hospitality, lawyers, medical, historians, philosophers, arts) then STEM folks.
TBH, I'd rather cut down say politics and law. I like tap water, HVAC, 'net and electricity
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@muiren @thepurpleoctopus Look up Egyptian brown paint some time. I don't know what the hell category that falls under! (But if I were a horror writer, I'd have some ideas.)
@LPerry2 @thepurpleoctopus
I'm very familiar with the various historic use/abuse of mummies, but it's at best, only peripherally related to the point I made about the history of blue pigments which was pivotal to the evolution or art and science, the rise and fall of entire civilizations over millennia. -
Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus
C. P. Snow wrote about this in "the wltwo cultures" and it's never been more (depressingly) relevant
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T tanyakaroli@expressional.social shared this topic
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stems without roots, leaves or flowers don't last long. same for STEM.
@paul_ipv6 beautifully put!
@thepurpleoctopus -
@Colman I'm not from the anglosphere, but we called it just "natural sciences". The local term for STEM then was MINT (Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik).
I usually still use the term Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) in regular speech, but it doesn't translate that well to English directly.
That said, I do agree with you, and I would use a different term than STEM if I did not mean to highlight everything that came with the term.
I'm interested in the differences between the anglosphere and other cultures on this - I'm from the UK but live in France, and my English/French daughter studied chemistry in the French grande école system - and received a much broader general education than she would have done in the UK - including at least 2 foreign languages throughout her 5 years higher education in chemistry, along with philosophy and the arts.
There is in the UK constant criticism of the too-early over-specialisation in UK schools and universities, and attempts to introduce a French-style 'bac', which even for science specialists includes languages, philosophy, literature, etc...
I'm not saying there's no 'two cultures' problem at all outside the anglosphere - but I tend to think it is particularly acute there.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus soooo the humanities are not the same as the social sciences. Both of which we need.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus the only tricky part here is who is going to teach these humanities.
STEM is neutral however these disciplines can be heavily biased and justify basically anything. E.g. USSR had no shortage of philosophy taught. It was just very specific kind of philosophy.
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@thepurpleoctopus the only tricky part here is who is going to teach these humanities.
STEM is neutral however these disciplines can be heavily biased and justify basically anything. E.g. USSR had no shortage of philosophy taught. It was just very specific kind of philosophy.
@shuro@friends.deko.cloud @thepurpleoctopus@lgbtqia.space there is a number of smart and meanfull people working on philosophy. There a lot were. But usually they are not easy to unterstand and tgey not always told what you like to hear.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
Agree completely, although it's probably worth noting that STEM subjects have also been focused on applied science and engineering subjects most likely to offer an economic return.
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus again, I am reminded of a moment in Small Gods (1992) by Terry Pratchett in which an engineer and a philosopher argue on which books to save from a vast library about to be destroyed by religious zealouts: Some books teach people how to live better while some books teach people how to *be* people. #discworld
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Society is starting to look exactly like what happens when we spend decades treating STEM as the only path worth investing in, while sidelining the humanities.
This isn't a criticism of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. We need them. Desperately. They should be well supported.
But we also need philosophy, history, literature, languages, ethics, the arts, and every discipline that wrestles with what it means to be human. We need people who can understand the human condition, recognise propaganda, interpret context, think critically about power, engage with complexity, and ask not only how the world works, but what kind of world we ought to build.
A society built only to solve technical problems eventually forgets how to solve human ones.
#Humanities #STEM #Education #CriticalThinking #Ethics #Democracy #Society
@thepurpleoctopus I work in tech, and I 100% agree that we need to challenge the assumption that humanities are somehow not “useful”. The seems to have increasingly crept into public discourse from the far right. An educated person should be broadly well read, including science, tech, arts and humanities, and we need people specializing in all these domains.
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@thepurpleoctopus again, I am reminded of a moment in Small Gods (1992) by Terry Pratchett in which an engineer and a philosopher argue on which books to save from a vast library about to be destroyed by religious zealouts: Some books teach people how to live better while some books teach people how to *be* people. #discworld
@baltakatei @thepurpleoctopus as usual, the late, great Terry Pratchett has nailed it!
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@baltakatei @thepurpleoctopus as usual, the late, great Terry Pratchett has nailed it!
@baltakatei @thepurpleoctopus His novels should be required reading in schools, particularly this one.
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@thepurpleoctopus again, I am reminded of a moment in Small Gods (1992) by Terry Pratchett in which an engineer and a philosopher argue on which books to save from a vast library about to be destroyed by religious zealouts: Some books teach people how to live better while some books teach people how to *be* people. #discworld
@baltakatei @thepurpleoctopus I just finished the audiobook of this one! Another great parallel conversation between Urn and Didactylos is the one later in the book about the arms race.
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Agree completely, although it's probably worth noting that STEM subjects have also been focused on applied science and engineering subjects most likely to offer an economic return.
@ReggieHere Yes, very true. Thank you!
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@thepurpleoctopus soooo the humanities are not the same as the social sciences. Both of which we need.
@DrSuzanne Very correct, and I feel I should have included this, to be honest. However, when I wrote this, I mostly thought of philosophy and ethics, so I hope my oversight can be forgiven.
I will also say that where I worked academically, even the social sciences were looking down on the arts and humanities. And on the other side, in German speaking academia, social sciences and the humanities are often seen as almost the same.
But yes, you're definitely right.
