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Notes -
STEM gave us:
Nuclear weapons
Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.
Fire gave us:
Arson, ruining our precious forests
Severe burns while cooking
Predators spotting our fires at night and coming to eat us
Toxic smoke, seriously damaging our eyes and lungs
We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of fire.
--
The criticism you're getting is that STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) is so core to modern civilization, the level of "uncritical worship" it gets is entirely reasonable. Unless you're in a log cabin in estonia, there are a hundred ten thousand distinct and identifiable products of "STEM" within a hundred feet of you. Plastic, paint, plywood, antibacterials/fungals embedded in that, light, glass, paper, all the parts in your phone/computer, clothing, processed food...
Also, criticism of the effects of one or another technology isn't exactly unheard of, everyone does it.
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And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.
Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument. Especially not if you’re just going to slam them in there.
Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)
My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".
If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.
It’s fine to be skeptical of the results of scientific research being used improperly. Most of which are policy issues anyway. Science can tell us how a disease spreads, but it cannot tell us to lock the population up in their homes and weld the doors shut. Science can tell us how to create nuclear fission, but not tell us to cram it into a bomb and drop in on a major city.
And to be honest, if anything we are actually much too skeptical of science and math. These tools of reason are the best methods available to understanding the universe. If we didn’t have the tools of science and mathematics, you’d be wearing a toga and writing this post on sheepskins as was tradition. You’d live in a world full of angels and demons and superstition where getting sick was punishment from God and the cure was bloodletting.
The problem is that we’ve done such a piss poor job of explaining what rigorous, scientific exploration of the universe has actually done for us that most people come away afraid of people they see as practical wizards reworking the world and conjuring new ideas from the ether. This was why COVID responses were so bad. It wasn’t science people were follow, it was lab-coated priests bringing down The Word from the mountain. Thus Saith the Experts is not remotely how real science works. Real science is about asking questions and looking for physical evidence of the answers.
Humanities could have been a good counterpoint and balance against excessive technophilia where everything you do with tech is good forever and we should never question it. But since it’s become unserious, ideologically corrupted, and lacks any sort of academic rigor, it’s mostly lost. A discipline that can regularly get obvious jokes printed in their academic journals isn’t going to save anyone. A discipline that argues mostly about words cannot save anyone.
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Motte: STEM gave us , so we should “skeptically evaluate” it.
Bailey: STEM isn’t more valuable for mankind. Therefore, we shouldn’t favor STEM in universities.
I don’t mind your motte. I don’t think most people would mind it. Even @f3zinker’s original proposal allows it, because skepticism is not unique to the humanities.
It’s the bailey that gets me, because it hangs on this idea of (unfettered, “dogmatic”) STEM as a net negative. But where’d you do the work to justify that? You’ve just sort of thrown out all these boo lights. Even if I agreed with you on all of them, which I don’t, why fund the humanities instead of buying a cabin in Montana?
What is the value that you place on your heart? I mean your literal heart, the organ of flesh and blood.
In one sense, it is inestimably high. You can't live without your heart; you would sacrifice almost anything to keep it, if it was threatened. In another sense, it is essentially nothing, an afterthought, a pure zero. When was the last time you even thought about your heart? You will never compose panegyrics to it, or perform rituals in its honor; memories of it do not comfort you in times of want, thoughts of it will never enter your daydreams or fantasies. Living without it would make no difference to you, assuming such a thing were possible. How can such a thing be said to have any value?
We can say that something is necessary without thereby saying that it is valuable - and rightly so! The man who went out of his way to honor his own heart, who gave it a rank ordering of value higher than his own blood relations, would rightly be called perverse - even though, in the last analysis, he can live without his kin, but he cannot live without his heart.
When it comes to science - and for this one instant science is simply identified with technical vocational training, with "having a good head on one's shoulders", with the exertion of power over man by impersonal technological means - do we not risk making the same sort of error? Do we not risk confusing what is necessary with what is valuable? Do we not risk confusing the drudgery of life with life proper?
Of course there are many senses of the term "science" that we could disambiguate here. I do not paint my target equally over all of them. I have no quandary with theoretical science qua theoretical science, for example. There's nothing wrong with wanting to dedicate yourself to fundamental physics - it's a perfectly admirable pursuit. It is certainly not my aim here to adjudicate between, say, the aesthetics of the experience of reading early Latin poetry and the experience of studying string theory. There's room for both, there's no need to fight. I was once in training to become a mathematician, so I would like to believe that my taste in these domains is not entirely untutored.
Nor is it particularly my aim here to raise a question about the value of technological development. Of course, there are absolutely issues here too, certainly. But they are issues that can be partially bracketed. As a manifestation of the Faustian spirit, as the apotheosis of the Freudian death drive, there is something commendable even in technology that may lead to the annihilation of humanity, to the annihilation of all value. That's not my preferred course of action, naturally; but there is something commendable there nonetheless.
Far more contemptible than even the will to destruction is the will to mediocrity, the will to utility, the silent subjection to "what simply must be done". Homo economicus throws himself at "what must be done" with eyes wide open and a smile on his face; he eschews any identity of his own, he grinds himself down into something that is more machine than man, he becomes the willing accomplice of the protection racket that is modern science in its merger with capitalist economics. You can't stop doing science, you can never stop doing science, because the other guys have science too, and they're going to get us if we don't get out ahead of them. There's no time for a "humanist" education - we need more engineers, more researchers, more output, more growth, otherwise we're going to get crushed by someone else's output and someone else's growth. You must accept more surveillance, you must quantify more of your life, you must accept being connected to work 24/7, in the name of the efficiency that will serve this growth. And don't even think about not building the best damn AI you can, because dear god what if China gets AGI first? Such is the vicious circle that science has ensnared us in.
In some sense this is nothing more than a new layer of ornamentation over the same natural condition of man that has existed since time immemorial. The "state of nature" is certainly not any kinder. If you do not run you will die, if you do not fight you will die, if you do not eat you will die. But at least we once had a proper sense of the tragic about it! At least we once felt a sense of righteous indignation about this reality - we felt that it demanded redemption. But now, even the sense that there is a problem has been forgotten. Man's subjection to the technological order is viewed as not only necessary, but desirable.
Should we favor STEM in universities? Should you empty your bank account for the maniac who has a gun to your head? In one sense - yes, obviously! But you don't have to like it. The attitude behind an action can in fact tell us a great deal about whether the action is contemptible or praiseworthy. If you conduct yourself with dignity, should you not bristle at the imperiousness of science? Should you not chafe at the seemingly ineluctable demands it makes upon you?
There can be no change in conditions unless there is first a change in desire. Without desire, there is no hope. And if a change in man's condition is impossible, then I can at least make him loathe to accept that condition, and upset his happy conscience.
I believe that is as direct and honest a statement of my position as I can give.
The framing of science and technology as competitive just strikes me as silly. Yes, there is an element of competition but that's not all that science and technology does. It also is the reason we're not subsistence farming and instead able to have this high minded conversations in the first place.
You can mope in the tragedy and indignation, some of us aim to fix it.
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I think having computers and jet engines and electric power plants is 'valuable', and thus sending many of our smartest people to institutions to learn science and engineering and create those things is worth doing. And that is much of why our institutions focus on STEM so much.
Also, the challenge and complexity of math/science/engineering is itself very interesting, for the same reason the challenge and complexity of MMA or having a written debate or making a good painting is interesting.
That is literally true, though. Groups of people who don't do science have been gotten over and over by those who do. Competition generally encourages improvement and growth, see evolution.
Societies that didn't do humanist education also get gotten by those who did it, in the past.
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I don't need to use STEM to answer that; I can use the humanities, specifically referencing the laconic "if". Or perhaps the quip about counterfactuals attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Or I can use STEM, formal logic, and note that
Assume A
A -> B
B
B
is bad logic -- that is, that if you assume A (I can live without my heart) and prove B (my heart has no value) under that assumption, you cannot validly say you have proven B without that assumption.
Seems unlikely, without some sort of sophistry you'd need formalisms to avoid.
This could mean at least two things. Either we expect a man to value his kin greater than his life -- in which case the fact that his heart is necessary to his life is not sufficient to make it more valuable than his kind. Or we somehow expect him to value his kin less than his life but more than his heart which is necessary to it.... which is incoherent, as Shakespeare might be able to tell you.
Miguel de Cervantes might be able to tell you the results of such chafing. Or Rudyard Kipling.
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This is a tortured form of thinking. And honestly, it might be passable in a high school "debate" class, but that's about it.
The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.
Nuclear weapons - STEM doesn't tell you anything about whether to use them or not.
Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes - Same, just don't pass policy implementing them.
Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality - Really? The trans movements' postmodern roots are the antithesis of science. Seriously ask those 78 gender folk how they feel about biology.
AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime - The takeaway from reading 1984 is not to stop producing tech that enables Big Brother, It's to not let him become all that big to begin with.
I get it, you made a cute consequentialist set of arguments. Rich being that the same thing you are making the argument against saved you from dying of polio at age 3 or allowed you to make this comment at all. Revisit what "science" is or maybe the difference between an "is" or an "ought". I am not smart enough for galaxy brained what if consequentialist shit.
Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.
This line of reasoning proves too much. The phrenology department has never produces anything of any value, so surely that should get even more funding than the humanities?
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The actually producing research over real subjects parts of the humanities does, yes, but it would get misappropriated for the spinning bullshit parts.
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Fixing and funding aren't synonyms, though. And it seems pretty clear that there's no viable mechanism by which extra funding for the humanities would lead to fixing it, not without some other methods far more significant than extra funding. When an oncologist sees a malignant tumor, his solution usually isn't to feed more into the organ from which that tumor is growing, in the theory that the organ, with more resources, will somehow be able to fight off the tumor; this would rarely lead to the desired results. It's usually to excise the tumor in some way that leaves the organ severely impeded and possibly non-functional, but still far far healthier than the tumor being present and now having some hope of making a recovery to functionality.
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They did not fail because of lack of funding so adding more funding without addressing the actual problems will likely make things worse
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STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting. It gave us rapidly increased spread of social epidemics (and real ones) as a side effect of better technology. And it gave us nukes and AIs (including ones put to evil use) and contact tracing. It also gave us damn near everything that separates us from the apes.
We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful. The only one of those anyone outside such rarified atmospheres paid much attention to died in a prison cell recently.
Quarantines did exist in the pre-modern world. But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology. I don't think Covid would have played out the way it did without the internet (for WFH and Zoom calls), phone apps, and social media.
Well, maybe. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?
If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do, then I don't see why you should be dissuaded by contingent failures and defects of the university system. Sometimes things don't work out. That's the way it goes. But that doesn't mean you give up. That just means you try harder next time!
If you think it's impossible for the university to have any positive impact in this area at all, then that would be different. But I don't see why we should accept that. Do you think it's just impossible for the university to have any impact on culture or politics? A number of rightists claim that contemporary progressivism can trace its roots back to the "postmodern neo-Marxism" of the Frankfurt school - i.e. it's an ideology that started in universities and percolated outward. What do you think of those claims?
If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important, or if you think it's outright pernicious, then of course you would be in favor of just turning universities into trade schools. But then, that would just be grounded in your preexisting political commitments, not in any empirical facts about the university itself.
Prisons and slave camps have existed for a very long time. You don't need modern tech for lockdowns.
That generalized handwringing over science and technology is useless.
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo (used to be religious, now usually is not explicitly so), navel-gazing, hand-wringing, self-flagellation, or something along those lines. Critique of neoliberal market ideology tends to converge on communism, which was the most destructive ideology to grace the 20th century. The arguments for these things tend to be nothing but sentiment, sophistry, lies, and misdirection.
Calling something "humanistic" is assuming the conclusion; the idea is that somehow STEM is in opposition to humans. (If you claim the original definition of humanism -- that is, as opposed to supernaturalism -- then STEM is a part of it. But usually "humanistic" in this sense is just the opposite, a woo term excluding STEM from proper human pursuits)
It's not a question of "alternatives," its a recognition that STEM disciplines are still full of people, with the same conflicts of interest, corruptions, status-games, cliquishness, and all the rest. STEM doesn't get you an "objective" view of society because the map is still not the territory, and to the degree that it gets you an objective view of the physical universe you still have to convince all the other non-STEM people that you're right or else they'll just coordinate meanness against you using the same old dark arts as always while you're demonstrating the perfection of your equations alone at a blackboard.
That doesn't make "Critique of STEM supremicism" better or more useful; that makes it (as would be expected) harmful (to STEM people).
No, it makes it a "momento mori"-type reminder of fallibility. But I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree here.
I don't think "STEM is so dull and mechanical and anti-human; there are other equally valid ways of knowing" is a "memento mori"-type reminder of fallibility.
Was that supposed to be a summary of what I commented? If so, I'm confused - I didn't say that at all. What I said was:
STEM disciplines' truth-seeking functions are often undermined by human nonsense. E.g., "The Vaccine Prevents The Spread of COVID, and anything else is misinformation."
STEM methods are currently ill-suited to describing and analyzing the human nonsense undermining their truth-seeking functions. E.g. the Replication Crisis.
Even where STEM disciplines do produce truth, that is no guarantee that power will not suppress those truths. E.g., "Comrade Lysenko is correct; the so-called 'genetics' are reactionary bourgeois fallacies!"
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I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.
It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI. It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity. You may think these propositions are stupid or counterproductive, but they're not "woo".
When I said the alternatives were woo, etc, I meant those "other types of intellectual activity".
No, that's hand-wringing. There are things man was not meant to know, just because we could doesn't mean we should, etc. Perhaps you could come up with solid reasons it's a bad idea to build advanced AI, but then you'd be back in the realm of STEM.
It isn't, but for some reason this notion always ends up being advocacy of or defense of some sort of redistribution of the fruits of "raw economic productivity", which is why I said it converges on communism.
What do you mean by "woo"? I always understood "woo" to essentially mean "supernatural". Is that how you're using the word?
There might be many criticisms you could make of what goes on in English departments or women's studies departments, but I don't think "belief in the supernatural" is one of them.
You seem to be saying here that STEM (let's just say science) can give us knowledge of "solid reasons". If that's the case, then what area of science is responsible for studying "solid reasons"? What is our current best scientific theory of "solid reasons"? If I open a physics textbook, I can find quarks, and wave functions, and black holes, but I can't find any "solid reasons". Where are they?
This isn't just idle speculation. It seems like in order for science to give us knowledge of X, then either we have to be able to directly observe X, or we have to have a scientific theory of X. But neither of those criteria seems to be met here. I can't look out my window and see any "solid reasons".
Yes. But also note in addition to "woo" there was "navel-gazing, hand-wringing, self-flagellation".
There's no shortage of "spiritual" stuff, which I would include in "supernatural" and "woo".
You might need to check the engineering textbooks rather than science, e.g. for solid reasons you shouldn't build roads from macaroni noodles. But they are there.
I read a lot of contemporary humanities work and I've hardly ever seen anything I would describe as "spiritual". I mean maybe you can find one crackpot out there, but they wouldn't be representative of any field as a whole. Do you think this is "spiritual"?
What if I just want to build bad roads? What if I want to waste a lot of money and build a road that will break on its first use, so using macaroni noodles seems like a good idea?
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You mean the archetypal ‘M’ who was just a bit angry at the ‘T’?
I have no idea what you're talking about, I mean the author of "Industrial Society and it's Future".
My point was that Ted, a math prodigy, was the ultimate STEMlord, he just didn't like the 'technology' part. He had no qualms with math.
See, StEMlords are even superior at critiquing STEM!
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