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Absolutely abhor everything about this idea. Wastes everyones time and money when you could just hand the kids a verbal iq test and achieve the exact same outcome without all this prissy tea party cucumber sandwhich Model UN nonsense. Oh wait something something beautiful. Use their instagram profiles as a proxy too while you are at it. The more photos they have in Europe (while on vacation on daddys money) and the sexier they are the higher the score.
In my ideal world we wouldnt be in this signalling shitfest that we are in with college degrees. 4 precious years each across millions of people wont be wasted... on not working amd forgetting it all anyways. Yes, I am homo economicus.
In my ideal world, American colleges would be overrun with Asians. Because they deserve it. They are smarter and more hard working. It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering. Yes, I believe fairness and equality of opportunity is of much importance. Much more than equality of outcome or having sexy elites. You fuck with meritocracy at your peril.
In my ideal world Harvard wouldnt exist. Every university would be like Georgia Tech. Easy to get into, hard to stay in. Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.
In my ideal world people would prove their technical and verbal chops with their work. They wouldnt be able to rest on their Harvard laurels, they should have skin in the game. Oh yeah you are soo good at people skills? Okay go make that 2 million dollar deal, prove it.
https://www.themotte.org/post/565/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/117177?context=8#context
In my ideal world, everything would be run by people who embody the ethos of the first kind of American described in the post above and the second kind (like you) would be banished to underworld.
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.
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)
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.
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