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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.
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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