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When facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail? 113 comments
 @adapalmer @cynblogger @adapalmer Caring about one another isn't a "theological" problem, it's just another humanities + sciences combo. Philosophy concepts like "The Veil of Ignorance," and sociological concepts like "intergroup contact theory" can help us with that. @doikayt @cynblogger @adapalmer Exactly this. Many religions want a monopoly on morality and want to convince everyone that theology is the only answer, when most of us humans have wonderfully effective systems in our bodies and societies that encourage empathy and camaraderie.   @cynblogger @adapalmer if you aren't able to care without theology, you've got a bigger problem.  @crashglasshouses @cynblogger @adapalmer I think "theology" can also cover wider areas of caring about people, understanding about people, and understanding the world. There is a wider part around this of psychology, philosophy, that is a way of engaging with the world, understanding what the world is. @crashglasshouses @cynblogger @adapalmer We will not agree on this. But I think you need philosophy to care. You need an understanding of what other humans are. You may not have to study it, but you use it.  @cynblogger @adapalmer Atheist here with a sore left bicep. A lack of theology isn’t the problem.  @cynblogger @adapalmer this is an ironic take considering few of the people I know who have been adamantly COVID conscious are religious (although ime religions other than Christianity have a better track record) @adapalmer part of me likes to agree, but another part thinks: well, some issues, including in the pandemic context, may not be curable by any of these academic knowledge approaches, but might be an issue of politics and discourse dynamics, power relations. Of course that also supports the diagnosis that more STEM is not sufficient, if efficient at all.  @i_ngli @adapalmer Ever since the atmospheric scientist Dr. Katherine Hayhoe went into the political science department it's been clear to me that politics is really our most important field of study in a whole lot of ways. I dislike when people say things like "politicians suck". Bad politicians suck, but good politicians like the young Maxwell Frost are crucial towards a better future imo. @GreenFire @adapalmer oh, I agree (people, studying politics, which is not necessarily constrained to political science), but I would be surprised this would solve any problem of power relations. With the understanding that we can't play back the experiment, in your opinion, in what ways was the "getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation" a Humanities problem, and how do you think the Humanities would have done better? (gawd, I hope we never have to play back that experiment...) First, in understanding it was going to be a problem. Second, in figuring out the power dynamics and narratives existing in various communities to increase the chances of reaching them. Historians have provided many studies of successful and unsuccessful public health campaigns. See, for example, Paul Ramirez's Enlightened Immunity, about smallpox inoculation in colonial Mexico. The stories we tell matter. The humanities help us tell better stories. Hah, hah. No. Reducing #humanities inquiry to the products of Hollywood is like reducing scientific inquiry to the products of Dupont Chemical. They do a lot of science. And they are actually global leaders in industrial health and safety planning and design. @1dalm Yup. And Hollywood can do some good storytelling, as long as it makes money and reinforces existing nodes of power. @christinkallama @1dalm @adapalmer All of these things were well-known by the non-STEM political hacks in charge of decision making, and were ignored by them. The people I've seen talking loudly about this kind of thing are mostly engineers, who understand that "all problems are real problems". Non-STEM-trained apparatchiks are happy to ignore data about how the world actually works. So I'd say the non-STEM folks in charge failed in ways that STEM folks would have been unlikely to. @1dalm @adapalmer in New Zealand some of the vaccine pushes did really well by focusing on the ground game, getting aunties involved and playing on people's sense of nostalgia with an old school telethon. Putting effort into understanding culture and effective communication at community level is humanities. Specifically understanding that local approaches might need to vary based on community culture is important. We are in the experiment's extension period that is scheduled to run through at least ... *checks notes* ...the end of human civilization.   @adapalmer  @adapalmer We failed the policy problem, because for decades we've put policy in the hands of preening Oxbridge politics, philosophy and economics graduates who have never had to suffer the consequences of their own actions @tryst @adapalmer Just _Oxford_ PPE, please. Cambridge gave the world Keynsian economics, the very antithesis of Tory policy.  @adapalmer  @adapalmer @xgranade I agree with you substantively, but rhetorically you might be making an error given the ideological priors of the people you’re trying to persuade. The platonic ideal of a STEM booster would reply to this, “yes, of course, if you have a ‘humanities’ problem then you’re doomed since ‘humanities’ isn’t Real Science. You need to transform every problem into a STEM problem and then we can solve it with math without involving fallible, annoying *humans*” @adapalmer @xgranade Then they’ll proceed to propose some absolutely horrifying nightmare like designing robots to patrol the streets and shoot people with vaccines so you don’t have to ask them, of course  @nichartley @adapalmer we'll make 20 different frameworks for growing potatoes by the end of the week!  @adapalmer I'm a scientist married to a humanist. The degree to which they exceed me at "understand human emotions and motivations and institutional structures" is ... honestly not even funny. Except it kind of is because sometimes I wonder why people disagree when there are shiny beetles to look at and they just sigh. @guenther @adapalmer we systematically fail to teach people how to think because for some fucked up reason it's considered impolite to assume someone doesn't know despite insurmountable evidence that most people don't. That's the problem and it should have been solved decades ago. That phrase sounds fine, though? You're letting prejudice color your interpretation unfairly @caffetiel Which phrase are you referring to, the one from @adapalmer, or the one I linked to on Wikipedia? @adapalmer Hmm. Well. (As a BSc) Being able to explain what scientists actually *do* is a STEM problem, and it is a result of lack of cross-over between Humanities and STEM. @adapalmer I read somewhere (here on Masto I think): STEM without Humanities is how you get Spiderman villains.  @adapalmer The origin of the failure is embedded in the clique/caste system of public schools. The nerd caste is afforded low social status. Political aptitude and money dictate success among same-age peers. This pattern continues into adulthood. The problem is most obvious in the membership of legislatures--overwhelmingly lawyers, business managers, and professional politicians. Maybe 50 in the combined federal Congress have a STEM background. Schmoozers don't want boffins to wield power. That is not how class works. You're confusing cause and effect--adult society is replicated by children. What the parents value is passed on, which is why we see similar structures in society before public schooling. Further, your 'schmoozers' have made social games their obsessive interest. Why would 'boffins' ever break into a sphere they deliberately haven't invested in? @caffetiel @adapalmer I don't believe I have explained my point adequately. I apologize. You are correct that science-and engineering-focused individuals have little interest in politics. The everyday business that occurs in the halls of power is distasteful to us. It is a conditioned aversion. We were forced near those who do not respect us, and left unprotected from their depredations. They grew into adults, and still don't respect us. @adapalmer We seem to have lost track of the difference between education and training. And STEM is high powered training, but very narrow focus @adapalmer I don’t think many are trying to say “all we need is STEM”, but we do need STEM and that seems to be the general field that American (pre-university) schools emphasize the least and for which American students tend to underperform foreign counterparts.  Add civics. My class (ca 1990) was an entire 3-4 months and they may as well just have everyone watch all the Schoolhouse Rock shorts. I mean, most people don't seem to have any clue about how a law is made even without the modern asshattery @adapalmer @felip @adapalmer how do you get the people to let themselves and their families get vaccinated just with STEM? No (non clinical) psychology, sociology, economics, ethics, etc.? @adapalmer @adapalmer @pluralistic Science dictation failed if adults people don’t understand vaccine work and are safe. @adapalmer this reminds me of Buzz Aldrin's autobiography where he wishes a poet had been with them on the first moon landing, somebody who could speak and write eloquently about their unique experience.  @adapalmer @josh You just blew my mind. This is going to be pinging around my head for a long time.  @adapalmer given the source of misinformation, I'd say it was also a communications industry problem. They apparently don't teach ethics at whatever journalism school Fox News' anchors went to.  @adapalmer Discovering how Viruses and the different kinds of RNA work was the basic science problem. Both (STEM and humanities), I'd say. Because the "STEM in school problem" was also people understanding that there are microbes and how and why masks and vaccination works. @adapalmer I like this. I'm a scientist and I totally agree. Additionally, the arts make the life science and tech allow worth while  @adapalmer And the attack on sciences as such is generational actually. Neoliberalism, that fig leaf for the rich oligarchs on top to get even richer, was “gently” forced onto academia and politics half a century ago. Not sure if everyone realizes that privately funded research means ultimately privately directed research. Even if, the “directives” don't have to be spelled out in writing in numerous instances. Withdrawing some funds for a year sends a clear enough signal.  The competition for grants - which topics and proven researchers get chosen and which do not - is another clear signal that doesn't even have to be as overt as pulling funds. @Frances_Larina The point is that carrying everything into a business template it's problematic at best. Science, and its usefulness cannot always be expressed in numbers. And some uses are only discovered or become practical only decades after the discovery. @adapalmer And when we are at it, the Bologna system in Europe is a bit devaluation of the university system too. The old (bachelor free) system in Austria was arguably harder (because you did have to organize yourself), but it was, well, university, you had choice. Today, a BSc might have 10 ECTS electives, and 12 ECTS specialisation. The rest is basically planned through for 3 years, including timetables??? @adapalmer @adapalmer @oxytocinated whenever I read about the unprecedented push to get people into AI research, I think about all of the failures and unanswered questions of the pandemic. @adapalmer I thought the approach was "all we need is public relations, political science, business & management"? @adapalmer Absolutely. See also climate change. The science has been clear for ages that we need to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere if we want to avoid catastrophic effects. How to get people to actually do that is a social science problem. In fact I suspect most of the great "scientific" challenges of our age are really social science problems. @adapalmer This is a wonderfully provocative framing! I do hope that the takeaway isn't entirely operational, as in, we needed a timely deployment of humanities ninjas to fight vaccine misinformation. Rather, there's foundational mush into which the situation was dumped. Scientific and statistical illiteracy are part of the ambient problem, and those things are not purely STEM considerations. @adapalmer @samhainnight agree, but I don’t think stem folk are blameless here - there were oodles of scientists at fda, cdc who could’ve raised a stink at the gutting of their agencies’ missions for the urgency of normal. But as far as I can tell, no walkouts, no massive protests, no burning the CDC director in effigy, nothing. That’s a pretty catastrophic moral failure on STEM’s part as well. @adapalmer @lacey who advocates the “all we need is STEM” approach, if anyone? Your post has been boosted a thousand times, but it doesn’t make your straw man argument any stronger. It just contributes to the degradation of thinking about problems. 🍸😼 @adapalmer A scary aspect of your example is that medicine (at least in my experience) tends to do a better job of incorporating people from non-STEM backgrounds than many other fields. For example, I have difficulty believing that many tech companies even have in-house policy analysts, given the frequent comedies they release when anyone mentions regulation. Comedy to me, at least, even if they're trying to be serious. @adapalmer As a STEM person basically my entire life: a life with only STEM in it is pretty empty. We NEED arts. We need poetry. We need history. We need the study of society and culture and religion. It's what makes us human. @adapalmer @hpk are there people still out there saying stuff like this? it seems to miss the point that not everyone is good at or likes STEM... @adapalmer  @adapalmer @Teh404Gal so the humanities and social science elites have failed the society at large? Will there be any repercussions for them?
@adapalmer humanities professionals did a brilliant job convincing people that vaccines were a dangerous plot from their (political) enemies to destroy them and that they could safely ignore COVID. It would have probably been better if fewer worked for those that are trying to destroy our society for their own profit. @adapalmer There is a nice quotation by data bases guru Jim Gray: May all your problems be technical.   @adapalmer One might argue that if all grokked STEM, the latter would not be a problem at all. Also, not sure how social science helps with logistics. @adapalmer it's also a problem at the intersection of politics and technology. There is a large gap between the opinions expressed in this thread (moderate and Bernie left) and what we see in the Pew/Gallup surveys or presidential elections. @adapalmer I hope we educate kids to properly evaluate and process information about Pfizer profit margins, lack of cheap repurposed preventive drugs, impact of monetary policy during the COVID period on working class people and what "excessive" vaccination looks like.    @adapalmer I haven't seen a live human in my neighborhood speak to another live human in my neighborhood, other than myself, in DECADES. To my mind, this means I'm talking to too few neighbors. To others' minds, why am I talking to that neighbor? I think it has a huge part of the impact of a pandemic regardless of how it's handled. @adapalmer @williampietri that is said merely to ensure the largest pool from which white supremacy may select the most obedient servants, while identifying and destroying those who have a connection to loving-kindness, compassion and would constitute a threat to whiteness. @adapalmer@wandering.shop stem, because the vaccine was shit and therefore you can't convince people of the shot to combat the social panic created by media  @adapalmer @dalias Which one is the one that allows for patents & copyright to exist? Because those were the very first few failures.
Then the monopolies & cartels/oligopolies. @adapalmer good point. The science worked just fine, it was the socio political dimensions where the big fails happened |
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Brilliantly insightful.