Naah. The important component of all the problems you listed are socio, not STEM. I shouldn’t have to link to cites to convince anyone on this board that our coronavirus problem has more to do with how we make and implement our social decisions than with our ability to synthesize a good vaccine or limitations on our knowledge of how to deal with a pandemic.
In general, as a species, we’re going well with technology. But socially we’re in our infancy. We’ve got a lot farther to do in making our ways of interacting with each other satisfying to all the individuals involved and maximizing everyone’s opportunity while still producing rockets that can go to Mars and still making trains that run on time.
As a STEMmer directly involved with technology development, we hire plenty of non-STEM folks to help facilitate that process.
And please add another tick mark for people wondering what the heck “prioritize” is supposed to mean here.
IME universities will expand a department if student demand increases or if that department is bringing in more external funding. I don’t expect simply expanding the chemistry department to result in more chemistry majors unless they’ve been having to turn them away.
I don’t find the easy/hard arguments productive or persuasive. I would have struggled as an English major.
Because you want to make sure that a lack of interest is real and not driven by society. As in “only nerdy loser girls like to program.”
When I went to MIT only 15% of students were women. Now over 50% are. I don’t think this is the result of women suddenly getting smarter or suddenly developing an interest in STEM.
I know I suffered from a dearth of exposure to various topics and feel I would have benefited from learning more about more fields, starting from early. Who knows, I may have found something that suited me better.
As an undergrad seeking a degree in biochemistry I was forced to take courses in the humanities so that I would be “more well rounded”. So, I figured out workarounds, like using a “History and Philosophy of Science” as a philosophy requirement, and a “Physics in Science Fiction” (a difficult upper level physics class) as an English Literature requirement.
There is an underlying assumption here that different fields of study are in direct competition with one another for funds, but this is not precisely the case. There are separate organizations like the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, National Endowment for the Arts, etc. Even within a given university, a professor of chemistry and a professor of literature are going to be respectively hired by separate colleges with separate budgets, and it is not as though someone has to literally choose between having one or the other.
I agree that popular departments with lots of external funding are likely to expand, but that does not mean another department has to be liquidated to make room for them. After all, if they are really awash in grants and endowments and funding and tuition, they hardly need to worry about the other department in the other college.
I work for a regulatory agency that protects the environment. Obviously my agency needs a shitload of scientist and engineers. That just goes without saying.
But we also need people with other skills. Communication skills. Policy skills. Negotiation skills. Management skills. Even for scientist/engineer roles, we need people who understand how their work fits in within the greater context of humanity. So we really do need all types.
I know that during these stressful times, I’ve been finding a lot of comfort and distraction in works of art. Whether it be music, TV shows, films, or stand-up comedy. Yesterday I watched a history documentary. I’m also addicted to the news and news commentary. Some of the talking heads on CNN are STEM folks, but most of them are not.
Science and engineering may hold the key to the world’s pressing problems, but the humanities are what we all live for. I say this as a scientist who loves being a scientist. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it hadn’t been for a bunch of writers and other creatives producing content like educational programming (I was a huge fan of 3-2-1 Contact) and works of fiction. I have a sibling who was inspired to be an epidemiologist after reading the “Hot Zone” in the ninth grade. I watched that cheesy cartoon “Captain Planet” as a 12-year-old, and I think that planted the seeds for the career I have now. Could STEM folks create this kind of content? No.
So I really do think we need all types. The challenge is how to connect people to what they really are good at but then have viable career paths waiting for them. There are a lot of STEM students who wind up in disappointing jobs–the same kind of mediocre jobs that a lot of humanities students wind up with. I don’t know if all of the blame for this goes on people being pushed into the wrong areas of study. I just think there’s an abundance of mediocre jobs relative to the number of people out there looking for work.
One of my professors (mumble-mumble years ago) remarked that STEM students are required to take some liberal-arts courses in order to help then achieve a well-rounded education. He wished that liberal-arts students were also encouraged to take STEM courses for the same reason.
He also remarked that many STEM students are aware that their heavy emphasis on one aspect of education leaves them lacking – and seek to remedy this through their own reading.
I couldn’t disagree more. We’ve seen the “people” approach: no more than a tiny handful are willing to reduce their consumption in order to slow climate change. Furthermore, taking science out of the picture just means it’s one tribe vs. another, and that means the conservatives are doing everything in their power to lie and sow doubt about the whole mess. Climate change skeptics have humanities graduates on their side too, after all.
On the other hand, it’s a result of science and engineering that renewable power is cheaper in many cases than fossil fuels (and this will only get better over time). It’s a result of science and engineering that electric vehicles are an amazing experience and far better than gas cars on almost any axis (and the remaining axes, like price, are also converging). It will be science and engineering that allow electric planes, low-carbon food production, and all the other tools that we’ll need to maintain a modern lifestyle while being carbon-neutral.
It’s an under-reliance on science that got us into this mess. Too many people have become disconnected from reality, because they lack the mental tools to evaluate scientific matters.
Yeah, that’s why people need to be changed. Their minds, their behaviour, their habits. And that includes having them listen to the science. STEM isn’t suddenly going to make people change, social engineering will.
If you just apply tech bandaids and don’t change culture, nothing will get fixed. You might delay the worst outcomes.
Might.
maintain a modern lifestyle while being carbon-neutral.
…or not, if you think that’s the answer. Lifestyles have to change, there’s no getting around that. All the renewables in the world won’t matter a damn if lifestyles don’t change.
People have been trying for decades, and it’s been a failure. All the propaganda in the world won’t help when people want to live the way they’ve been living.
Shitbox economy cars have been around forever, and most people hate them. On the other hand, my Tesla has lower emissions than the shitbox (drastically lower in areas with high renewables), and is a vastly better car on every metric but price (they’re still working on that). People are switching to EVs not because they want to help the planet, but because they’re better. That took technology.
These aren’t bandaids. There are a finite number of industries that emit carbon or other greenhouse gases, and all of them can be improved. But we need lots and lots of scientists and engineers to work on the technologies.
If humanities workers have a role to play here, it’s to encourage STEM students to work on technologies to combat climate change.
STEM activities have a key advantage over the alternative, which is that they have a ratcheting effect. Once there is a new scientific or mathematical result, once you develop a new technology, it is there forever. And so the economic pressures to use it are also there.
But non-STEM activities just drift. There’s no preferred direction. Maybe you can convince people to reduce consumption for a little while, maybe by making it seem cool with the youth, but unless there is some underlying driving force it is just as likely to drift backwards at some point.
Not when the corporations and governments are actively pushing propaganda the other way, no.
Don’t project from America to the rest of the world. Economy cars do quite well in many other places.
Really? Because I don’t think it’s one set of finite industries that’s the problem. You develop one panacaea (say, electric cars) and you open another wound (mining those battery and motor minerals). That’s very much a series of band aids, to me.
Also, would love to hear how the world’s insistence on strip-mining the world’s forests for palm oil and beef is going to be “improved” by STEM, absent a change in consumer desires.
Substitutes don’t matter without changes in human behaviour. One example - we’ve had plastic for more than a century, why are elephants still being killed?
And said propagandist, when given the choice between working for an environmental group vs. a cushy job at some corporation, is going to pick–well, maybe they don’t pick the cushy job every time, but there will be enough of them working for the bad guys.
Nothing’s perfect. Humans will always have an impact on the planet. The goal is to reduce it to a sustainable level. And furthermore, to buy humanity time to research further technologies.
Everything’s just energy in the end, and there’s plenty of energy in space. We just need a couple hundred more years to make effective use of it.
Synthetic meats have made tremendous progress. There’s nothing fundamental about meat-like foods being more costly than plants; it’s just that cows are a ridiculous way of producing it.
About palm oil–well, needless to say it’s a complicated problem tied up with the fact that for desperately poor farmers, palm oil is one of the most profitable crops. Convincing said farmers that their families should starve or go without medicine in order to reduce deforestation seems… unlikely. This is starting to get pretty far afield of the topic though.
The rate at which elephants are killed has gone down fairly dramatically, from about 250/day in the 1950s to about 60/day today. It’s not good enough, but it’s something. And it’s not like there’s been any shortage of non-tech efforts to stop the ivory trade. It’s already illegal in most developed nations.
At any rate, ivory is a bit of a special case. The scarcity is the whole point. Almost no one has a similar attachment to fossil fuels. “Real” meat, maybe–but it will be limited to a few rich folks. It’s the elephants’ bad luck that a few rich folks are enough to decimate their population, but ultimately this is not a planet-scale threat.
I ask because while I’m reading a post I’m interested in the information. When you don’t say what you mean I have to ask you. It would be easier for everyone if you said it in the first place instead of assuming that we know what you mean.