Like you might think that abstract intelligence and social intelligence might carry over solidarity instead of making people more shitty in that regard. How does that even work? Why does people like that coast in life while those who they seem lesser than them suffer?
It doesnt carry over
The system is set up specifically to encourage this.
If you are good at learning the stuff in the books then you learn your periodic tables and also your liberalism.
Why would bourgeoise institutions encourage the development of a class conscious world view? The “smartest” STEM students are ironically probably the ones who didn’t manage to land a job, despite their excellent grades, which might have been a radicalizing moment for them, especially when they end up meeting people just as smart as them with no diplomas.
The “smartest” STEM students are ironically probably the ones who didn’t manage to land a job, despite their excellent grades
It’s me! (i have awful grades though hehe)
A culture of superiority to others has been built around stem. It is the same culture of superiority to others that the bourgeoisie have built around themselves.
Solidarity is unlikely among people that are pleased with being top of a hierarchy.
It’s a classic problem with several highly educated fields. People think because they’re well educated in one topic they are more able to understand things as a whole.
I used to work in IT for a hospital. We had literal doctors breaking CD drives because they wouldn’t accept they weren’t collapsible cup holders. If we were trying to walk them through something simple like turning the monitor on we’d ask for a nurse to be put on because we found doctors would just say it isn’t working, never press the button. They thought they were smarter than us.
I’ve learned to trust people in their very specific field, and nothing else. The rest of the world just hasn’t learned that lesson. This means any dumb idea someone has when they’re highly educated in STEM they’re likely going to convince themselves is good, because they’re smart.
I have a vivid memory of a guy I went to high school with complaining on FB 15 years ago about how he had a bachelors degree and should be trusted to make informed decisions on whether to vaccinate his child, his degree was in graphic design.
Material conditions determine political ideology. In this case, STEM (though really just T and maybe E) educations generally grant those who obtain them easy money and an avenue into the professional class. They view capitalism as fair because it worked/is working for them, and then have to work backwards to justify how a fair system can have systemically marginalized groups. This way leads to liberal racism at best, to fascism at worst.
You get really bright people swept up into this kind of, well, like world that privileges them and insulates them, and most minds are going to become immersed in that and assume that the institution is good and beyond reproach. They’re inside it and see no problem, so external detractors must clearly be wrong. They don’t know “how it really is”, after all.
You can honestly cultivate a system that blinds people to certain kinds of realities outside of their own experience, and the top end of nearly any org that exists under capitalism is going to deal with this a bit or a lot, depending on how much they believe in the system.
I don’t think it’s about good or bad or ignorant and enlightened. I think perfectly good people end up being servants to bad things, and end up taking in bad views that poisons their soul.
It’s hard to not give into a sense that “this is entirely by design” - and I think especially with people who have a high level of abstract intelligence and low social intelligence kind of need exposure to unpleasant things to understand their own position in things. Without it you have a society that will elevate, isolate, and surround you with people who think very similarly to you - you will have nothing but monetary, social, and experiential affirmation of increasingly ghoulish views.
It’s like Amigara Fault - you can’t go down these paths and stay what you entered the hole as. It will twist you up, and again, i think it’s by design.
One of the doctors at the emergency department at a hospital i worked at is an open anti vaxxer.
That’s like when a semiconductor manufacturing engineer told me that They were putting chips in the COVID vaccines. I was like “for what? What could they even accomplish with that?”
And also, “you know that’s not physically possible, right?”
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At least in the fake field of “Computer Science” the throughline is that you can go from proletarian to C-suite ruling class in only less than a decade (or being a lingering bootlicking parasite to someone who made that transition).
You move out to the bay area in California, get shackled to an expensive “campus” apartment and commute every day to your humble office right next to a weapons manufacturing base while you are insulated from the rest of the world with great weather every day and a Waymo self driving car that will let you not have to interact with the poors who litter the streets.
“Computer Science” is a disease vector for this because it’s not real engineering. You can make profit line go up just by changing some lines on a document or talking to the right Epsteins. You invent problems and then sell more problems while you go on hikes and take expensive vacations at the end of the year.
I hate that CS people have coopted the word engineer, to the point where all any one who thinks of the word engineer is someone who sits on a computer and programs useless slop. They don’t need a license, they don’t need liability insurance, they have no stake or accountability to the failure of their design, yet they get to piggy back on the prestige of the profession and earn more than any engineer that actually builds shit for the functioning of society.
/rant
So true. Who were the SW developers who killed those people with the Boeing Max 8? How is that any different from building a bridge that falls down?
Being from STEM, I can’t relate that much? Maybe it’s a Spanish thing, but in my university, all the progressive stuff like student associations was done by so-called “pure sciences” students (maths, physics, biology). In contrast, going to the law and economics faculty was like stepping in capitalist hell.
That’s not to say there weren’t reactionaries, but the most progressive and downright communist people I know are through my STEM friends. Engineers are a different breed though, all fascists here.
I live in the USA
Nah it still applies to the US, why are people in STEM always targeted? There’s no shortage of shitty people in the humanities and social sciences or literally any field in this country.
Law is literally the bastion of liberal indoctrination, polisci has the most chuds per capita, psychology, History, English, philosophy, economics, all filled with weird monarchists, christian fundamentalist weirdos.
I was speaking about my experience as a STEM person. Why cannot one speak about one experience in STEM without someone coming out and feeling offended by that “but what about other majors”. I am a black person and when I speak how white shitty white people are with me, white people are like “but what about shitty black people? They commit more crimes. Why don’t you speak about other ethnicities as well?”. Same when you speak about Palestine “but what about other wars? Why you only condemn the Israelis?”. This is fucking ridiculous and it pisses me off. There are a lot of shitty petite bourgeosie people in STEM. There is a lot of elitism and assholes on it, and that has been my experience. I have no idea about the other majors and I don’t think that the fallacy of relative privation ever matters.
I’m think one possible source of misunderstanding is the term STEM itself is broad and somewhat ambiguous. What falls under that umbrella, and how shitty they are may very well vary by country/culture.
I’m willing to entertain the idea that maybe the S fields are ultimately no worse than many of the fields outside of STEM. But Tech/Engineering people are the absolute worst.
It kind of sucks that people in relatively harmless sciences get lumped in with tech/engineering. I think the vast majority of the time people complain about STEM, they mean the T/E.
To extend your analogy (badly?): It’s like if one response to complaining about white people was “what about eastern Europeans?”
I guess the definition of “white” could vary somewhat and some groups who fall under that umbrella aren’t the ones you mean. Maybe Poles or certain Russian minority ethniticies aren’t considered white in the UK (idk, just based on fashy Brits online). But it’s still just (probably) someone getting defensive, and regardless sidetracking the issue.
I guess what I mean to say is you’re right, we all pretty much know what we mean by “STEM” or “white people” so it feels dishonest when the response is quibbling. But at the same time, if I were being charitable, I guess it’s possible for some misunderstanding because they are terms with blurry edges.
tech workers were paid very well for a long time and techbro company men are loud in the media.
True but for as many chuds and libs you may find in stem i bet stem also has the highest percentage of leftists outside of sociology
studying history seems to produce communists at least where i live
History seems to pump out a lot of chuds
Smart people are good at talking themselves into things. And a lot of the time smart isn’t the only thing going on. How many ‘smart’ people will tell you covid is over?
One more thing to add is intelligence =/= morality.
Sure, it’s cathartic to call chuds stupid, but in real terms never underestimate chuds. Even with capital they still run circles around us in the culture wars.
Most cases in my experience is partly because STEM study is divorced from study of Humanities. Wanna know how many STEM students were in my 300s Eng Lit class where we had analysis on Neuromancer and how fucked that all was? ZERO. It was the same people from all my other Humanities courses.
Yeah, I think it’s largely the result of the consensus view in STEM becoming “the humanities are worthless”
Of course then the diphsits, having refused to learn any history, have no clue that it wasn’t always this way and many (most?) of the great STEM figures of the past were polymaths with good foundations in the humanities.
My college required four humanities classes for every degree. Including STEM. Really wish more pushed that.
My college had a special philosophy for Engineering class that counted towards our humanities class that was basically DOD propaganda about how you aren’t morally responsible when you make weapons that end up committing war crimes
One of my humanities classes was a study on successful rebellions and how they overthrow governments through united effort. Much happier with mine, lol
If there’s a bourgeoisified working class, it’s STEM. Their relation to the means of production mean that they are elevated above other workers, benefiting from monopolization and imperialism. When the money line goes up, their wages do too.
At least, that’s how it was before the c-suite started trying to replace entry-level tech jobs with LLMs. I think things might start changing once they can’t just get any job they want after graduation and are kicked into the dirt with the rest of us.
When you experience a modicum of success in life, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that this means the system is fair, your success is entirely the result of your own intelligence and hard work, and those without success just must’ve not tried hard enough.
The long-documented phenomenon of people grossly underestimating how large the income ratio is between the median earner and the 1% also plays a large role. It makes it easier to think of oneself as economically closer to the 1% than the bottom 25% even though by raw numbers and ratios they’re way closer to the latter than the former.
From my experience STEM folks are real hit or miss. Remember the capitalist framing of college anyway.
“Ugh, why? Just do a trade? Ugh, if you insist, STEM only and absolutely nothing else!” So some people will go into STEM and ignore more of the intellectualization because “I’m just following the rules.”
One of the strongest arguments the left has imo is all the people who “did everything right” and still got discarded by porky on his arbitrary whims.
IMO, it’s not necessarily a uniquely stem problem so much as it is “what are they complaining about? Just don’t major in things porky doesn’t want and you’ll be fine!”
