askchapo

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.

It doesnt carry over

One of the doctors at the emergency department at a hospital i worked at is an open anti vaxxer.

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 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.

As someone who studies STEM the only reason I can think of is money.

Of course it is

Technology has always been a tool of power for the state, and those who control it also control the narrative and the politics

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most people don't pick their politics because they reasoned their way there or found some evidence that convinced them. Even otherwise smart people. "smartness" plays little role because most people aren't reasoning their way into politics or their views on marginalized people.

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!”

A lot of people in stem are just there because they were told to be which doesnt really open anyone up to broader thinking. Its varies depending on the field itself though but as always i find neurodivergence to be more of a factor in basedness than anything else. But thats my own observation

it's the nature of the academy in the US. the ideological project of the powell memo, the "philanthropy" sponsoring chairs, and the way boards have been stacked by committed market fundamentalists for decades has had its impact on the culture of higher education in the US.

but really, you should see how many academics in the social sciences lack class consciousness and efficiently recreate crazy hierarchical dynamics in their fiefdoms. it's not all, but it's enough and they're fucking mind boggling. like, what kind of wretched beast doesn't take the exact lens they were taught to build and use it to look at their immediate surroundings, their career ladder or the institutions they work in?

i was interdisciplinary across stem and social sciences. stem specialists have the (weak, imo) excuse of not being trained to critically analyze power or social systems, but even without the training, some totally understand something is rotten at the core. they just lack the language to articulate it and often find themselves viscerally angry at representatives of power. there's a rage in ecology, like a wound that won't heal.

with the inverted social scientists... it's hard not to assume the only lesson these people internalized is that they would comfortable and content holding the whip over the innocent than subject to its sting. and they don't have to look at or contemplate the collapsing biosphere. if they want comfort, they just have to find travel grants, generate publications, and outperform their peers.

Some things are correlated with learning, some things are correlated with wealth acquisition.

These categories have a small overlap.