Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can’t write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It’s fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.
Then there’s business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, “business school” wouldn’t even be an option at a university.
fckreddit@lemmy.ml 22 hours ago
Businesses would not be terrible if business education is actually tempered with some humanities. In fact, I am strongly of the opinion that every field of study should have some humanities component to them. None of the fields exist in vacuum, we have to have at least, some appreciation of other fields, lest we risk creating silos in the name of organization. And that is precisely happening in this age of hyper-specialization.
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
100%.
Children are always told that they could become a scientist or engineer one day and that this would be a great thing to achieve. Scientists and engineers are so highly regarded, yet they are often complicit in creating the necessary technology and machinery for most of the worlds worst projects. Climate change, plastic pollution, nuclear weapons, are all created by the worlds smartest and all the while they’re being told they’re doing a great job and bettering the world.
Ethics needs to be mandatory in all STEM studies. Jesus at least just make them watch Oppenheimer.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
Ethics is largely mandatory for engineering majors (source: am finishing my bachelor’s in electrical engineering), but the first job or project you take will ask you to throw that out the window.
There are two areas of safety considered: Operator/client safety, and regulatory compliance. All other safeguards are optional and ignoring them is encouraged.
gaybriel_fr_br@jlai.lu 19 hours ago
Funny you should say that, because those very humanities aspects of what I studied, Economics, leads STEM students to disparage it as a non-scientific field built of gospel and tenets. As if Humanities diminished the quality of the research and teaching within the Economics field.
So while I agree, and it’s good to see you being upvoted, in a different scenario the application of your thoughts about this will lead the person sharing their experience to getting massively downvoted in an attempt to shame them for being a “soft science”.
Eccentric@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Big gripe of mine is the distinction of “soft” and “hard” science. I’m a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn’t mean it’s automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can’t exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don’t exist outside of human society
fckreddit@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
I really do wish humanities were not actually considered as ‘lesser’ to the sciences. But I have actually found it to be greater of the sciences, simply because of the importance and the difficulty of questions it tackles. I have spent a fairly long time reading on philosophy, history, economics. I am not an expert, in fact, I am really far from it, but I have really come to an understanding the importance of these fields. But that’s just me. Most just consider them not important because they don’t understand. I just hope that we can rectify with better academic curriculum.
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 17 hours ago
They would be terrible anyway, because competition rewards business fucking over their employees and customers.
Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 16 hours ago
That’s obviously not true. For businesses to not be terrible, they would have to not operate on the profit motive, which is impossible.
Why? And what disciplines do you want to force people to pass exams in, even if they have no bearing on a person’s skills in the area that they actually chose?
Also, why?
fckreddit@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
There are many approaches for a business to be both good and also make profit. Just as an example, in the periods of comfort, they can focus only on profit. However, in the times of crisis, businesses can instead focus on doing social good, instead of profit, until things go back to normal. This can be in the form helping people in need during floods, hurricanes, etc. Of course, there are many approaches to this and I am giving just an illustrative examples, but thing is many small businesses around the world do this because many people put humanity first and profit second, especially in the times of crises.
I am really sorry if you don’t enjoy exams, because I also hate exams. To make my argument about why, I believe, we need to be educated in humanities, first I just want to focus on the question what is the purpose of education. I strongly believe that the education helps us to be a better human being, beyond just being a better doctor or a better software developer or a better engineer. Being a good human being, I believe, transcends being a skilled doctor or engineer, etc. I am going to try to give an example from Civil Engineering to try to illustrate it. In India (where I am from and have been living my entire life), there are still villages where the access to basic necessities like clean water, electricity are either absent or rarely available. Now, when the government is planning a project to provide a more reliable access to these resources, the responsibility falls on the Engineering Team to design the project, including costs and the benefits. Beyond just the monetary cost-benefit analysis, or maybe the environmental impact (which are inevitable), there are also societal issues that are important, but are left out during the planning? But, a study in humanities will give these issues the weight it deserves. For example, caste system is a major issue in India, with population of even the tiniest villages are split into two or sometimes more groups: the so-called “upper” (let’s just called them oppressors) castes and the “lower” (let’s call them oppressed) castes. So, as it happens, the oppressors might establish a monopoly over the fresh water that reaches the village due to aforementioned project. So, despite the project providing some benefit, to the oppressors, it provides almost no benefit to the oppressed class. No engineer would consider these kinds of societal issues while designing the project, despite knowing about the casteism and understanding it’s consequences because they are not educated to combine their engineering skills and know-how with the casteism. Systematic Humanities education might actually help Engineers to understand these issues at a deeper level and might inform them on how to proceed with the project, while at least trying to mitigate the caste situation in some way.
I am trying to go beyond the exams and the academic degrees for this because the most of the life of an engineer (or a doctor, etc) is spent on practice, i.e., designing, planning and executing projects (or something equivalent). These projects should not just have economic utility, but also social utility or at least should not have negative social utility. Consider the impact of plastics, fossil fuel and their pollution on the society and individuals. However, for decades, we gladly kept building new roads to accommodate more vehicles purchased by rich people, despite knowing about them. My hope is that with a humanities education, it will make more engineers to evaluate the social utility of their projects and not just the economic utility. One interesting theory that I came across was in a book called “Development As Freedom” by Amartya Sen, a Noble Prize winning economist. In the book, he puts forward the idea that “Economic Development must increase the freedoms of individuals and society”. In essence, contrary to popular measures of economic development like GDP, Per Capita Income, he straight-up wants to quantify (or at least qualitatively) the impact of economic and market activity through their social utility.
In essence, all human activity has the goal to serve the humans (both individual and society), this world and the nature we live in. But, if we don’t appreciate this at all, can we really work towards benefiting as many people at possible, while at the same time, try to minimize or even offset the damage (both social and environmental) caused, without a humanities education, that by definition deals with humanity, both individually and as a collective?
P.S. Sorry for the long reply, but I really wanted to try to present my argument in greater detail. Not in the hope of changing your mind, but just to make you understand where my stance on this matter is coming from. Also, I am not saying that everyone should be an expert in all the fields of humanities. All I am trying to say is that with a little bit of humanities education, I just want everyone to gain some appreciation of humanities and what they do and how important it really is.