• brsrklf@jlai.lu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    140
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    5 months ago

    Okay, I’m all for good, complete education, but blaming people not understanding media on “too much STEM” is a bit ridiculous.

    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      I dunno. Math asks me to just accept it’s normal to have 60 watermelons and is trying move bulk orders of melons on a regular car. The goal is to figure out the problem and not accept that the person who is a wholesale watermelon dealer in denial is commiting tax evasion.

      Or to discover that the melon seller has a regular job in ag and gets a bunch of melons on the side from the field and sells the harvest at cost to make up the part of their paycheck that was paid in perishable food.

      Should we shame the seller for breaking the law or sympathize for being forced into that situation? People don’t have the energy to care; they just came for a maths question.

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        ·
        5 months ago

        Sorry, dude, what you said must have been very interesting, but at some point I just stopped reading to optimize a watermelon workflow instead. Weird.

      • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        5 months ago

        but… this is not the math you see at STEM, this is the math you see at high school at best. There’s no deeper meaning in actual STEM math problems, they are way too abstract or specific. There’s no watermelons, it’s just some a, b, n1, nk… maybe some physics formulas that apply to velocity, mass… I read 0 problems in my uni math and physics courses where they used real world examples.

        I see your point but that’s for high schoolers, not STEM students or alumnus.

        • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          5 months ago

          It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

          Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

          Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

          So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.

          • brsrklf@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            5 months ago

            This is what bothered me in the original discussion, making it seem like being in STEM somehow doesn’t prepare you at all for critical thinking in general. On the contrary, I believe too there are people who develop it in part because of the S in there. It’s not necessary, but it’s an important tool.

            Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext. We ask kindergarteners to do that with Dr Seuss.

            • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              5 months ago

              Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext.

              I think it’s about learning that it’s worth doing more than anything else.