(2018-01-19) Alexander STEM Vs Liberal Arts Create

Scott Alexander: Why do people want to live in the sad little world where STEM is the only thing worth doing, anyway?

Your best primary source, if you want to get a visceral feel for this thought process, is Dilbert. The plebs work themselves to death making things, and everyone is content to abandon them to eternal Cubicle Hell

Generalize, and you get a world where learning real skills and making useful things is for chumps. The real rewards go to people who learn how to plug themselves into networks of power, play political games, and justify their right to control others.

Somehow thinkfluencers have taken over the world, deriving their divine right to rule from their skill at criticizing others.

And Literature classes generally don’t teach you to write books; they teach you to criticize. Art History doesn’t teach you to paint; it teaches you to criticize. Philosophy doesn’t tell you the true nature of Good so much as it teaches you to criticize

“STEM majors learn how to make stuff, liberal arts majors learn to think critically and promote themselves” is an unfair simplification, but so is everything

Think about any widely beloved work. Let’s say Lord of the Rings. I have never heard any self-appointed representatives of STEM criticize Lord of the Rings. Nobody says “you shouldn’t read Lord of the Rings, you should just learn to code”. On the other hand, I have heard two million vaguely liberal-arts-adjacent people criticize Lord of the Rings. Either it’s not Serious Literature, or it’s somehow Problematic, or Tolkien has the wrong politics, or it says something about Society

But STEM people feel - I think reasonably - that their fields have a special immunity from thinkfluencerification insofar as they hard to fake

So “learn to code” means learn to code - or prove theorems, or build bridges, or cure an ear infection, or deliver a baby, or dig ditches. Or heck, design a UI, write a novel, play an instrument, paint a picture, raise a child - just do anything other than manage / criticize / consult / thinkfluence.