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