• Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    That actually doesn’t give me confidence in the CPC. If the US government officials were STEM brains we’d be even further cooked than we are now. They are all Dunning-Kruger’s when it comes to economics

    • Itsmyusername [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netBanned
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      4 days ago

      But that’s through a capitalist lense where we assume they will sell out for the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat. They have no reason not to be educated champions of the people when it is rewarded in China.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      The problem with STEM brained people isn’t the interest in science, but rather how they only look at science in terms of money or profit. They also dismiss anything outside of their chosen field because it all becomes a pissing contest. This isn’t everyone in STEM, just a widespread attitude and a symptom of what created it, exploitative American capitalism.

      I don’t know much about the Chinese education system, but it’s better than ours in most things so I’m gonna guess it gives a more rounded education on science including ethical considerations and its history. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering for instance and he’s not someone I’d call a STEM brain.

      • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        In my experiences, Chinese tech bros are on average definitely significantly more well rounded in humanities and much more intelligent in non-math/tech fields than their Western counterparts. Much less ego and arrogance too

        This only applies to the ones that only studied in China and recently moved to US for work though, the Chinese ones I’ve met who did studied post secondary here and lived in America for 10+ years act way closer to your American tech bro

        • Lussy [any, hy/hym]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          Chinese tech bros are on average definitely significantly more well rounded in humanities

          Half my classmates in engineering school were Chinese nationals, this isn’t true at all.

          • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            So my experiences is a pretty extreme end of the spectrum of tech bros. I’m comparing against largely MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU tech lords grinding their ass off to climb the corporate ladder in big tech

            I compare the talks about politics at work between the Chinese group chats and the English group chats and the Chinese people definitely have a much better understanding of what’s going on. The English group chat discussions is literally indistinguishable from r/worldnews level of intelligence

            And to be clear, I’m not saying they’re very well rounded, just more so than the low bar for American tech bros lol

    • dil [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      I think a bit more scientific method would be great in economics, and I think we’ve seen that with the CPC, e.g. in having local experiments before rolling out broader changes, and in accepting when something doesn’t work.

      Contrast with trickle down economics with tons of experiments and evidence that it doesn’t work (Kentucky), and economists still push for it. Obviously in the US the goal isn’t that things work better, so naturally the conclusion will be that we need more concentration of wealth.

      But approaching government policies scientifically, based on gathering data, hypothesis, experiment design, peer review, etc all sounds pretty reasonable.

      Where things gets yucky is when STEM brains decide that they know better than other folks, and hopefully that’s kept in check.

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    Meanwhile our actual MIT engineer nerds are mostly doing crypto scams and trying to find ways to make people click on advertisements more frequently curious-marx

      • sping@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 days ago

        To be fair though only some are ok with Palantir. They made some useful generic developer tools and quite a few refused to use them.

        And there is a lot of free software ethos was born out of MIT. Free as in libre, not free as in beer. This may all have been a mistake, but quite a few people in our are ok.

      • WoodScientist [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        They’ll strap guns to the robots, legally declare the robots to be police officers, and allow the robots to use lethal force to defend themselves. We’ll have robot officers pulling people over in traffic stops, and they’ll be just as trigger happy as human officers. The robots will be programmed to screech, “I’m in fear for my life” as they take a human life.

    • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Maybe not merit but a STEM PhD at least establishes some pretty high baseline understanding of scientific method and contribution to humanity which is more than you can say about 99% of other certifications

      • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        If a STEM degree doesn’t include mandatory ethics and humanities credits then the graduates it produces are mostly only useful for raising Lockheed Martin’s stock price.

        • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          Knowing the difference between first-order ethics and second-order ethics, and being generally knowledgeable about the study of ethics doesn’t seem to make one what most people here would consider to be morally good.

          Not sure why the other humanities fields are supposed to be relevant in this regard, at least if we separate them from social studies.

        • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          People can understand right and wrong without studying it.

          Most STEM PhDs are working for ordinary, banal, good. Testing water, improving infrastructure, serving coffee, trying to make stuff more efficient etc. Yeah a minority go into like banking and weapons and that is a horrible thing to do with the legacy of human knowledge but most are just people.

          • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            Yea, especially the math related PhDs that are in academia and don’t do any industry work at all since that means they chose to not work for companies making 5+ times what they’re making in academia

        • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          Ethics in engineering don’t teach you to not build weapons for Lockheed Martin. They teach you to not cut corners while you build weapons for Lockheed Martin. It’s about the ethics of the actual engineering process, not what you engineer

          People are much more affected by their social environment and material conditions than a miniscule amount of required humanities classes. Most STEM students I know who took humanities classes openly told the other students and sometimes even the teacher that they only took it because it was an easy class

          Required ethics and humanities courses doesn’t change the fact that in the West, they graduate into a ton of opportunities worth six figures to do highly unethical shit, and those opportunities were probably the reason why they even chose to study engineering in the first place

      • peeonyou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        I know lots of STEM PhDs. Lots of them. The majority of them have an attitude that they’re well above basic humanity. That is not the mindset you want from a leader of any sort.

  • 2812481591 [any, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Xi, Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, all had merely Bachelors of Engineering. Most of the current politburo have PhDs in normal political areas like Law, International Relations, economics, Political science.

    after checking the current Politburo, I found the following people with PhDs in Engineering:

    Chen Jining: Civil engineering

    Yuan Jiajun: Aerospace engineering

    in addition, the following have related graduate degrees:

    Li Ganjie: Masters in Nuclear Engineering (?)

    Li Qiang: Masters in Engineering Management

    Liu Guozhong: “Graduate degree in artillery system fuse design and manufacturing”

    Ma Xingrui: PhD in Mechanics