Like you might think that abstract intelligence and social intelligence might carry over solidarity instead of making people more shitty in that regard. How does that even work? Why does people like that coast in life while those who they seem lesser than them suffer?
A culture of superiority to others has been built around stem. It is the same culture of superiority to others that the bourgeoisie have built around themselves.
Solidarity is unlikely among people that are pleased with being top of a hierarchy.
As someone who studies STEM the only reason I can think of is money.
Of course it is
Technology has always been a tool of power for the state, and those who control it also control the narrative and the politics
As someone who studies STEM the only reason I can think of is money.
Yes, but also racism and elitism.
The smartest people from wealthy backgrounds can still absolutely despise the poor (there are people who are so ridiculously rich they can’t imagine how difficult it is to struggle with poverty; sometimes they do a challenge to see if they can survive on low wages and find out the hard way that no, no they cannot); also you have people who hear about atrocities committed against the global South and are fine with it because they identify with some Western identity.
Sometimes these people can have a struggle with their conscience (apparently Churchill said something about feeling guilt at a young age about the wars in Africa he was involved and the things he was doing, but then got over it), which is where propaganda can patch over the holes.
Racism is part of elite power structures. Those in power want to preserve it for themselves, not hand it over to non white or non cis people
Also, in those spaces you also have the non-white people who hate other non-white people (generally hate black people) and want to keep the rest down.
Many times when people like that surpass me at test scores or job positions or are fitter than me or have friends while I am friendless, it makes me feel terrible.
in capitalist society, reactionary pigs are the ones getting ahead. we are marginalized.
This makes me wonder many times how will we win, when these are the people with the power and the intelligetsia is working over time for them
i ask myself this question every single day. i think there’s a lot of darkness to be had still.
This makes me wonder many times how will we win, when these are the people with the power and the intelligetsia is working over time for them
Their system is not functional and destroys itself by its very nature. Everything they do is a fortress built on sand in the long term.
It’s not you, those environments encourage constant comparison and that can make anyone feel awful. I’m sorry you’re dealing with that
I console myself (cold comfort) that chuds don’t make friends. Their close acquaintances are measuring sticks for their success in life, when they get together they essentially flex and dick measure, see who’s pulling ahead/falling behind, who knows more about x topic or show, who’s going to nicer brunches or whose rennos are almost complete.
I have never walked away from a conversation or catchup with chud friends and felt like I connected on anything other than the most superficial levels, and it actively discourages against it. Pathos is seen as weakness or pretentiousness.
It’s tiring, it’s constant macro and micro comparison and triangulation so that every individual can walk away and say they’re superior in something. It’s all the trappings and motions of friendship without any of the motive and it is as hollow as a job interview with mimosas
One of the doctors at the emergency department at a hospital i worked at is an open anti vaxxer.
That’s like when a semiconductor manufacturing engineer told me that They were putting chips in the COVID vaccines. I was like “for what? What could they even accomplish with that?”
And also, “you know that’s not physically possible, right?”
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Smart people are good at talking themselves into things. And a lot of the time smart isn’t the only thing going on. How many ‘smart’ people will tell you covid is over?
One more thing to add is intelligence =/= morality.
Sure, it’s cathartic to call chuds stupid, but in real terms never underestimate chuds. Even with capital they still run circles around us in the culture wars.
i’m not convinced there is much of a “general intelligence”. there’s things you’re good at and things you’re bad at. if you’re good at aviation and physics, it doesn’t automatically translate to being good at social analysis. if anything, it’s the opposite because a lot of those people don’t want to know what they’re doing to others
You get really bright people swept up into this kind of, well, like world that privileges them and insulates them, and most minds are going to become immersed in that and assume that the institution is good and beyond reproach. They’re inside it and see no problem, so external detractors must clearly be wrong. They don’t know “how it really is”, after all.
You can honestly cultivate a system that blinds people to certain kinds of realities outside of their own experience, and the top end of nearly any org that exists under capitalism is going to deal with this a bit or a lot, depending on how much they believe in the system.
I don’t think it’s about good or bad or ignorant and enlightened. I think perfectly good people end up being servants to bad things, and end up taking in bad views that poisons their soul.
It’s hard to not give into a sense that “this is entirely by design” - and I think especially with people who have a high level of abstract intelligence and low social intelligence kind of need exposure to unpleasant things to understand their own position in things. Without it you have a society that will elevate, isolate, and surround you with people who think very similarly to you - you will have nothing but monetary, social, and experiential affirmation of increasingly ghoulish views.
It’s like Amigara Fault - you can’t go down these paths and stay what you entered the hole as. It will twist you up, and again, i think it’s by design.
Being from STEM, I can’t relate that much? Maybe it’s a Spanish thing, but in my university, all the progressive stuff like student associations was done by so-called “pure sciences” students (maths, physics, biology). In contrast, going to the law and economics faculty was like stepping in capitalist hell.
That’s not to say there weren’t reactionaries, but the most progressive and downright communist people I know are through my STEM friends. Engineers are a different breed though, all fascists here.
I live in the USA
Nah it still applies to the US, why are people in STEM always targeted? There’s no shortage of shitty people in the humanities and social sciences or literally any field in this country.
Law is literally the bastion of liberal indoctrination, polisci has the most chuds per capita, psychology, History, English, philosophy, economics, all filled with weird monarchists, christian fundamentalist weirdos.
I was speaking about my experience as a STEM person. Why cannot one speak about one experience in STEM without someone coming out and feeling offended by that “but what about other majors”. I am a black person and when I speak how white shitty white people are with me, white people are like “but what about shitty black people? They commit more crimes. Why don’t you speak about other ethnicities as well?”. Same when you speak about Palestine “but what about other wars? Why you only condemn the Israelis?”. This is fucking ridiculous and it pisses me off. There are a lot of shitty petite bourgeosie people in STEM. There is a lot of elitism and assholes on it, and that has been my experience. I have no idea about the other majors and I don’t think that the fallacy of relative privation ever matters.
I’m think one possible source of misunderstanding is the term STEM itself is broad and somewhat ambiguous. What falls under that umbrella, and how shitty they are may very well vary by country/culture.
I’m willing to entertain the idea that maybe the S fields are ultimately no worse than many of the fields outside of STEM. But Tech/Engineering people are the absolute worst.
It kind of sucks that people in relatively harmless sciences get lumped in with tech/engineering. I think the vast majority of the time people complain about STEM, they mean the T/E.
To extend your analogy (badly?): It’s like if one response to complaining about white people was “what about eastern Europeans?”
I guess the definition of “white” could vary somewhat and some groups who fall under that umbrella aren’t the ones you mean. Maybe Poles or certain Russian minority ethniticies aren’t considered white in the UK (idk, just based on fashy Brits online). But it’s still just (probably) someone getting defensive, and regardless sidetracking the issue.
I guess what I mean to say is you’re right, we all pretty much know what we mean by “STEM” or “white people” so it feels dishonest when the response is quibbling. But at the same time, if I were being charitable, I guess it’s possible for some misunderstanding because they are terms with blurry edges.
tech workers were paid very well for a long time and techbro company men are loud in the media.
True but for as many chuds and libs you may find in stem i bet stem also has the highest percentage of leftists outside of sociology
studying history seems to produce communists at least where i live
History seems to pump out a lot of chuds
econ makes sense because the job is to compete to be the most ghoulish imperialist
Thank god for my macro professor who taught us marx before Milton
Most cases in my experience is partly because STEM study is divorced from study of Humanities. Wanna know how many STEM students were in my 300s Eng Lit class where we had analysis on Neuromancer and how fucked that all was? ZERO. It was the same people from all my other Humanities courses.
Yeah, I think it’s largely the result of the consensus view in STEM becoming “the humanities are worthless”
Of course then the diphsits, having refused to learn any history, have no clue that it wasn’t always this way and many (most?) of the great STEM figures of the past were polymaths with good foundations in the humanities.
If there’s a bourgeoisified working class, it’s STEM. Their relation to the means of production mean that they are elevated above other workers, benefiting from monopolization and imperialism. When the money line goes up, their wages do too.
At least, that’s how it was before the c-suite started trying to replace entry-level tech jobs with LLMs. I think things might start changing once they can’t just get any job they want after graduation and are kicked into the dirt with the rest of us.
At least in the fake field of “Computer Science” the throughline is that you can go from proletarian to C-suite ruling class in only less than a decade (or being a lingering bootlicking parasite to someone who made that transition).
You move out to the bay area in California, get shackled to an expensive “campus” apartment and commute every day to your humble office right next to a weapons manufacturing base while you are insulated from the rest of the world with great weather every day and a Waymo self driving car that will let you not have to interact with the poors who litter the streets.
“Computer Science” is a disease vector for this because it’s not real engineering. You can make profit line go up just by changing some lines on a document or talking to the right Epsteins. You invent problems and then sell more problems while you go on hikes and take expensive vacations at the end of the year.
I hate that CS people have coopted the word engineer, to the point where all any one who thinks of the word engineer is someone who sits on a computer and programs useless slop. They don’t need a license, they don’t need liability insurance, they have no stake or accountability to the failure of their design, yet they get to piggy back on the prestige of the profession and earn more than any engineer that actually builds shit for the functioning of society.
/rant
So true. Who were the SW developers who killed those people with the Boeing Max 8? How is that any different from building a bridge that falls down?
It’s all slop. IIRC in KKKlanada “engineer” is a protected title like “doctor” is. IBM renamed all their tech support guys as “AI Engineers”.
Material conditions determine political ideology. In this case, STEM (though really just T and maybe E) educations generally grant those who obtain them easy money and an avenue into the professional class. They view capitalism as fair because it worked/is working for them, and then have to work backwards to justify how a fair system can have systemically marginalized groups. This way leads to liberal racism at best, to fascism at worst.
Why would bourgeoise institutions encourage the development of a class conscious world view? The “smartest” STEM students are ironically probably the ones who didn’t manage to land a job, despite their excellent grades, which might have been a radicalizing moment for them, especially when they end up meeting people just as smart as them with no diplomas.
The “smartest” STEM students are ironically probably the ones who didn’t manage to land a job, despite their excellent grades
It’s me! (i have awful grades though hehe)
When you experience a modicum of success in life, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that this means the system is fair, your success is entirely the result of your own intelligence and hard work, and those without success just must’ve not tried hard enough.
The long-documented phenomenon of people grossly underestimating how large the income ratio is between the median earner and the 1% also plays a large role. It makes it easier to think of oneself as economically closer to the 1% than the bottom 25% even though by raw numbers and ratios they’re way closer to the latter than the former.
The system is set up specifically to encourage this.
If you are good at learning the stuff in the books then you learn your periodic tables and also your liberalism.
Most people don’t pick their politics because they reasoned their way there or found some evidence that convinced them. Even otherwise smart people. “smartness” plays little role because most people aren’t reasoning their way into politics or their views on marginalized people.
it’s the nature of the academy in the US. the ideological project of the powell memo, the “philanthropy” sponsoring chairs, and the way boards have been stacked by committed market fundamentalists for decades has had its impact on the culture of higher education in the US.
but really, you should see how many academics in the social sciences lack class consciousness and efficiently recreate crazy hierarchical dynamics in their fiefdoms. it’s not all, but it’s enough and they’re fucking mind boggling. like, what kind of wretched beast doesn’t take the exact lens they were taught to build and use it to look at their immediate surroundings, their career ladder or the institutions they work in?
i was interdisciplinary across stem and social sciences. stem specialists have the (weak, imo) excuse of not being trained to critically analyze power or social systems, but even without the training, some totally understand something is rotten at the core. they just lack the language to articulate it and often find themselves viscerally angry at representatives of power. there’s a rage in ecology, like a wound that won’t heal.
with the inverted social scientists… it’s hard not to assume the only lesson these people internalized is that they would comfortable and content holding the whip over the innocent than subject to its sting. and they don’t have to look at or contemplate the collapsing biosphere. if they want comfort, they just have to find travel grants, generate publications, and outperform their peers.
