xanthocomically:

callstheadventurescience:

brown-madonna:

i feel like STEM isn’t immediately looked upon more intrinsically valuable unless the major you choose has immediate capitalistic benefit, which tends to be technology or engineering. not saying at all that STEM folks face the same social barriers/stigma that art or humanities people face, bc that’s not true! but as an astronomy person the one thing i always get asked by folks (even scientists sometimes!) is “so…what can you ~do~ with an astrophysics major?” there is definitely a recognition of rigor that is very unfortunately missing when someone majoring in classics or gender studies is asked that question, which is a whole other problem. but i feel like the lesson here is maybe not to continually base the intrinsic worth of an education entirely on its capitalistic use. idk.

THIS.

This is really insightful, and I think it raises a lot of issues concerning how STEM and the institution of capital s Science is viewed by the general public and by those who do not study STEM subjects (and how those who do study them view their work in relation to the larger body of human knowledge).
I’m reading a book now (The War on Science by Shawn Otto) about the current state of the relationship between science and politics (especially in the West) and some of the intro chapters talk about exactly this. In particular, I’m reminded of its discussion on how Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, may have been partially right in his assessment of the U.S. and science.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville has an entire chapter titled “Why the Americans are More Addicted to Practical than to Theoretical Science,” where he argues that the infant United States, in valuing the application of science and the returns that can be made on investment in such applications, instead of valuing pure (as in non-applied) research driven by curiosity, is headed down a dangerous path. Namely, that the nation, were it to proceed as such, could be “absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes” would be “preserved” but science, the process, would fail to exist.
Shawn Otto, building off of this and others, posits that by turning our backs on basic research–by not accepting as an answer to the above question of “what can you do with that major?” that “you can learn more about the world around us, that’s what you can do”–a country will have built a system of interrogating science and demanding from it “financially quantifiable projections before an investment is made.” This is indeed dangerous thinking if the spirit of discovery and curiosity is to exist and support the health of a democracy.
Otto ultimately argues that Tocqueville’s assessment has only stood partially to the test of time as history has played out, but the lesson still stands.

So more to your point, the over-emphasis on the monetary value of the applications that proceed from a person’s chosen vocation, or even those which proceed from entire fields of study, is disingenuous to the supposed spirit of science, and is also downright irresponsible and dangerous. And it’s perpetuated from the level of our highest institutions and grant funding agencies. The application of new science and technologies is important to human existence, don’t get me wrong. But when I feel that I can’t even write a grant without feeling like I have to justify how my proposed study will benefit the United States & humanity outside of just expanding the frontier of knowledge, or when the governmental institutions that do support basic research are being systematically defunded…then I think Tocqueville’s assessment hits closer to home.

The obsession with valuing scientific fields based on their potential to yield monetarily valuable applications hurts science and it hurts other important fields of learning, such as the arts and humanities. And as Otto and others argue, it ends up hurting our entire political process.

this is discourse I am here for! (And thanks for the incidental book recs, I’ve been having pretty significant burn out-related existential conflicts about academia and capital-S science, and I think this post plus that Why I Left Academia blog post that’s been going around will be really helpful as I try to sort through my thoughts and piece back together some sort of worldview)