STEAM vs STEM, Liberal Arts vs Everyone Else, Everyone is Acting in Bad Faith etc.

Terminal Blue

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STEM is a vastly undervalued field in the public consciousness, can anyone name any of the lead researched who helped make the Covid 19 vaccine?
Why does that matter, though?

Those people are technical specialists. In order to understand or engage with their work, you would need to be educated in their field. There are people, some of whom are household names, who specialize in the breaking scientific knowledge down into a form the general public can understand. That is called science communication, and it requires a very different set of skills to being a researcher.

This is true in all fields. There are books you sell in bookstores and there are books you sell to academic libraries, and not everyone is equally skilled at writing both. One is written to entertain a general audience and perhaps help them become more knowledgeable and well-rounded people, the other is written for an audience of technical specialists.

Ok anecdote time which will lead into my point.
The problem here, and it's actually much worse in non-STEM fields, is that most developed countries have far more PhDs than research positions. Research in general is no longer a career, it is an expensive hobby that you may one day earn a bit of money from.

Noone goes into research for the money. They go into research because they want to make a difference, because they like the work or because of the sunk cost fallacy of having done a PhD. If you want to look at this from a purely instrumental standpoint, then doing a PhD is basically entering yourself into a self-selected sample of people who don't mind spending obscene amounts of money for the prestige that comes from being a very highly educated specialist, and I say this as someone who is about to get one.

But let's be honest. The typical person picking STEM as an undergraduate is not the kind of person who is going to end up doing research. People go into STEM because they think it will lead to a high paying career, and research is not a high paying career. In this regard, my feeling is that STEM fields are actually a victim of their reputation. The typical STEM graduate is not someone who is thoughtful or intellectually curious. Frankly, they're often the kind of person higher education is wasted on and would be better off doing an evening course in the specific vocational skills they want to develop.

Stem degrees require more time input than arts degrees (There's literally some degrees you can opt for BSC or BA in with the BA being less work to get)
I feel like this is a common misconception.

If by art degrees you mean things like fine art or music, then no. Those are degrees that require a serious time commitment because they involve the use of skills that you have to practice continuously.

But the reason things like humanities and social sciences have relatively low contact time is because those courses place a high emphasis on independent study. Students being students, many will only do the bare minimum (which is still going to come to an hour or two each day) but you're supposed to do much more and in my experience the better students do grasp the point of the system and learn what is expected of them.

Lecturers and tutorials in these courses are supplementary. They are meant to guide independent study and give students a place to ask questions and resolve problems they encounter. The part that actually matters is the reading. You can't reference your lectures in your coursework (although I've seen people try).

In fact, one of the most rewarding parts of teaching undergraduates in the humanities is that you watch these people grow from children who have spent their whole lives learning to regurgitate information on command and follow basic instructions into independent-minded young adults. The knowledge they learn isn't actually important, no airline staff are ever going to get on the intercom and ask if anyone on the plane is an anthropologist. The point is that they've learned a new way of thinking that they can use to evaluate any information and draw reasonable conclusions. A lot of STEM graduates I've met just seem like they never went through that process, and frankly they're worse off for it.
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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And what other work were they doing or was expected of them?
Based on module credits the same number of everyone in Chemistry for the dissertation module.


There are two issues here.

Firstly, this is just a terrible argument because you have vastly less perspective than I do. You have the experience of doing a degree. I have the experience of doing a degree, plus teaching on about ten degrees across my career, and having worked at four universities. This logic is only ever going to be saying that your opinion is less robust than mine.

Secondly, what do you think external oversight is if not people from different departments (and in the case of external examiners, different universities) scrutinising?
You can argue that. I mean it's an idealistic view to think it actually works and balances the courses to any real degree

Even researchers seemingly agree Stem takes more time


 

Dwarvenhobble

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Why does that matter, though?

Those people are technical specialists. In order to understand or engage with their work, you would need to be educated in their field. There are people, some of whom are household names, who specialize in the breaking scientific knowledge down into a form the general public can understand. That is called science communication, and it requires a very different set of skills to being a researcher.

This is true in all fields. There are books you sell in bookstores and there are books you sell to academic libraries, and not everyone is equally skilled at writing both. One is written to entertain a general audience and perhaps help them become more knowledgeable and well-rounded people, the other is written for an audience of technical specialists.
Ah but here's the kicker, much of stem is for generally life these days. Your phone / computer, the systems that run it, the technology used to allow them to function. Just because I don't understand the specifics of training and football tactics doesn't mean I can't say David Beckham was a very good footballer.

It's not a hard concept to go "this is the main researcher who developed x chemical or x technology" but that doesn't happen, instead you get Elon Musk.

The problem here, and it's actually much worse in non-STEM fields, is that most developed countries have far more PhDs than research positions. Research in general is no longer a career, it is an expensive hobby that you may one day earn a bit of money from.
Well yes, I'm guessing there's only so many pieces on social interactions at Twilight conventions and how dog parks reinforce the sexism of the modern world or how Stem is wrong and needs to take a more feminist and holistic approach to glaciology that can get written before the subject gets a little overdone and I can't imagine having that much worth to begin with. One of those was fake, can you pick which one?


Noone goes into research for the money. They go into research because they want to make a difference, because they like the work or because of the sunk cost fallacy of having done a PhD. If you want to look at this from a purely instrumental standpoint, then doing a PhD is basically entering yourself into a self-selected sample of people who don't mind spending obscene amounts of money for the prestige that comes from being a very highly educated specialist, and I say this as someone who is about to get one.
Yeh, but I'd imagine most would like to earn enough to live on comfortably and not have companies trying to screw them over so much they earn less than an Uber driver having put so many resources into actually getting said qualifications.

But let's be honest. The typical person picking STEM as an undergraduate is not the kind of person who is going to end up doing research. People go into STEM because they think it will lead to a high paying career, and research is not a high paying career. In this regard, my feeling is that STEM fields are actually a victim of their reputation. The typical STEM graduate is not someone who is thoughtful or intellectually curious. Frankly, they're often the kind of person higher education is wasted on and would be better off doing an evening course in the specific vocational skills they want to develop.
You forgot those who delves too deep being too curious and become disillusioned more with the world when lets say hypothetically of course the thing they helped develop that they thought would help the world was then being used by other researchers creating new more deadly bio-weapons................hypothetically of course............
 

Ag3ma

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Even researchers seemingly agree Stem takes more time

There are a lot of problems with that. Firstly, It's just about the weakest claim of the paper, only addressed briefly in section 4.4. Notably, there is no evidence at all to justify it - no data and no citations. You have also overlooked a series of caveats. Most notably, that this is framed as a time management issue (which are noted to exist for all disciplines), not an excess workload issue. As additional context, in section 4.2 it notes STEM students befriending people on other courses with more "free" time. They've put the word "free" in speech marks themselves: because it's not really "free", it's a greater proportion of independent study time rather than directed study, thus more time flexibility. Finally, it's the USA and says research and laboratory time takes up most of the contact time - but this is generally not the case in the UK until perhaps final year with the research project. Perhaps you are out of practice at reading academic material?

I am willing to bet from my long experience that the single biggest determinant of how much work a student does is the motivation and conscientiousness of the individual student. Vastly more that the course they are doing.
 

Seanchaidh

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If indeed STEM is harder, I blame STEM majors. They were typically the ones who whined that writing essays is too hard-- harder than it should really have to be in some peasant liberal arts elective was probably the thought process-- which then may have caused the professors whose main method of student evaluation relied on students expressing their own thoughts at length (rather than marking A C B B E D C A B on a scan-tron and feeding it into a machine) to loosen up.

But what makes this whole discussion kind of funny to me is that by far the hardest thing for me in college was relearning the three years of high school Japanese that I'd taken to then obtain three quarters worth of college credit for the foreign language requirement. In concept, a foreign language course-- at least at the start-- is vastly simpler than any other kind of college course. you're literally learning how to ask things like where is the library or what day of the week it is or the grammar of saying that something is or is not or was or was not or will or will not be. it's just not familiar; it is the simplest of concepts in an entirely unfamiliar way of speaking: an entirely different code. And that, in a somewhat less radical manner in most cases, is what makes any course easier or harder: the ease or difficulty of figuring out what the hell they're talking about in the lecture or assigned reading. That is mostly a matter of prior experience; the easiest courses for me in college were the ones I was most interested in-- that were about things which I had already been thinking about and that utilized concepts I was already familiar with. Which is all to say that it should vary by student more than by subject. So that's another way to blame STEM majors (if, indeed, STEM were harder): if it's harder for you, why are you doing it and not the easier thing? Oh, wait, I remember. Capitalism.
 

Ag3ma

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If indeed STEM is harder, I blame STEM majors. They were typically the ones who whined that writing essays is too hard-- harder than it should really have to be in some peasant liberal arts elective was probably the thought process-- which then may have caused the professors whose main method of student evaluation relied on students expressing their own thoughts at length (rather than marking A C B B E D C A B on a scan-tron and feeding it into a machine) to loosen up.
MCQs are actually more reliable and robust assessment systems.

For instance, there's no point using a percentage mark, because there's no meaningful way to distinguish between 55% and 56%. Most universities probably use some form of gradeband system (e.g. A+, A, A-, B+, etc.) where each band converts to a numerical grade, maybe chunks of ~5%. Nevertheless, even then if a student submits an essay and it goes to a marker and secondary marker, there's a fair chance they will come out with different marks - you'd just hope not by much. That's not going to happen on a MCQ.

Another problem with essays is the extent to which you may be testing someone's linguistic capabilities rather than their ability to know, analyze and evaluate the subject the essay is on. Essays are perhaps also unpopular from a workload perspective because whilst easy to set, the marking can be extraordinarily time-consuming. (And why invest so much time into an unreliable measuring system?) Essays also run into similar issues that you never really know whether you are testing a student's thought processes, or someone else's thought processes that the student has memorised and regurgitates. MCQs can be poorly suited to testing various cognitive tasks, particularly at higher complexity domains.
 

Satinavian

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if it's harder for you, why are you doing it and not the easier thing? Oh, wait, I remember. Capitalism.
No, I would instead say prestige.

There are sooo many peoply doing what is considered to be particularly hard just because of bragging rights. And those are the same kind of people who are very invested in everyone else agreeing that whatever was really hard.



We rarely had multiple choice questions or essays but i have heard that both are more popular in the anglosphere. Our exam question generally required a numerical answer or one that could be expressed in few simple facts that both required several steps to solve. And all those speps gave points and "how do you arrive at the conclusion /answer" was always part of the task.

Pretty easy to grade usually. Most of the stuff is either right or wrong and you can give partial points for partial solutions. Some times there were multiple ways to derive at the correct answer and you had to find equivalent partial steps though.
 
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Seanchaidh

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MCQs are actually more reliable and robust assessment systems.
I agree with this, although I've also found that I could get good marks on them without knowing the material. that sounds silly, but I remember blowing up the curve (so much that my result was excluded from its calculation because otherwise the median grade would have been very low) in high school chemistry a few times because the test included a lot of stuff that wasn't covered in class (and that I also hadn't studied in my own time) and I had both the ability and the audacity to answer a lot of the questions I shouldn't have had any business answering based on just a reading of the question and the possible answers-- even risking a -1 instead of a 0 on the question (or something like that, it was decades ago). being good at multiple-choice question tests is a skill in itself. (i suspect i should have put my points somewhere else at character creation.)

I also agree with your critique of essays and what they do and do not show; actually, it's an unstated premise of my argument. Because multiple-choice tests and the like are more cut and dry, there is much less to argue a B up to an A over, whether individually or collectively. So whining doesn't do as much in those cases; humanities majors that are out of their element in a math or science class have a lot less ability to collectively argue themselves into an easier time.

Student evaluation is an enormously difficult problem. I don't think you can really do it very well at scale. And even very intensive methods like thesis defense seem to be riddled with bias or luck. It would be good to figure out ways to make it not so important. But that is beyond the self-prescribed scope of the academy.
 

Ag3ma

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I agree with this, although I've also found that I could get good marks on them without knowing the material. that sounds silly, but I remember blowing up the curve (so much that my result was excluded from its calculation because otherwise the median grade would have been very low) in high school chemistry a few times because the test included a lot of stuff that wasn't covered in class (and that I also hadn't studied in my own time) and I had both the ability and the audacity to answer a lot of the questions I shouldn't have had any business answering based on just a reading of the question and the possible answers-- even risking a -1 instead of a 0 on the question (or something like that, it was decades ago). being good at multiple-choice question tests is a skill in itself. (i suspect i should have put my points somewhere else at character creation.)
MCQ creation is a skill. I suspect a lot of courses just bash out MCQs with modest quality, but having moved into an programme where MCQs are extremely heavily scrutinised for their quality, I've come to learn that they need to be carefully crafted. In general, assessment is very challenging to do really well, and time / resource constraints hamper that. However, I'm broadly happy that on the programmes I teach on, the assessments tend to reflect the quality of the students overall.

In terms of thesis defence, I think the art is having the right examiners. I have definitely encountered substandard examination processes. This could be viewed as akin to peer review in academic publishing: editors know some reviewers are too lax or too harsh, and those reviewers often end up being informally blacklisted from peer review.

And, bar a few specific exceptions, I've no idea why anyone would set a test on material students haven't been taught. If it's just a bit here or there then my institution would demand we deleted those questions from the result, and were it a systematic problem they'd delete the whole exam result and make us set a new one.
 

Seanchaidh

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MCQ creation is a skill. I suspect a lot of courses just bash out MCQs with modest quality, but having moved into an programme where MCQs are extremely heavily scrutinised for their quality, I've come to learn that they need to be carefully crafted. In general, assessment is very challenging to do really well, and time / resource constraints hamper that. However, I'm broadly happy that on the programmes I teach on, the assessments tend to reflect the quality of the students overall.
I don't doubt that MCQ creation is a skill. It absolutely is. And it's generally harder for students to fake it on something like a math question in which all the answers might look very similar-- intuition can only take you so far when all the possibilities are numbers (though there are tricks to eliminating possibilities without really knowing how to properly find the answer that can work sometimes). But MCQ test-taking is still evidently a skill almost no matter how good the questions are and, I must presume, no matter how well the material is known. If it is possible to do it extraordinarily well, then it should also be possible to do it extraordinarily badly. Or just ordinarily well or badly, which might still have a wide variation. Maybe there are ways of understanding-- even of the same material-- that are better able to translate into answering multiple-choice questions than others. I specify "even of the same material" because there are definitely times when MCQs simply cannot get at the sort of understanding a professor is aiming for students to achieve by definition (e.g. when philosophy professors want students to be able to write good essays about the topic), and that is a much less controversial claim than the one I'm proposing, which is that even in situations where MCQs seem to be appropriate, some approaches to understanding a subject may be worse for answering MCQs than others even while not being worse in terms of actually understanding the material (which is tricky enough to define to begin with, but that doesn't mean we should let the method of evaluation decide for us).

In terms of thesis defence, I think the art is having the right examiners.

I have definitely encountered substandard examination processes. This could be viewed as akin to peer review in academic publishing: editors know some reviewers are too lax or too harsh, and those reviewers often end up being informally blacklisted from peer review.
Economists might interject about the various downsides of informal (i.e. 'traditional') economies-- which this can be understood as-- in which personal loyalties and obligations are what rule, though I'm not saying you should listen to them. In any case, "just have the right people" can be quite hard to implement with reliability.

And, bar a few specific exceptions, I've no idea why anyone would set a test on material students haven't been taught. If it's just a bit here or there then my institution would demand we deleted those questions from the result, and were it a systematic problem they'd delete the whole exam result and make us set a new one.
I (unsurprisingly) don't know what they were thinking. Chemistry is a pretty vast subject, though, and if some state or district wanted to have a standardized chemistry test and then let a bunch of different schools do with it what they will, then I could see taking the approach mine seems to have done with the midterm and (iirc) also the final. Apparently whatever they were doing worked adequately to at least one decisionmaker's purposes. And it did produce results which seemed to roughly correlate with understanding the material. It just also correlated with being able to figure out answers just from the question and the set of possible answers alongside the correct level of hubris. Or to knowing which questions to risk answering, a matter of strategy using probabilistic reasoning (or intuition) akin to that employed in Poker (which is not, whatever its merits, chemistry). I don't know if this particular case was affected by the No Child Left Behind Act at all-- I suspect it wasn't-- but it was around the time that was implemented, which means the atmosphere in the United States was a panic about other countries doing better at education and the supposed answer to that being the adoption of standardized tests of various sorts so schools could be compared with each other and the worse ones brutalized appropriately. The Bush years were pretty fucked up.
 

Terminal Blue

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It's not a hard concept to go "this is the main researcher who developed x chemical or x technology" but that doesn't happen, instead you get Elon Musk.
That's capitalism, baby.

Well yes, I'm guessing there's only so many pieces on social interactions at Twilight conventions and how dog parks reinforce the sexism of the modern world or how Stem is wrong and needs to take a more feminist and holistic approach to glaciology that can get written before the subject gets a little overdone and I can't imagine having that much worth to begin with. One of those was fake, can you pick which one?
So, let's focus on the glaciology article, because I actually remember it.

Firstly, every single point in your summary is incorrect. That article never said that STEM is wrong, it never recommended any specific approach, it wasn't about feminism or whatever "holistic" is meant to mean in this context. It was making a very basic criticism that glaciology perpetuates colonial dynamics. That point can just exist. It doesn't need to be rooted in a political agenda or fixed plan of action, it's merely a thing that is worth thinking about.

But this is kind of what I mean. Because I see undergraduates do this all the time. They're the product of a school system that expects them to just regurgitate the right answer, so you give them a problem that is actually complex and all they try to do is "solve" it. Undergraduates will do this thing where they pick a theory or approach they like or that makes sense to them and try to apply it to everything like it's the theoretical master key, because they still live in a world where there has to be a right answer and the goal is to find it.

But over time, when you read widely and constantly for years on end, something happens to you. You find that the theories you initially clung to are flawed, and the theories you replace them with are flawed, until you stop clinging to theories altogether. You become accustomed to criticism. You start to maintain a distance from the things you believe. The points where your beliefs break down become opportunities to learn. That is critical thinking, it's the most important academic skill. In many degree program it's what our entire curriculum is focused on developing.

By the time a person is in a position to write an article like that, they've already gone through this process and come out the other end. They're not trying to solve the world, they're dealing with problems which don't necessarily have right answers. At that point, it's not personal or even really political, it's just criticism, and nothing is above criticism. If it upsets you to have it pointed out the colonialist implications of scientific knowledge, then good. Take that injury and grow from it.

Because right now, it's like watching a child try to fight in an professional MMA match. You are in an arena where criticism is everything, and yet the only criticism you have is that you don't understand the point and it offends you.

Yeh, but I'd imagine most would like to earn enough to live on comfortably and not have companies trying to screw them over so much they earn less than an Uber driver having put so many resources into actually getting said qualifications.
And what?

If people are basically willing to do something for free, noone's going to pay people money to do it. It doesn't matter if the people who will do it for free are shit (which they often are) because who cares, they'll do it for free.

I mean, congratulations, you have stumbled onto the realization that the profit motive is often at odds with any kind of wider humanitarian objective, self-improvement or the pursuit of knowledge and that the conflict between the two has a destructive effect on the knowledge economy. What are you going to do with that realization?

You forgot those who delves too deep being too curious and become disillusioned more with the world when lets say hypothetically of course the thing they helped develop that they thought would help the world was then being used by other researchers creating new more deadly bio-weapons................hypothetically of course............
Frankly, I suspect that would require more capacity for self-criticism than the typical STEM graduate possesses.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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That's capitalism, baby.
Nope because otherwise the corporate football company owners (the clubs) would be talked about more than the individual players lol


So, let's focus on the glaciology article, because I actually remember it.

Firstly, every single point in your summary is incorrect. That article never said that STEM is wrong, it never recommended any specific approach, it wasn't about feminism or whatever "holistic" is meant to mean in this context. It was making a very basic criticism that glaciology perpetuates colonial dynamics. That point can just exist. It doesn't need to be rooted in a political agenda or fixed plan of action, it's merely a thing that is worth thinking about.
That claim can. Doesn't mean it's right not the fact it was based that accusation about the approaches taken by present glaciology in the time we had shit like this going down between more core Stem and Liberal arts



But this is kind of what I mean. Because I see undergraduates do this all the time. They're the product of a school system that expects them to just regurgitate the right answer, so you give them a problem that is actually complex and all they try to do is "solve" it. Undergraduates will do this thing where they pick a theory or approach they like or that makes sense to them and try to apply it to everything like it's the theoretical master key, because they still live in a world where there has to be a right answer and the goal is to find it.
Well there may be different solutions to the same problem. Sacrificing people to the volcano god is one I'd say is the least likely the be one that actually works. Oh and this applies doubly to Liberal arts where many of the claims that have been disproved in said "studies" programs just get repeated by the students on them ad nauseum because they refuse to accept they don't hold water due to them being core parts of said subjects. It's why there was the whole repeatability crisis which hit a number of subjects.


But over time, when you read widely and constantly for years on end, something happens to you. You find that the theories you initially clung to are flawed, and the theories you replace them with are flawed, until you stop clinging to theories altogether. You become accustomed to criticism. You start to maintain a distance from the things you believe. The points where your beliefs break down become opportunities to learn. That is critical thinking, it's the most important academic skill. In many degree program it's what our entire curriculum is focused on developing.
Except it's non scientists saying Science is wrong because they don't understand where the theories come from. This is no better than the Anti-Vaxx crowd on about how the Covid Vaccine could kill people by entering the brain.

By the time a person is in a position to write an article like that, they've already gone through this process and come out the other end. They're not trying to solve the world, they're dealing with problems which don't necessarily have right answers. At that point, it's not personal or even really political, it's just criticism, and nothing is above criticism. If it upsets you to have it pointed out the colonialist implications of scientific knowledge, then good. Take that injury and grow from it.
Or they're people who just want to yell about how science is wrong and their idea of the world is better without understanding Science properly and why the theories that endure do endure.


Because right now, it's like watching a child try to fight in an professional MMA match. You are in an arena where criticism is everything, and yet the only criticism you have is that you don't understand the point and it offends you.
That was more the point of the paper about glaciology lol

And what?

If people are basically willing to do something for free, noone's going to pay people money to do it. It doesn't matter if the people who will do it for free are shit (which they often are) because who cares, they'll do it for free.
And plenty of people would do some stuff for free, doesn't mean they also don't get paid for it............


I mean, congratulations, you have stumbled onto the realization that the profit motive is often at odds with any kind of wider humanitarian objective, self-improvement or the pursuit of knowledge and that the conflict between the two has a destructive effect on the knowledge economy. What are you going to do with that realization?
Just keep pointing to the writing on the wall I'd say



Frankly, I suspect that would require more capacity for self-criticism than the typical STEM graduate possesses.
Woosh.
 

Gergar12

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Based on module credits the same number of everyone in Chemistry for the dissertation module.




You can argue that. I mean it's an idealistic view to think it actually works and balances the courses to any real degree

Even researchers seemingly agree Stem takes more time


I am not entirely against STEM salaries I am against people who can't see the bigger picture. STEM/TEM/Tech and Engineers don't know that the bosses will eventually come for them. They think because of their salaries they won't be affected, and will always have the job forever. We need more unions, more sector unions, and more professional unions period. But the libertarians and conservatives in tech don't want to talk about it, then cry when their field gets oversupplied, and keep pushing bootstraps.
 

Satinavian

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As for the corona vaccine researchers supposedly no one knows, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci have been minor celebrities in Germany. Sure, they were also the Biontech founders, but no one would have cared for them hadn't they been scientists successfully realizing their vision*.
Scientists in general have higher social standing than entrepeneurs. Which is why cou find at least one German scandal about a politition and their doctor thesis a year. It is just that beneficial to have science cred for being trusted and elected.



*And yes, obviously they did not exactly do that alone and people in leading/managing positions don't get to do all that much science personally anymore. But that is another topic.
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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I am not entirely against STEM salaries I am against people who can't see the bigger picture. STEM/TEM/Tech and Engineers don't know that the bosses will eventually come for them. They think because of their salaries they won't be affected, and will always have the job forever. We need more unions, more sector unions, and more professional unions period. But the libertarians and conservatives in tech don't want to talk about it, then cry when their field gets oversupplied, and keep pushing bootstraps.
It's not so much that.

it's the idea of the funding vs benefit to things.

An example I had with a flatmate at uni.

S4C was being potentially shut down due to lack of viewership and mostly being tax payer supported (for those who don't know S4C is a "Welsh Language promotion channel") it is funded by mostly Welsh taxpayer money and some advertising and they make a small handful of Welsh language original shows with English subtitles and mostly their programming is buying shows from other networks (E.G. Smallville, which was also shown on channel 4 on the UK already) and then creating Welsh subtitles for them for broadcast with Welsh language on them.

I argued the at the time £80 Million pound running cost would be better spent on tech / science companies and investment in them etc while said flatmate argued the £80 Million cost was perfectly fine and justified to spent on S4C and not tech / science.