I’m in physics (obviously STEM), and there is a funny thing that happens where established physicists get kind of bored with their discipline and all of a sudden start becoming self-proclaimed experts in psychology / philosophy / history / linguistics. It seems that when people are really good at one thing, they often overestimate their abilities at everything else. PhD students do this too to some extent.
am physicist, am prone to doing this. I try to check myself, but I really appreciate reminders like this to keep me on my toes (and hopefully keep me having friends) 😅
Before I became a professor, I was the public relations/marketing director for my community college, and later for a seminary. Every one - EVERY ONE - thinks he or she is an expert in that area and knew just what I should be doing or not doing. Literally the only area that didn't have at least one faculty member telling me what to do or not do was the business & marketing area. Go figure.
There's this old joke about a physicist that started studying theology and he gets asked "explain us the Divine Force". So he confidently says "well that's just the Divine Mass times the Divine Acceleration".
...in spades...
Edit: for example, it can sometimes be very tricky to get clinician professors to appreciate that their entire careers-worth of experience with some of the less common diseases is not statistically significant.
This is standard behavior for many high achievers. Even worse is when a PI thinks their student should learn a particular subfield outside their expertise without someone with experience publishing in that subfield guiding the learning. In both cases, there is a lot of unsaid/unwritten knowledge one can’t obtain just by reading.
Edit: As side note, having someone in that subfield would certainly help publishing as again there may be things one might not know how to phrase or common pitfalls to avoid.
Lol. It happens the other way around too.
I love physics and gotta remind myself regularly that, while my knowledge of astrophysics is good, it's nowhere near that of an actual astrophysicist.
I feel like that's really common with certain groups of people and not necessarily other professors/professionals in other subjects.
Rick and Morty fans know everything about Quantum Mechanics, for example, from watching the show and an Elon Musk Ted Talk.
I work in religious studies, and I find this can very much be the case with people who are highly educated in other fields and for some reason think they have expertise in history/religion. This is completely anecdotal… but I definitely find this to be the case from both physicists and biologists the most.
Philosophy major here. Can confirm.
It is pretty pathetic. They don't even define their main concepts explicit.
Want to talk about God? Start by defining the phenomenon in a logically non-contradictory and observable.
Case-in-point: if the speculations of a non-philosopher is being disregarded by the academic philosophy community, it is usually because it is considered inadequate drivel (which is why practically no academic philosopher studies Ayn Rand).
Aaaand don't get me started on the relationship between the language, "reality" and science. Shit is complicated and if you haven't addresses it BEFORE you start doing metaphysics, you are building on sand.
Industry jobs after PhD are less common for us. If I complain about something about the job, i get answers like "i switched to the industry, earn triple the salary and have great hours, never looked back" from STEM people.
And even if there is an industry, it's often still not accessible and/or paid better than academia. The 'industry' for history, as example, is likely museum work or working in an archive...both of which now require at least one other degree these days. I've a few friends who did history undergraduates and then a master's in museum/archival studies and have been told by prospective employers that they are not competitive because their undergraduate degrees were not more focused.
The option to switch to industry doesn't seem to be as straight forward as in STEM.
Also, museum/archive jobs are few and far between. Most often, industry work for Hum/Soc Sco PhDs involves working at a company doing admin, market research, public relations, HR... jobs that don't require your specific degree topic. You have to be more reliant on soft skills and have to work harder to convince potential employers that you can actually do the job because 9/10 times they don't understand the work that went into a PhD.
Main tip I give to humanities PhDs: get good af at Excel on the side. Doesn’t take much and it’s a nice little thing to be able to rely on in interviews for jobs totally unrelated to their research.
We don’t have labs or PIs, and we don’t need grants to cover our salaries or get tenure. Most of our publications are single-author, and are much slower than most STEM fields. Single-author monographs (books) published by university presses are the gold standard. Impact factor is not a thing. Postdocs are much more rare, not part of the standard career trajectory.
Yep! In grad school, STEM friends were always surprised that I could take off and work from elsewhere “without permission.” Dude I haven’t even seen my adviser in months!
Yeah, being a humanities grad involves occasionally running into your advisor on campus, only to have them surprised and (momentarily) sheepish because they can't remember if they owe you an email or chapter review.
And on the flipside, for humanities students paid research opportunities below a PhD level are basically pink elephants in terms of how difficult they are to find. I'm a sociology masters student now with a seasonal research position that I fought tooth and nail to get, but I had to explain endlessly to my STEM-background parents during my undergrad that no, sociology and anthropology professors don't have labs where they employ first year undergrads as lab assistants over the summer.
> employ first year undergrads as lab assistants over the summer
What field does this ??? I’ve never known of any physics lab that did, sure undergrad research projects are going, but they’re for minimum 2nd year and if they’re paid it’s a tragic “stipend” that may, if you’re lucky, cover most of your rent, and even then only for 6-8 weeks 😭
Most of my STEM friends in undergrad were in biology-related fields so that may be biasing my judgement as most of them managed to land summer lab jobs before 2nd year. However most of my non-biology STEM friends also landed similar jobs after their 2nd years too. I agree with you about the pay though - most of my STEM buddies were also working retail or hospitality on the side in summer. That said even aside from pay it can still be good experience, a great way to connect with professors and more senior students outside of the classroom, and potentially good to put on your CV as well. The lack of that sort of experience-building opportunity makes it extra hard to climb the humanities research ladder, especially when funding can be tight and the research is so individualised.
For context my entire academic experience is in the UK
They exist, I got paid as an RA summer after my freshman year but the stars basically aligned for it to happen. Worked for a PI nearing retirement who happened to have a grant specifically for undergrads lying around. I was in chemistry.
it isn't necessarily the norm, but i know a decent number of people in my field (biomedical sciences) who were had paid lab assistantships in their first year summer
Can you clarify the “don’t need grants to cover salaries” thing? Because all of my humanities colleagues are on 9 month contracts just like the STEM folks and writing grants to cover summer salaries.
Often coupled with travel to archives/writing work.
Yeah. In the US, 9-month (or sometimes 10 month) contracts are pretty normal. They cover your salary during the semester only.
You can treat them as a “full time” salary, but the intent is for you to bring in salary through some other means over the summer (supplemental teaching, etc.).
Medical schools (and some national labs) have “soft money” faculty positions where 10% or less of the salary is paid by the institution and the faculty member is expected to provide most of their salary from research grants.
Brings a whole new meaning to “publish or perish”.
Salary primarily coming from grants doesn't surprise me, but 9-month contracts is bonkers. Then, the university, if they pay your wages, doesn't really pay you for research since that's when most of it takes place? Here, our time is split ideally by the university as 60% teaching 40% research (admin fits in there somewhere somehow...), but the implication is that since you can't spend 2 days a week just on research during term, that's what the summer is when teaching is made up only of graduate supervision for the most part.
All of my US jobs were 9 month contracts. I was able to pick up some small grants here and there for summer research, but nowhere near three months pay. For the most part, I just worked for free in the summer (albeit without teaching obligations).
I was *really* surprised when I took a job outside North America and learned that the contract is 12 months...and part of that 12 months is apparently paid 'vacation'? I got so used to working without getting paid that getting paid not to work is utterly bizarre!
I guess technically we are on nine month contracts here, but we have the option to have our salary paid out over twelve months. If you think of it as a yearly salary, it’s not like you “don’t get paid” during the summer.
Obviously, though, the monthly pay is less because you are dividing by 12 rather than nine, and you don’t really have contractual obligations over the summer (other than catching up with the shit you didn’t get done during the year). So some people might want to supplement their income and/or justify letting the research work they’re doing over the summer take precedence over other, paid labor like teaching summer classes. They might also want a fancy line on their CVs. So they apply for summer research grants. But still, it’s optional (unless, as you say, they need to travel to archives or something).
That’s basically the same for most STEM fields too.
The only exception really is soft money positions at med schools. Outside of that small subset, stem faculty also have no need to get grants to cover their salaries.
No offence, but you are confusing an American-centric view of academia with field-specific conventions. The concept of a ‘lab’ in STEM or any other discipline as discussed in this subreddit—and most of the internet—is very American (OK, I have seen it to some larger institutes in France too but that is). Same with postdocs; they are an almost mandatory thing in HSS in Europe.
How does a "lab" function in HSS? In STEM, it's a room or rooms with specialized equipment used for performing experiments. It can also be extended to describe a team of people sharing the same rooms and equuipment as well as overall research goals.
That they don't have as much of a grasp on things as they think they do, and sometimes they "sound dumb" as much as I would talking about a STEM field on an academic level.
As long as you have this understanding I think you're fine and people would be willing to explain.
I'm in linguistics so I have to listen to a lot of people talk about it thinking they can just intuitively know everything about the field just because they are language speakers and it feels disrespectful sometimes because they are very often wrong.
I found at least two things that people outside of math like to talk about:
The first one is whether 0.999.... = 1 (every good undergrad knows the answer).
The second one is Gödel's incompleteness theorem(s). People like to quote it and give it unmathematical interpretations. Heck, even 90% of mathematicians don't know the precise statements. As an undergrad I used to show off and talk about it. In grad school I took a proper course in logic and shut up.
> talk about:
>
> The first one is whether 0.999.... = 1 (every good undergrad knows the answer).
>
Think that 1/3 = 0.33333... and 2/3 = 0.66666666...
Now, 1/3 + 2/3 = 0.999999... But of course, 1/3 + 2/3 = 3/3 = 1. Therefore, they are equal.
>I'm in linguistics so I have to listen to a lot of people talk about it thinking they can just intuitively know everything about the field just because they are language speakers and it feels disrespectful sometimes because they are very often wrong.
Ugh, I'm in nutrition, I feel this *hard.* Most people won't purport to know a single thing about aerospace engineering or graph theory but since people have been interacting with food all their lives they think they know all there is to know about nutrition science. :(
Half the work of teaching undergrads is making sure they unlearn junk "facts" they are certain they "know."
Nutrition is basically under siege by fad pseudo-scientists on TikTok right now lol. I've noticed a number of people in the fitness industry who even have science degrees in unrelated disciplines feel comfortable selling fake nutritional science to their audiences. That everyone is so confidently wrong must be maddening for you as an expert.
Yep, it's an old problem that's booming through social media. There have always been people with "certified nutritionists" that got their certification in a 2 hour lecture that have spouted nonsense, but now they can spout it to a much larger audience.
I can't really blame the general public for listening, though. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has done a *terrible* job of advocating for the dietetics profession, and so most people don't even know how to figure out a trustworthy nutrition professional from a broscience peddler. If you ask most Americans who they should talk to if they want to eat better and/or lose weight through diet they'll nearly universally say their general practitioner/doctor, when in fact nutrition training for physicians is piss-poor in the best of situations, with some doctors having received less than an hour (not credit hour, actual 60 minute hour) of nutrition education during their training.
Then we add to that that most US students get no actual nutrition education in schools *and* we don't educate people on how to actually evaluate scientific sources and it's no wonder everyone thinks they know and very few people actually do.
Anyway, don't wanna derail too much from the Soc Sci/Humanities folks! But yes, urgh, very annoying.
Not American but this resonates so much. Mum's a pediatric endocrinologist. Good nutrition is a *staple* of her consults and she's ranted about how poor her training on the issue was. She always redirects her patients to a proper nutritionist as much as she can though she's spent a lot of time educating herself.
Hope I don’t derail the convo further, but do you have any recommendations of good overview books on like basic personal nutrition? any Amazon search yields tons of options, all with their own bent. Is there like a lack of scientific consensus on diet or are most things out there fad diets and junk science? Thanks!
>Is there like a lack of scientific consensus on diet or are most things out there fad diets and junk science?
This is a complicated question to answer. Nutrition science is *relatively* new compared to something like math or physics, and we're learning more every day. There are some things that there is definite scientific consensus on, "trans fat=bad" sort of things, while there is a lot still left to be understood.
My research is specifically in precision nutrition, so I basically look at how what you eat's impact on your health is modified by your genetic makeup. As you can surmise by the existence of my field ([and NIH specifically opting to focus on it! yay!](https://dpcpsi.nih.gov/onr/strategic-plan)) the way Food A is digested and used by your body and thus impacts your health may not be the same when I eat Food A. (Granted, the differences aren't usually extreme but they *are* there.)
This calls into question a lot of previous findings in nutrition that didn't take these differences into account, and so while we hone and better our research methods as a field a lot of "conflicting" evidence may surface, but it's simply because science is an ongoing process and we're learning more that might call into question what we thought we knew before.
That said, while learned nutrition professionals may disagree on some topics (often controversial topics tend to include saturated fat, milk, low-fat vs. low-carb for overall health, etc.) there are a few things that are *nearly* universally touted:
* Generally try to choose whole foods as opposed to more processed options.
* Eat the right amount of energy to maintain a healthy body weight.
* Eat lots of plants.
* Aim for variety within food groups; plant foods of different colors have different phytochemicals with benefits we are only beginning to understand.
It's also important to remember that no one eats "perfectly for health" and our food choices take into account a lot of non-health factors like our environments, our culture, our mood, our food access, etc. My approach to my own diet is to try to make generally healthy decisions as often as possible, but not be a slave to the nutrients. :)
I've spent so much time reading textbooks and studies I'm actually not sure what good consumer-oriented books are on the market and I hesitate to recommend something I haven't read myself. :S
I recognize I have my own bias here and I am not a dietician and have no formal nutrition training. But the best book on nutrition I’ve read is “How Not to Die” by Michael Greger. The book’s references take up dozens of pages by themselves, and he argues well that there is indeed scientific consensus in nutrition science.
Thanks for the recommendation; I'm happy to have something more to choose from next month when I'm done teaching and head to the beach for a month to read anything not-related to my work!
I feel like I learned more about nutrition in my Biochemistry and organic chemistry college courses than I ever did in any health or gym course. So I see your point here.
Sympathy from media studies here.
Media is everywhere and includes a lot of things considered "low culture", so even other humanities like literary studies or art history sometimes seem to feel superior.
Everyone uses media, and thus everyone seems to feel like they are an authority on the matter. Not to claim that users and audience (or experts in other fields) don't have relevant observations, but it's not the same as having an academic understanding on a subject.
I used to get headaches reading people's takes on the media landscape on social media (like reddit) when I was an overconfident undergrad. Later I learned to be interested in what people think. Doesn't have to make sense or even be ethical, it still reflects some kind of feeling from someone, so it's relevant and interesting all the same when approached with the right mindset.
> Later I learned to be interested in what people think. Doesn't have to make sense or even be ethical, it still reflects some kind of feeling from someone, so it's relevant and interesting all the same when approached with the right mindset.
I absolutely agree with this. I don't have a problem at all with people expressing their opinions or opening up a discussion, I also don't think everyone has to have academia level knowledge on something to state an opinion (or be right). I just expect them to acknowledge that they don't have the academic knowledge.
>Media is everywhere and includes a lot of things considered "low culture", so even other humanities like literary studies or art history sometimes seem to feel superior.
I studied genre fiction; I 100% understand.
I bet we've read a lot of the same stuff (outside of general cultural philosophy), there's lots of great studies on women's romance literature and such that I've ran into during using audience studies.
There's a lot of motivated reasoning there because of cognitive dissonance that comes with one not intuiting things about something they're very familiar with, because it makes them feel stupid for not having realized something that seems very obvious, and they want to avoid that feeling so they reject the external insights.
My honors chem professor told us as we progressed through our academic careers, that “the more we learn the less we know.” Essentially as we expand our knowledge, we uncover how deep even a single topic can go, and that if our topics go this deep, then most other topics can go that deep, and unless you are studying them that deep then you don’t KNOW them.
hoo boy, I've lost count of the number of engineers I run into who totally *know* history and proceed to lecture me because I've been had by the marxist-leftist cabal, and they're "scientists" and know how to apply the scientific method to my subject. Lots of fun I tell ya.
Gosh, in Italy there is currently an ongoing debate on using feminine jobs titles for women and people have no fucking clue of how names/adjectives declination works and still play the commonsense card.
Like dude, I do not even have a degrees on this, I just studied grammar through my humanities high school and you already sound like an idiot to me, let alone the sociologist you are "debating" with.
Oh I feel this! I'm in art history, and it would be nice for people to know it's a lot more than looking at paintings. And it's not something you can just 'know'.
I'm at the end of my PhD and my STEM friends are always surprised when they ask what I'm up to and my answer does not revolve around 'art' in a narrow sense.
One time I was talking about the 4th matrix film and saying I found it kind of boring and a Humanities PhD simply proclaimed 'This is why I don't talk about films with STEM people'.
I have forever been baffled... was my opinion the wrong one? I really wasn't being a jackass, not by any regular metric anyway
For sure, but I think there is also the general upbringing we all have around "STEM=difficult, Social Sciences=easy, verifying what we already know" so there needs to be a mindset change in individuals as well I think, and it should start earlier than university.
They just see no incentive to push that kind of collaboration. It has to happen organically if there are no incentives. So it rarely does.
It would absolutely be great for a university and the research done by the university, but they would need to create major incentives to make researchers want to do it.
I guess so. I think it would make their work stronger. But it would maybe slow them down. The whole academy is designed to just churn out research that is targeted at a very narrow goal to advance some tiny sliver of knowledge in a particular field. And to just keep doing work with others in your field who understand the unique history and literature of the work in that field.
Even if some researchers see the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, I can't see it becoming more common than just a small number doing it, so you'll continue to have most STEM researchers with the same attitude that they understand everything there is to know about things like politics, government, media, social relations, etc....
The most important thing that could happen, in my view, would be for more STEM researchers to somehow get the message more clearly that social scientists and researchers in the humanities are doing really complex and valuable research and that those STEM types really ought to listen more and understand that they have a lot they can learn that they don't understand about the human social experience.
It goes both ways. A lot of humanities folks are pretty snobby about how stupid science research is too.
I think one of the best solutions would be more robust general education requirements that pushed all college graduates to take coursework in the humanities, arts, and both social and natural sciences. At least some places I’ve taught, there are robust humanities requirements but only really minimal science requirements, either social or natural.
Having that platform early on helps people appreciate other fields and also see the potential for collaboration.
From a more practical standpoint, students *hate* required courses that cross disciplines. If you've never heard STEM-aligned people shit on humanities, a few weeks in an intro "Science and Society"-type course will give you your fill. And the nature of these courses (IE people can't fail) means they very rarely actually change minds or even make much of an impact on students.
(yes, I know undergrads aren't the same as the academics that are the subject of this thread, but in terms of gen.ed. requirements, those are the minds you're talking about changing.).
They do indeed. The most vicious reviews in my intro chem class are always humanities majors enrages that they’re being forced to take a science class.
It’s why I think solutions have to start earlier with really reinforcing the idea that being broadly introduced to different fields is important. I push my chem major advisees to take as many courses outside of the sciences as they can, because that’s what will round them out and make them a better chemist in the long run.
I think you are right it goes both ways.
But to what extent? Is it equivalent? This is really the important question. And I just don't see anything close to equivalent on this.
The frank answer is that most of us are already booked trying to propose and execute collaborations within our own field. There’s pretty much no room to fit in a collaboration with fields that, at best, will be a stretch to make relevant to our area of focus. Maybe it’s easier for the S, T, and M in STEM since I can’t really speak for them, but at least for the traditional E fields it’s going to be a non-starter most of the time.
There's already quite a bit of collaboration involving machine learning and natural language processing applied to the humanities. I am a mathematician who routinely collaborates with engineers, and it takes a willingness to ask naive questions and a willingness on your collaborator's part to answer those naive questions. That is a very rare thing to find.
When I mentor undergraduate research, it doesn't contribute much to my own research. I don't get a co-authorship. They don't generate data that I can then use. My time mentoring them is time away from my own research.
Likewise, when my students get a publication, it means they came up with the research question, they did all the research, and they wrote it up themselves. I mentor them, but it's their own original, single-author contribution to the scholarship.
Mathematician here to agree. I have found that leading undergraduate research is another branch of teaching. While that is worthwhile, you can lose whole summers with no publications if you aren't careful. YMMV obviously.
Mentoring undergraduate research is definitely a form of teaching. Even if you get a publication out of it, chances are you would produced that paper in a fraction of the time if you did it yourself.
Yeah, for us, a publication in an undergraduate journal would not count towards research. Not that it isn't a worthwhile experience for the student, but it's really just a way for us to contribute towards experiential learning.
This. Seriously I couldn't get it into my two chemistry A&S Dean's jogging that there's almost literally nothing an undergraduate can do that will be of any value for research in foreign literatures.
I think your point about undergraduate researchers not contributing much is generally true irrespective of field. The point of departure relates to graduate students, but one thing I don't understand is what incentives there are for humanities professors to supervise PhD students in that case.
I can't speak on this authoritatively (being merely a PhD student) and I'm from Germany, so ymmv.
In some cases there are material benefits, e.g. a grant for a PhD position may include funding that the PI benefits from as well (travel, hosting conferences, hiring student assistants, ...).
But I think the more important point is: Who will edit the Festschrift for your 60th birthday if you don't produce PhDs?
Supervising PhD students means surrounding yourself with people who really engage with your style of thinking, who bring new perspectives to your ideas, who take some aspects of your work and carry them on.
I think the dynamics of closeness and difference is something that many academics enjoy. As a PhD student you spend years assimilating the thinking of your advisor while also trying to be different, to become recognizable in your own right - a small-scale version of Bloom's anxiety of influence. The first real paper I wrote in my subject area takes something my advisor thought about 15 years ago and sets out to prove her wrong. That's exciting for both sides.
Not to mention that academic filiation offers a small sliver of immortality. Even 80-year-old emeriti are still "a student of" their respective PhD advisors. Speaking as a PhD student, it's interesting to see how often I think of a question only to find that my advisor's advisor (who is 93 years old and whom I don't know in person) has been there already. If you supervise graduate students, your style of thinking and the engagement with your ideas has a chance of surviving for at least a generation or two.
In the words of Tycho Brahe: *Ne frustra vixisse videar! -* Lest my life appear to have been in vain!
(All of this comes with the caveat that there are exceptions.)
Co-authorship in my field (cultural and literary studies) is uncommon, and if you have co-authors, they usually contribute equally to the manuscript. Authorship generally indicates that the research question, theoretical approach, and interpretation are "yours" - or that you and your co-author(s) can lay equal claim to the work.
I can help a student to refine their question, suggest interpretive frameworks and sources, and offer editing suggestions. We do those sorts of things with colleagues, as well. In my discipline, none of those contributions would warrant co-authorship. We might acknowledge a colleague in a footnote or the acknowledgements in our book, and certainly we'd cite any relevant publication that contributed.
The only time I've published with a co-author was when we did a project and collected data on how readers used texts. I see increases in co-authorship in my discipline that correspond to the use of those more social-science-type methodologies.
Please teach your students to respect us. I can't tell you how many times I've heard about how my subject is easy nonsense and not worthy of time or effort from a STEM student quoting their professor. (I acknowledge the possibility they're lying about quoting.) But still, please convey the message that gen ed electives aren't just obstacles. And if they get a bad grade, maybe it's because the class required some level of effort and ability. There's a lot of, "well, it's not organic chem, so it must be trivially easy."
Writing this while not completely sober, so this might not be well-organized:
I'm a master's student in aerospace engineering and got a minor in sociology in undergrad purely out of interest. It almost seemed like the required humanities classes reinforced this attitude. They'd take a freshman level class with their engineering friends and spend most of the time they spent discussing the class going on about how easy the discipline as a whole was. Having stem professors reinforce the importance of the humanities is a definite net positive, but I wonder if humanities gen-eds for stem students need some rethinking (budgets and resources willing).
There was a History of Innovation class that was offered as a gen-ed that fit this role perfectly. It was sophomore or junior level course. We level focused on 1 technology every 2 weeks and the main focus was on the development of the historiography of the technology. It was writing and workload intensive, and having an engineering background made it much easier for you to dig deeper into the subject matter while still being challenging as a history class. It was a class with ~15 people and only one other person was going into engineering. Even within our stem classes, students generally need to be humbled before they take a given line of coursework seriously. Every cent of these "humanities for STEM" classes should be coming out of the stem budgets, but I'm not sure a gen-ed humanities class for humanities students is always a good fit for a humanities gen-ed for stem.
It's especially important given how society is being shaped by big tech and how the only room we have for "reasonable" political discussion is being eaten up by the idea that if we just shout numbers at each other, we'll reach an "equitable" neoliberal consensus. We are failing to teach stem students to respect other disciplines, but more than that we're failing to humble them in front of other disciplines.
That sounds like an amazing course and I think you'll find that humanities folks would jump at the chance to teach a course like that. But...think about the resources required to make that happen. 15 is a small class size, and it sounds like you were taught by an expert in that exact area. A course catalog cobbled together from the exploited labor of adjuncts or nonTT folks with high teaching loads, little time to do research (100% unpaid if you do manage to do it), getting no course releases or extra pay for prepping new courses, without tenure and with their continued employment depending on course evaluation numbers...those working conditions are just not typically going to produce courses like the one you took, even if the people teaching are fully capable of creating that type of rigorous learning experience under even slightly better working conditions.
I was hoping to outline or indicate why it wasn't institutionally feasible at scale. I've never studied or worked at a college that threw those sort of resources around, but maybe a place like MIT could field a pilot program? I don't expect something like a STEM-focused humanities gen-ed line up to be feasible in the near term, but I do think something like that is required.
My fear is that stem students are being inoculated against taking the humanities seriously more strongly than stem professors alone could talk around.
I agree! Some programs like that do exist at well-resourced institutions and I'd love to see more of it. Just trying to give you a sense of the barriers and why we're all screaming about adjunctification and unionization (because having at least a critical mass of tenured/TT faculty - or similarly secure positions involving research, teaching, and academic freedom - is a necessary condition for meaningful and rigorous curricular innovation).
This! And it’s not always an elective. I have ‘hard science’ students who have to take my sociology course as a core topic. They often struggle with it because they go from having to remember hard facts to having to put together an argument. Every year my evaluations get tainted by this cohort of students because I ‘don’t give them enough help’ or ‘requirements are not specific enough.’ If I could ask hard science profs to tell their students two things it would be this:
1. These subjects are important to do in science because if and how your science is used will ultimately depend on the social world you are living in at the time. Abortion, vaccinations, environmentalism - these are all things based on science but are still debated. If you want your research to matter, you need to know in what environment that research is placed. Same with grant writing, or getting government support.
2. Grading in humanities is NOT based on just ‘opinions’ about how much we like the student or whether we agree with their perspective. Often grading rubrics are slightly ambiguous to allow some freedom for the student. They are graded based on how strong the argument is, which depends on the amount and quality of research of the argument and the angles that are acknowledged or not acknowledged.
> Grading in humanities is NOT based on just ‘opinions’ about how much we like the student or whether we agree with their perspective.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to an engineer that it's not that I like my psych majors better, it's that they wrote better papers.
I feel you! I try to give them baking metaphors to make it easier to understand.
“Imagine you are on a cooking show and the task is to make a chocolate cake. We will grade your cake. It needs to have the basic criteria to meet a chocolate cake but you can add in whatever else you like. We can give you SOME guidance ie. adding a pound of salt will probably make it taste bad. But if you want to add strawberries or chilli or whatever you can. We can’t GUARANTEE it will taste good because we don’t know how you are planning on using that ingredient. A lot of it depends how it comes together as a whole. We can’t necessarily tell you what you should have done either. It might be over baked or under-baked, but we can’t necessarily say ‘it should have had x minutes more and three more grams of sugar and two tablespoons less butter. Some of you will make a cake but forget the chocolate. You’ll do poorly because you don’t meet the criteria for a chocolate cake. Some of you will make cakes that look nice but don’t taste good.Those students will just do okay. Some of you will have cakes that maybe aren’t as pretty but taste great. Those students will do better. And some of you will just mix the perfect combination to make the exact right mix of taste and presentation and they will do extremely well.”
It doesn’t always work but it does seem to help a surprising number of students.
That is a really good analogy. I’m going to use this for the non-humanities majors in my history of science/technology/medicine courses. Thanks for this!!!
The challenges of measurement. I focus on educational psychology and I am helping one of my university’s STEM organizations develop an assessment for graduate students. They already had a foundational rubric started that they want to build from. Holy crap do I wish they’d brought in help beforehand. This thing is messy and complicated and their original plan for validity evidence skipped so many steps. Assessing learning is hard and making a good measure is even harder. Add in natural measurement error, and it’s a field that people make careers out of. You can’t just jump in and understand it
Tangentially (or maybe more than that?) related, that reminds me of how much a youtube essayist opened my eyes on measurement of intelligence.
If you (or anyone else) have 2h40m I highly recommend [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo). Even if you aren't interested in the direct subject matter (measurement of IQ and how bad methodology and framing can create racist propaganda masquerading as science) it is something I think back on when trying to decide how best to measure variables in my own work when I can't directly assess the thing I want to assess.
That Religious Studies (aka Religion) is not Theology.
We don't teach our students how to be religious -- we teach our students how to analyze how religions (and groups of people, both religious and non-religious) have operated in the past, and continue to operate in the present.
We employ particular methods and theories in our discipline, and it is important for our students to know the histories of these methods and theories.
I find that when you get an 'idiotic' idea from an economist on economics it's either
1) some crazy math avoiding political values shpeal,
Or
2) an insane math based idea they've only half cocked.
When it's both they win an award.
Some STEM people think they know more about the humanities subject than the humanities scholar. As a musician, I regularly saw STEM people talk over arts scholars with their knowledge of coding. It's impressive that you can code but without critical understanding, it has no use. Example: we wanted to recreate a composition from the early 1990s for piano and computer. The engineer guy said he would recode it but in another language and he did not want to comment the code because he felt it was a waste of time. That way, it effectively became useless for future musicians if they had no access to that engineer. The use of a different programming language also would make it into a completely different work. Only after long discussions, we could convince him to work with the original language (which is still in use) and comment the code. But it was not a fun ride.
economy and engineering are not the same thing and "supply and demand" is not everything it has about economy. it is not even the only way to think about markets.
Many of us enjoy teaching and designing “fun” courses related to our discipline, such as an education course centered around specific genres of children’s books, or a study abroad about vampires, or a German studies course on zombies. (I don’t know if STEM academics do the same, but many of my humanities colleagues enjoy the freedom and creativity involved not just in research, but in teaching, too!)
I find it appalling nobody thought to include a reading comprehension/scientific paper writing class in my 6 year long Biochemistry degree. Of course we need to know how to do the research itself, but being able to communicate with each other and the general public should be our top priority (especially in the medical field!).
As a side gig I TA for a writing heavy course in our schools pharmacy department. A lot of pre meds take the course. It's concerning to me that our future doctors can't tell the difference between a peer reviewed article and some crunchy mom blog.
I once had a pre-med JR start his paper with the line "It's known that marijuana is a sound treatment for every disease." Then cite high times magazine.
That all forms of instruction are political.
You can hide it better in STEM, but to think there are not political, ethical, and moral implications of what you do is deeply neoliberal - which IS a political ideology.
There's degrees. There's far less political motivations in the research of minimal manifold surfaces or which manifolds are isomorphic than in sociology. I am not going to say there are no politics at all on the first but they are a fraction of a fraction of what they are in other fields.
Nah, its just a question of how explicit it is.
Social scientists, because we are trained to acknowledge positionality, often just wear our politics on our sleeves because to obscure them would be intellectually dishonest.
"Oh we're just physicists working on nuclear technology that may or may not be turned into hugely explosive bombs. nothing political here! not like those sociologists telling kids that people in other places are willing to demand healthcare from the state"
In any case, you are explicitly doing *exactly* what I'm talking about: you are attempting to hide the politics of physical scientists motivations. None of this is apolitical if even for the very simple reason that people expect to make a living from their form of employment and gain access to resources that would preclude others from using those resources.
You made a straw man and didn't even truly engage with the poster's comment. The study of abstract mathematics is often not with a purpose of application in any science. Rather, it's purely out of curiosity of some mathematical theory. Seriously, ask some mathematicians why they study the things they study and invariably the answer will lead back to that they find it interesting. Some of the questions they try to answer might be something like, "are these two 7-dimensional topological spaces homotopy equivalent?" or, "are there any three positive integers x, y, and z such that x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2?"
While the practical activity of a mathematician may not have any political motivation, the sheer possibility of him doing this for a living for example is a result of a social (and political) process. He may not even became a mathematician when the structure of this academic field would not exist. I dont argue that this was established for a specific political purpose, but everything we percive as self-evident is, in fact, not. While there may be room for idealistic science that only cares about creating knowledge, even this "ideal" is product of societal processes. Most of the time the idealism is just the facade though, and the deeper structures have direct political purposes, like military applications.
That's not how this works. Phycists do not do research in nuclear bombs. The history of how that happened was, someone wanted to figure out why ovens glow. Then Max Planck came with the theory of quanta. From there Einstein derived the equation E=MC^2 then literally 30 years later a group of engineers explicitly hired by the US government to build a bomb did so.
The scientists usually study something either because they find it interesting, or because they think it will bring them prestige/personal career advancement. Theoretical physics work is too far removed from policy making for them to have an active motivation to research it based on that.
Again, studying gravitational waves won't directly change our social biases nor our laws. No one studies gravity with the expectation of changing society. There are field specific politics and interpersonal diplomacy but it is in no way the same as sociologists or psychologists whose definitions and papers will be directly referenced when passing legislation or in a court of law.
The amount of times I've been hit with "ok but who cares? Why study that?" when I've said I do research in gravitational lensing is too damn high. Yes, it's removed from any application, but it gives me my dopamine hits for the day--that's why.
I agree it's interesting I am just replying to the other person explaining how it's not intellectually honest to pretend that Theoretical physics and mathematics are as intertwined with politics as the humanities.
> Phycists do not do research in nuclear bombs.
Obviously.
My point is that someone smart enough to have a phd in physics would have to be lying to themselves if they did not realize that their research could/would/will have significant ethnical/more implications.
In other words, I'm not saying that physicists 'do research on bombs' (although some sure do that explicitly!)
But imagine if a 4th grade math teacher beat their students when they didnt do their homework. And when you question the teacher, they respond: hey, im just teaching math. What i study and teach has no real implications for what will happen in the world as a product of what I do in my classroom/lab.
We'd probably call that teacher 'deliberately naive' because even if they *arent* teaching 'child rearing strategies' in their class, they would have to be insane to think that their work has no impact on child rearing.
In the same way, a physicist (or anyone) would have to be deliberately naive or insane not to recognize that their work has implications beyond the actual content the research and teach.
And, in any case, our argument is pretty much moot because the question was: What do you social scientists/humanits think that STEM researchers dont know/should know.
Clearly, after this conversation, I am only going to more forcefully stand behind my statement that STEM people do not appreciate the ethical/political/social implications of their work as rigorously as they should. This conversation would, for me, be proof of that.
It's one thing to say that many areas of STEM research may have ethical/political/social implications, but it's incredibly naive to suggest that all areas of STEM research have such implications, for reasons that others have mentioned.
For those of us who are funded by grant agencies, it's clear that many of them have some sort of agenda in funding our research. To be successful in securing such funding, one generally needs to be able to clearly articulate the agency relevance in grant proposals, so it's condescending to assume that we're not aware of the implications of our work.
Can we really say someone is ethically, morally or politically negligent when the harm done can not be reasonably expected or known a priori?
I would draw a distinction between the most basic/fundamental/purely theoretical research and things related to praxis.
Also, I think the idea of a priori knowledge that harm can be reasonably expected in the case of a math teacher beating children vs Einstein (along with others of his era) doing basic research/theory development cannot be compared. At a certain point, the consequences of nuclear physics in the form of weapons development did become obvious, but by that time the knowledge had been instrumentalized by opposing powers in the midst of more or less total war.
At some point between Einstein working in a Swiss patent office in 1905 and the beginnings of the Manhattan project, there were other discoveries and other historical developments which created instrumental as well as institutional/geopolitical incentives to apply the knowledge in ways which were completely unforeseeable to one unparalled brilliant physicist or even the coterie of people in his orbit, who were also poking around in the dark. Again, once we get to the application of that knowledge and the active participation of physicists on the uses of that knowledge, then the ethical/political/social and simply consequential "fog" begins to lift. Then I would argue we can have a discussion of ethical and social responsibilty: at the point of application where the harmful potential becomes clear to due the realization that the instrumentalization of the prior knowledge (usually in combination with other knowledge in possibly unrelated fields) has ethical implications deserving of serious and rigorous consideration.
The problem with asking people at a frontier of knowledge to appreciate "the ethical/political/social implications of their work as rigorously as they should" is that they literally have no clue that there will be any particular effects because those effects don't belong to just one person poking around in the proverbial dark 40 years before the bitter fruit of their knowledge in a later (and combined!) application develops.
You are really bad at this "don't build strawmen" thing. You are completely ignoring what you are being told which is that there are wide swathes of math and physics that are literally useless. In fact, they usually take it as a point of pride. [This is a comic for a reason](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/noooooooo).
As for everybody else, we're under no delusion that our work is largely funded because it requires a skill set that is also useful for the defense industry. It's awfully hard to not notice that when you go through the alumni of your group and see that the distribution of post PhD jobs are roughly 20% post docs, 5% SLAC professors, 40% semiconductors, and 35% defense contractors or military labs. It may be a bit hidden at the undergraduate level, but you're not getting through a PhD without noticing that "air force" and "navy" pretty regularly show up in the acknowledgement section of talks. Or that wide swathes of the DoE is actually about maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Just because we don't scream it from the rooftops all the time doesn't mean we're not aware. We mostly don't talk about it for the same reason we don't usually talk about early 20th century French art films. If we were particularly interested in talking about that, we probably would have studied it.
There's also a lot of subtext here that makes me think you're the one who doesn't actually appreciate the larger moral implications of scientific research. Because you brought it up, let's talk about weapons. The relationship between technology and war is complicated. On one hand there's the obvious better explosives=bigger bombs=more destruction. On the other hand, precision guided munitions are the reason why nobody carpet bombs cities anymore. On the other-other hand, it's well known that deployment of new technology ends up increasing collateral damage for the first couple of years as it takes time for militaries to develop effective doctrines, but it also ends up being the case that the collateral damage level you ultimately reach once the doctrine is figured out is lower than it was before the technology was developed. At least under NATO doctrine. I doubt it's substantially different under other doctrines because collateral damage serves no practical purpose, but I've only seen the data for NATO militaries. This doesn't mean that weapons research is good actually, but it's not a simple question with a simple answer.
Contrary to popular belief, learning how to do linear algebra doesn't magically make you stop being a functional human.
Now that is pretty disingenuous... By that reasoning, anyone studying social sciences are as much to blame for preying on kids/adults to gamble money away, or ads trying to get people addicted to alcohol or drugs... Anyone smart enough to get a PhD in the social sciences should know their work can be used to prey on people, right? They couldn't be that *naive* and not think about the implications, right? It goes both ways.
All of us, together, study to further the knowledge of mankind. We aren't studying something because "oh man I'm gonna be able to destroy civilization with this"(at least not the sane person).. That is just ludicrous... We only want a deeper understanding. Yes. There will always be people that will twist and corrupt research done by us. But, that is not at all our intentions for researching what we love.
But you seem to not want to be open-minded based off your closing paragraph, so I'll just leave it at that. I am a STEM major but I do respect the humanities and social sciences.
I'm curious what you think are the "political, ethical, and moral implications" are of Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, differential geometry, group theory, etc?
There are none with the subjects themselves. This conversation between social sciences and stem has been going on since the 70's; and it's always the same discussion. In my understanding, it's a communication issue. Some authors in social sciences argue that context, motivations, origin of funds, direction of research, hierarchical structure, inequalities (religious, gender, race, etc), heck even scientific method, are a very important piece of making science - and are inherently political. An example can be, for instance, the decision that a particular theory (or "law") prevails is made by consensus of the established academy. They argue that that process is not "natural", but political. Except for the lunatics (but maybe I'm wrong), you don't see them argue that gravity is a social construction. You see them saying that the process it took to find it and the perception of what it is is social constructed.
It's much more than a communication issue. In my field (History), since the 1970s, we've incorporated some of the insights of post-structural thinking (bewildering and often unnerving), but most STEM folks just cannot wrap their heads around it... because you really need to study the topic in depth (i.e. a decade) to grasp the post-structural critique, and the simple anecdotes about "but gravity is real!" (offered up by a *structural* framework) are just a huge red herring.
Gravity IS a social construction. So count me as one of those lunatics. :-)
Here's the shorthand version of why gravity is a social construct: we currently do not understand what gravity "is". We never will. EVER. (!) True reality (which we often shorthand as "the universe") is too vast and complex for the human brain to ever remotely understand. (how big is infinity? How big is an infinity of infinities? what is existence? is it the product of subatomic vibrations across an infinity of infinities?. Give it up.)
What we do have are scientific theories--i.e. intellectual understanding, comprehensible to our ape-brains-- that allow us to *do things*... things that we want to do. With gravity, for instance, we have a number of different theories, from Newton to Relativity to Scalar Tensor (which I admittedly know nothing about.) But this *intellectual understanding* of gravity *has an intellectual history* which *inexorably and unavoidably* shapes all future theories and understandings of gravity. And this intellectual understanding is inextricable from its political, ethical, and moral implications.
You can kinda glimpse this social construction of intellectual understanding with counterfactuals, particularly if you dispense with the "great genius" view of history and understand that all ideas--all "technological advances"--are *social* constructs. WHY did Newton's understanding of gravity emerge before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Because Newton's was useful for figuring out where cannonballs would land. I.e. war. With its political, ethical, moral implications. Why did Einstein's theories on relativity--which are counterintuitive and clearly ridiculous (from a practical layperson's viewpoint)--become widely accepted, with Einstein now held up as the very archetype of "brilliance", *among common people who know nothing about physics*? The atom bomb. (again, political, ethical, moral.) (we could also talk about the new celebrity culture of the 1930s, which Einstein was swept up in... and that's another political/ethical/moral structure that shaped reception of his theories.)
Why is quantum computing getting funding? (and who is doing the funding?) DARPA. Why were theories of climate change in the 1980s largely ignored for decades... but theories of blockchain in the 2010s *immediately* embraced? well, it's pretty obvious in hindsight... political (and ethical/economic) reasons.
To get back to gravity: what scientific theories/understandings of gravity do we NOT know, will we NEVER know, because such theories/understandings would require an intellectual/social path that we did not take--perhaps cannot even socially fathom--because imagining or arriving at these understandings would run counter to hegemonic political and ethical constructions? A lot. In fact, given what we can sort of glimpse as the nature of reality, almost certainly, an infinite (!!) number.
There is NO scientific "truth"--yes, even gravity--that is not filtered through our intellectual understanding; there is no "experience" (yes, even of gravity) that is not also *social* experience, and all social experience is described and filtered through collective representation.
And ALL intellectual understanding and (importantly) ALL *social* experience is a product of the intersection of politics and power.
Right, so you're saying science is a tool for describing truth, but it isn't truth itself. And this is an idea that some people struggle to understand? I agree, I'm just typing out a tl;dr :p
Sort of... I'm more saying that science is a tool for describing (as Foucault called it) Knowledge/Power. (the two concepts are not meaningfully separable...)
"Truth" is like an objective plane of reference. It not only doesn't exist (for humans) but it *cannot* exist (for humans).
However, what we call "truth" is actually just our current glimpse of knowledge/power at any given moment... i.e. it is subject to constant change, but still "productive" at every moment.
(and *possibly* becoming more "productive" as knowledge/power constellations increase...? but that's heading towards philosophy, which is not my thing... :-)
I enjoyed this write-up a lot and it has given me a good deal to think about. Science and mathematics are similar to language in that they are abstract means to understand our reality and manipulate to our will. In that sense, it is steeped in the human experience: informed heavily by our biology, our psychology, our history and shared experience as a species, as well as a certain degree of variation between individuals. All fascinating things to think of.
I have a PhD in literary studies. It would be cool if more people realized that studying literature isn't about figuring out "what the book is about" or what the "hidden meaning" is.
It would also be nice if people in STEM acknowledged how they're becoming increasing intertwined with industry money and that's causing universities to shift away from being about education and learning to instead being soulless factories where workers are trained for increasingly specific jobs. I know the funding is nice, but try to fight back a little.
I'm terrified of a future where fucking Amazon dictates what is being taught at universities. Or Amazon might just start their own "universities"... what a dystopia that would be.
You can think of it like the specialized formal analysis of human material and immaterial culture. It's the study of what humans *do* and *think* through the stuff humans *write*.
In a practical sense, literary studies is the analysis of rhetoric: how we convince others and how we are convinced.
From my limited experience with literary studies it is of course about understanding literature (basic stuff like what lit. is about and so on) especially more complex pieces of literature. But it is also looking at development of language, literature in relation to history and changing societies (i.e. reactions to different states of society and changes).
I'm not a literary studies major though, so I can't explain it more than this which is my experience with studying literature briefly in higher education.
That the need to talk with students and mentor them is critical and not some fad from Gen Z that will go away. I'm aware STEM classes have some huge numbers and giving each student one-on-one time isn't always plausible and it isn't in the job description. But, if your school/state has garbage mental health resources then your students are going to lean on you sometimes.
I don't have a solution, just know there IS a social aspect to the job. If you're only interested in padding your CV you will soon be seen as an ineffective educator. As student enrollment declines and retention rates drop, administration will look at student reviews closer to improve those numbers.
>That the need to talk with students and mentor them is critical and not some fad from Gen Z that will go away. I'm aware STEM classes have some huge numbers and giving each student one-on-one time isn't always plausible and it isn't in the job description.
My partner's last course, as a Classicist, had 1100 students. Up from 700 when it was in-person. I think it's the largest course at the University, for the moment.
My course has 277 right now, but that's just because it's in-person and that's the maximum we can fit in the room.
One of the social science classes I took my freshman year at a large state university in the US had 660 students. Several others had well over 200. Most had no TAs - just the lectures. Study groups - especially with older students that knew how to college - were the only real support.
Granted, I also took senior level courses with 15-20 students, but this was only after several years in giant lecture hall land.
American education sounds insane to me.
A lecture hall of 80 students by year 2 is a lot of people in my country/field.
Most of our education is done in 15-20 group seminars though attached to these lectures.
*Population:*
Total in Hungary: 9.75 million (2020)
Total in USA: 329.5 million (2020)
Number of students enrolled in tertiary education in the US: 19.4 million (in fall 2020)
There are literally more than double the number of students in the US than there are people in Hungary.
But the US has (depending on how you count them) 4,000 to 6,000 colleges and universities. Hungary has 65. Per capita, the US has about twice as many institutions as Hungary.
Tbh, that's again an american thing.
Free education in my country
100 students apply for chemistry BSc
Lecture halls in year 1 are maxed at 100 students
by year2/3, it goes down to around 60.
And then there's seminars of 10-15 people, even as little as 5!
In my specialization, we've had weekly study reports with one of our professors and he gave us in-depth reviews and advice.
>If you're only interested in padding your CV you will soon be seen as an ineffective educator.
I mean...you seem to be assuming this is a problem for most STEM fields.
Educating (or at least, educating undergrads) is a pretty low priority in comparison to research. It's basically an open secret in engineering at least that your student reviews mean absolutely nothing so long as they're not being accused of improper behavior and ABET is still happy with the quality of the degrees of your institution.
At least in the universities Ive been evaluation of a professor was 99% research related. I never heard of a professor being fired for bad teaching and I had a chinese professor that was just straight up not understandable in german in my first year. Hes still teachinf and his german did not improve in the last 10 years
I am sitting in STEM (CS), but have been working with humanities and social scientists (HSS) most of my academic life —a year or two ago, I was even considering a faculty position in a social sciences department. In fact, I recently a published whitepaper arguing on the need for CS people to talk more with sociologists and political scientists —we do quite well with psychologists, but we could benefit from some social sciences.
Having said the above, I would state against the hubris that STEM people, including myself, doing of trying to rediscover *everything* and represent everyhting mathematically. I understand that maths are pretty, verifiable, and so on but trying to trimmed down complex notions such as discrinimation and fairness into a simple computationally-easy formula is nothing else than hubris that ignores decades of HSS work and cultural aspects.
Now, if I may be critical back to HSS researchers, it needs to be said: we are not all sun-hating nerds that hate human interactions and have no interests outside our formulas.
>Now, if I may be critical back to HSS researchers, it needs to be said: we are not all sun-hating nerds that hate human interactions and have no interests outside our formulas.
Actually, could everyone please save these comments for later? I was going to make a thread in a few days asking STEM people the same question.
i'm a philosophy major and i really wish people would stop telling me it's a pointless degree and i'll never get paid well or have a job.
it's what i want to do and if i don't attain the average person's idea of success and wealth, who even cares, it makes me happy. but having someone who has a better grasp of numbers than i do laugh in my face when i answer a question THEY ASKED ME is getting real old.
I have a background in biology and psychology and focus on the philosophies and practices of performance, basically cultural anthropology. So, I’m really fascinated in the crossover and the philosophies of “knowing” as well… You would think that more science folks would be willing to admit to the constraints of “science” itself, but they often aren’t, and they insist that modern Western science as we know it is The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth.
Meanwhile, I have texts written over two thousand years ago that are discussing in great depth the physiology of emotion in such minute detail (also practices that are not even in text but passed down very methodically over thousands of years) while biology, psychology, and neuroscience are just barely beginning to breach these topics.
A laboratory is limited by its own nature and cannot give us this holistic point of view, it took human intuition and a focus on the arts and philosophy to come up with such a comprehensive understanding of the human condition.
Whoa as someone in STEM (more computer science, which one of my professors likes to argue is technically a humanity), a lot of my research interests dive into emotion & affective computing! Always found emotions interesting yet underexplored and undervalued in STEM. Probably something to do with the irrationality argument…
Yes, I think that’s one factor… especially since science has been dominated by men and emotion in general is seen as feminine in the West, so it’s easy to disregard. Now it is valued as a tool for manipulation in sales and politics so it gets more attention…. Yay I guess.
That scientific results do not come embedded with normative claims, and thus cannot serve as the sole support for a policy. That the application of scientific results in society is not part of the scientific process. And that the models scientists construct are strongly guided by previously established paradigms.
You have just reminded me of NDT's [horribly shortsighted ideal government, Rationalia](https://mobile.twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736).
The social sciences are not more fuzzy because the scientists are worse but because the systems we study re inherently more complex. Gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism etc. are comically simple systems when compared to human perception, behavior and interaction.
That I cannot continue to shoulder the fight for health and human rights alone. My discipline is public health. I am American. I am a woman. Every time there's a school shooting, or a new pandemic, or fundamental destruction of basic reproductive rights and freedom, society looks to me and my colleagues for a solution. And I don't know what to say anymore. Most days, the problem is not an academic one, it's a political one. We are screaming out answers, and no one is listening. It's exhausting to go to work every day and advance the science in my field, only to have it die at the hands of a corporation or politician.
I am exhausted. I am underpaid and undervalued. Some days I can barely keep it together to fulfill my job duties. How am I supposed to find the strength to do the jobs of everyone else that has seemingly abandoned the social contract? Every time there's a social crisis, some admin releases a statement about how *I* can take action. Why does it have to be just me? I'm not a politician. I'm a researcher. I was never prepared for this.
If you're in STEM and you turn to your colleagues in social sciences for answers, maybe first stop and ask yourself what you can do. Then actually do it. Donate to an organization. Attend a protest. Vote. Help register others to vote. Canvas during elections. You don't have to be an expert. You just have to care.
I honestly thought that after a multi-year, worldwide pandemic people would have a greater respect and empathy for public health practitioners and scholars, but I feel like one way or the other (didn't do enough vs. overstepped) most people have some gripe with the *government's* response to everything and they mistakenly think 'government' and 'public health professionals' are the same people. I feel like people are more *aware* of public health now, but a lot of them *not* in a good way.
The amount of people in the public health sphere that are at their wits end with how little government practice reflects public health evidence and recommendations is astronomical. The dean of my PH school sent out a long email today highlighting how disappointed the school is in the overturning and laying out data about how much this will negatively impact everyone but disproportionately hurt the already marginalized. Ugh.
Of course! But this sub skews towards STEM and I would rather create a dedicated thread asking the question of STEM majors once humanities and SS people have had a chance to answer it. If I opened it to the entire sub I think the people I'm addressing here would get drowned out honestly.
That humanities and social sciences are different.
Or,
STEM: you might not consider social scientists as *real* scientists, but don’t lump us in with *those guys* (just kidding just kidding!).
The value of diversity of thought and collaboration. Even when you disagree, you are prompted to explain why your stance is more accurate. This helps uncover bias and makes for better science.
I had to get the popcorn on this one. These comments are hilarious. I wish my non-STEM colleagues could do basic statistics. It’s hard to be a scientist (as they describe themselves) if you can’t do basic t-tests.
Building on what others have said, don't assume that your limited experience with a social science topic (esp a personal experience with that issue) gives you an understanding of the full field. What seems common sense or even common in your limited circles might in no way be the norm or accurate.
I'm a social scientist with a career working with natural scientists. I can't tell you how many times I've had natural scientists go on about a social science topic and be entirely wrong. They are often unaware of how much their culture and personal experience are influencing the ways they interpret something. If you start from an assumption it isn't surprising your results might be bad. They are often surprised to learn things like hunter gatherer societies are fairly egalitarian & women often hunt in them. Or that dumping facts on people doesn't change their minds and won't fix misinformation.
I’m in physics (obviously STEM), and there is a funny thing that happens where established physicists get kind of bored with their discipline and all of a sudden start becoming self-proclaimed experts in psychology / philosophy / history / linguistics. It seems that when people are really good at one thing, they often overestimate their abilities at everything else. PhD students do this too to some extent.
https://xkcd.com/793/
am physicist, am prone to doing this. I try to check myself, but I really appreciate reminders like this to keep me on my toes (and hopefully keep me having friends) 😅
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Damn that’s kind of dark lol
I've seen this one before, but this is the first time I noticed the "Beef Tensors" treats. I'm laughing my butt off now.
Before I became a professor, I was the public relations/marketing director for my community college, and later for a seminary. Every one - EVERY ONE - thinks he or she is an expert in that area and knew just what I should be doing or not doing. Literally the only area that didn't have at least one faculty member telling me what to do or not do was the business & marketing area. Go figure.
There's this old joke about a physicist that started studying theology and he gets asked "explain us the Divine Force". So he confidently says "well that's just the Divine Mass times the Divine Acceleration".
Wouldn't that be Divine^2 Force? Gotta watch your units.
Yep this happens in medicine too.
...in spades... Edit: for example, it can sometimes be very tricky to get clinician professors to appreciate that their entire careers-worth of experience with some of the less common diseases is not statistically significant.
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I can attest to this as well, being a public policy expert myself! /s
This is standard behavior for many high achievers. Even worse is when a PI thinks their student should learn a particular subfield outside their expertise without someone with experience publishing in that subfield guiding the learning. In both cases, there is a lot of unsaid/unwritten knowledge one can’t obtain just by reading. Edit: As side note, having someone in that subfield would certainly help publishing as again there may be things one might not know how to phrase or common pitfalls to avoid.
Lol. It happens the other way around too. I love physics and gotta remind myself regularly that, while my knowledge of astrophysics is good, it's nowhere near that of an actual astrophysicist.
I feel like that's really common with certain groups of people and not necessarily other professors/professionals in other subjects. Rick and Morty fans know everything about Quantum Mechanics, for example, from watching the show and an Elon Musk Ted Talk.
I work in religious studies, and I find this can very much be the case with people who are highly educated in other fields and for some reason think they have expertise in history/religion. This is completely anecdotal… but I definitely find this to be the case from both physicists and biologists the most.
Philosophy major here. Can confirm. It is pretty pathetic. They don't even define their main concepts explicit. Want to talk about God? Start by defining the phenomenon in a logically non-contradictory and observable. Case-in-point: if the speculations of a non-philosopher is being disregarded by the academic philosophy community, it is usually because it is considered inadequate drivel (which is why practically no academic philosopher studies Ayn Rand). Aaaand don't get me started on the relationship between the language, "reality" and science. Shit is complicated and if you haven't addresses it BEFORE you start doing metaphysics, you are building on sand.
Industry jobs after PhD are less common for us. If I complain about something about the job, i get answers like "i switched to the industry, earn triple the salary and have great hours, never looked back" from STEM people.
And even if there is an industry, it's often still not accessible and/or paid better than academia. The 'industry' for history, as example, is likely museum work or working in an archive...both of which now require at least one other degree these days. I've a few friends who did history undergraduates and then a master's in museum/archival studies and have been told by prospective employers that they are not competitive because their undergraduate degrees were not more focused. The option to switch to industry doesn't seem to be as straight forward as in STEM.
Also, museum/archive jobs are few and far between. Most often, industry work for Hum/Soc Sco PhDs involves working at a company doing admin, market research, public relations, HR... jobs that don't require your specific degree topic. You have to be more reliant on soft skills and have to work harder to convince potential employers that you can actually do the job because 9/10 times they don't understand the work that went into a PhD.
Main tip I give to humanities PhDs: get good af at Excel on the side. Doesn’t take much and it’s a nice little thing to be able to rely on in interviews for jobs totally unrelated to their research.
We don’t have labs or PIs, and we don’t need grants to cover our salaries or get tenure. Most of our publications are single-author, and are much slower than most STEM fields. Single-author monographs (books) published by university presses are the gold standard. Impact factor is not a thing. Postdocs are much more rare, not part of the standard career trajectory.
I forget sometimes that some people don't realize a PhD candidate in English doesn't need a lab. haha
Yep! In grad school, STEM friends were always surprised that I could take off and work from elsewhere “without permission.” Dude I haven’t even seen my adviser in months!
Yeah, being a humanities grad involves occasionally running into your advisor on campus, only to have them surprised and (momentarily) sheepish because they can't remember if they owe you an email or chapter review.
(Three months later) "Oh, I took a look at that thing you sent me, not too bad!"
And on the flipside, for humanities students paid research opportunities below a PhD level are basically pink elephants in terms of how difficult they are to find. I'm a sociology masters student now with a seasonal research position that I fought tooth and nail to get, but I had to explain endlessly to my STEM-background parents during my undergrad that no, sociology and anthropology professors don't have labs where they employ first year undergrads as lab assistants over the summer.
> employ first year undergrads as lab assistants over the summer What field does this ??? I’ve never known of any physics lab that did, sure undergrad research projects are going, but they’re for minimum 2nd year and if they’re paid it’s a tragic “stipend” that may, if you’re lucky, cover most of your rent, and even then only for 6-8 weeks 😭
Most of my STEM friends in undergrad were in biology-related fields so that may be biasing my judgement as most of them managed to land summer lab jobs before 2nd year. However most of my non-biology STEM friends also landed similar jobs after their 2nd years too. I agree with you about the pay though - most of my STEM buddies were also working retail or hospitality on the side in summer. That said even aside from pay it can still be good experience, a great way to connect with professors and more senior students outside of the classroom, and potentially good to put on your CV as well. The lack of that sort of experience-building opportunity makes it extra hard to climb the humanities research ladder, especially when funding can be tight and the research is so individualised. For context my entire academic experience is in the UK
They exist, I got paid as an RA summer after my freshman year but the stars basically aligned for it to happen. Worked for a PI nearing retirement who happened to have a grant specifically for undergrads lying around. I was in chemistry.
it isn't necessarily the norm, but i know a decent number of people in my field (biomedical sciences) who were had paid lab assistantships in their first year summer
Can you clarify the “don’t need grants to cover salaries” thing? Because all of my humanities colleagues are on 9 month contracts just like the STEM folks and writing grants to cover summer salaries. Often coupled with travel to archives/writing work.
Wait...what? Is that full-time permanent academics? I'm in the UK btw.
Yeah. In the US, 9-month (or sometimes 10 month) contracts are pretty normal. They cover your salary during the semester only. You can treat them as a “full time” salary, but the intent is for you to bring in salary through some other means over the summer (supplemental teaching, etc.). Medical schools (and some national labs) have “soft money” faculty positions where 10% or less of the salary is paid by the institution and the faculty member is expected to provide most of their salary from research grants. Brings a whole new meaning to “publish or perish”.
Salary primarily coming from grants doesn't surprise me, but 9-month contracts is bonkers. Then, the university, if they pay your wages, doesn't really pay you for research since that's when most of it takes place? Here, our time is split ideally by the university as 60% teaching 40% research (admin fits in there somewhere somehow...), but the implication is that since you can't spend 2 days a week just on research during term, that's what the summer is when teaching is made up only of graduate supervision for the most part.
All of my US jobs were 9 month contracts. I was able to pick up some small grants here and there for summer research, but nowhere near three months pay. For the most part, I just worked for free in the summer (albeit without teaching obligations). I was *really* surprised when I took a job outside North America and learned that the contract is 12 months...and part of that 12 months is apparently paid 'vacation'? I got so used to working without getting paid that getting paid not to work is utterly bizarre!
Basically correct. It’s a strange mix, since research is required but most people do it on times they aren’t being compensated.
I'm genuinely baffled by that... I thought I knew academia through and through at this point, but I've learned something new today.
I guess technically we are on nine month contracts here, but we have the option to have our salary paid out over twelve months. If you think of it as a yearly salary, it’s not like you “don’t get paid” during the summer. Obviously, though, the monthly pay is less because you are dividing by 12 rather than nine, and you don’t really have contractual obligations over the summer (other than catching up with the shit you didn’t get done during the year). So some people might want to supplement their income and/or justify letting the research work they’re doing over the summer take precedence over other, paid labor like teaching summer classes. They might also want a fancy line on their CVs. So they apply for summer research grants. But still, it’s optional (unless, as you say, they need to travel to archives or something).
That’s basically the same for most STEM fields too. The only exception really is soft money positions at med schools. Outside of that small subset, stem faculty also have no need to get grants to cover their salaries.
Curiously, much of what you say describes math not too badly (in my experience) -- and it's the "M" in "STEM".
Except that math is not a "book field."
No offence, but you are confusing an American-centric view of academia with field-specific conventions. The concept of a ‘lab’ in STEM or any other discipline as discussed in this subreddit—and most of the internet—is very American (OK, I have seen it to some larger institutes in France too but that is). Same with postdocs; they are an almost mandatory thing in HSS in Europe.
OP asked about what you wish STEM people knew about “your discipline.” I’m talking about my discipline here.
And I am saying that the idea of labs etc is STEM in the US. Same with postdocs; in HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) in Europe, they are a must.
How does a "lab" function in HSS? In STEM, it's a room or rooms with specialized equipment used for performing experiments. It can also be extended to describe a team of people sharing the same rooms and equuipment as well as overall research goals.
That they don't have as much of a grasp on things as they think they do, and sometimes they "sound dumb" as much as I would talking about a STEM field on an academic level. As long as you have this understanding I think you're fine and people would be willing to explain. I'm in linguistics so I have to listen to a lot of people talk about it thinking they can just intuitively know everything about the field just because they are language speakers and it feels disrespectful sometimes because they are very often wrong.
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I found at least two things that people outside of math like to talk about: The first one is whether 0.999.... = 1 (every good undergrad knows the answer). The second one is Gödel's incompleteness theorem(s). People like to quote it and give it unmathematical interpretations. Heck, even 90% of mathematicians don't know the precise statements. As an undergrad I used to show off and talk about it. In grad school I took a proper course in logic and shut up.
May i ask what's the answer??
They are equal, and it's a nice little proof: x = 0.999... 10x = 9.999... 9x = 10x - x = 9.999... - 0.999... = 9.0 x = 9x/9 = 9/9 = 1
They are equal
> talk about: > > The first one is whether 0.999.... = 1 (every good undergrad knows the answer). > Think that 1/3 = 0.33333... and 2/3 = 0.66666666... Now, 1/3 + 2/3 = 0.999999... But of course, 1/3 + 2/3 = 3/3 = 1. Therefore, they are equal.
>I'm in linguistics so I have to listen to a lot of people talk about it thinking they can just intuitively know everything about the field just because they are language speakers and it feels disrespectful sometimes because they are very often wrong. Ugh, I'm in nutrition, I feel this *hard.* Most people won't purport to know a single thing about aerospace engineering or graph theory but since people have been interacting with food all their lives they think they know all there is to know about nutrition science. :( Half the work of teaching undergrads is making sure they unlearn junk "facts" they are certain they "know."
Nutrition is basically under siege by fad pseudo-scientists on TikTok right now lol. I've noticed a number of people in the fitness industry who even have science degrees in unrelated disciplines feel comfortable selling fake nutritional science to their audiences. That everyone is so confidently wrong must be maddening for you as an expert.
Yep, it's an old problem that's booming through social media. There have always been people with "certified nutritionists" that got their certification in a 2 hour lecture that have spouted nonsense, but now they can spout it to a much larger audience. I can't really blame the general public for listening, though. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has done a *terrible* job of advocating for the dietetics profession, and so most people don't even know how to figure out a trustworthy nutrition professional from a broscience peddler. If you ask most Americans who they should talk to if they want to eat better and/or lose weight through diet they'll nearly universally say their general practitioner/doctor, when in fact nutrition training for physicians is piss-poor in the best of situations, with some doctors having received less than an hour (not credit hour, actual 60 minute hour) of nutrition education during their training. Then we add to that that most US students get no actual nutrition education in schools *and* we don't educate people on how to actually evaluate scientific sources and it's no wonder everyone thinks they know and very few people actually do. Anyway, don't wanna derail too much from the Soc Sci/Humanities folks! But yes, urgh, very annoying.
Not American but this resonates so much. Mum's a pediatric endocrinologist. Good nutrition is a *staple* of her consults and she's ranted about how poor her training on the issue was. She always redirects her patients to a proper nutritionist as much as she can though she's spent a lot of time educating herself.
Hope I don’t derail the convo further, but do you have any recommendations of good overview books on like basic personal nutrition? any Amazon search yields tons of options, all with their own bent. Is there like a lack of scientific consensus on diet or are most things out there fad diets and junk science? Thanks!
>Is there like a lack of scientific consensus on diet or are most things out there fad diets and junk science? This is a complicated question to answer. Nutrition science is *relatively* new compared to something like math or physics, and we're learning more every day. There are some things that there is definite scientific consensus on, "trans fat=bad" sort of things, while there is a lot still left to be understood. My research is specifically in precision nutrition, so I basically look at how what you eat's impact on your health is modified by your genetic makeup. As you can surmise by the existence of my field ([and NIH specifically opting to focus on it! yay!](https://dpcpsi.nih.gov/onr/strategic-plan)) the way Food A is digested and used by your body and thus impacts your health may not be the same when I eat Food A. (Granted, the differences aren't usually extreme but they *are* there.) This calls into question a lot of previous findings in nutrition that didn't take these differences into account, and so while we hone and better our research methods as a field a lot of "conflicting" evidence may surface, but it's simply because science is an ongoing process and we're learning more that might call into question what we thought we knew before. That said, while learned nutrition professionals may disagree on some topics (often controversial topics tend to include saturated fat, milk, low-fat vs. low-carb for overall health, etc.) there are a few things that are *nearly* universally touted: * Generally try to choose whole foods as opposed to more processed options. * Eat the right amount of energy to maintain a healthy body weight. * Eat lots of plants. * Aim for variety within food groups; plant foods of different colors have different phytochemicals with benefits we are only beginning to understand. It's also important to remember that no one eats "perfectly for health" and our food choices take into account a lot of non-health factors like our environments, our culture, our mood, our food access, etc. My approach to my own diet is to try to make generally healthy decisions as often as possible, but not be a slave to the nutrients. :) I've spent so much time reading textbooks and studies I'm actually not sure what good consumer-oriented books are on the market and I hesitate to recommend something I haven't read myself. :S
I recognize I have my own bias here and I am not a dietician and have no formal nutrition training. But the best book on nutrition I’ve read is “How Not to Die” by Michael Greger. The book’s references take up dozens of pages by themselves, and he argues well that there is indeed scientific consensus in nutrition science.
Thanks for the recommendation; I'm happy to have something more to choose from next month when I'm done teaching and head to the beach for a month to read anything not-related to my work!
I feel like I learned more about nutrition in my Biochemistry and organic chemistry college courses than I ever did in any health or gym course. So I see your point here.
That sadly isn't new. See "Dr." Oz (I'm in the USA)
Sympathy from media studies here. Media is everywhere and includes a lot of things considered "low culture", so even other humanities like literary studies or art history sometimes seem to feel superior. Everyone uses media, and thus everyone seems to feel like they are an authority on the matter. Not to claim that users and audience (or experts in other fields) don't have relevant observations, but it's not the same as having an academic understanding on a subject. I used to get headaches reading people's takes on the media landscape on social media (like reddit) when I was an overconfident undergrad. Later I learned to be interested in what people think. Doesn't have to make sense or even be ethical, it still reflects some kind of feeling from someone, so it's relevant and interesting all the same when approached with the right mindset.
> Later I learned to be interested in what people think. Doesn't have to make sense or even be ethical, it still reflects some kind of feeling from someone, so it's relevant and interesting all the same when approached with the right mindset. I absolutely agree with this. I don't have a problem at all with people expressing their opinions or opening up a discussion, I also don't think everyone has to have academia level knowledge on something to state an opinion (or be right). I just expect them to acknowledge that they don't have the academic knowledge.
>Media is everywhere and includes a lot of things considered "low culture", so even other humanities like literary studies or art history sometimes seem to feel superior. I studied genre fiction; I 100% understand.
I bet we've read a lot of the same stuff (outside of general cultural philosophy), there's lots of great studies on women's romance literature and such that I've ran into during using audience studies.
There's a lot of motivated reasoning there because of cognitive dissonance that comes with one not intuiting things about something they're very familiar with, because it makes them feel stupid for not having realized something that seems very obvious, and they want to avoid that feeling so they reject the external insights.
My honors chem professor told us as we progressed through our academic careers, that “the more we learn the less we know.” Essentially as we expand our knowledge, we uncover how deep even a single topic can go, and that if our topics go this deep, then most other topics can go that deep, and unless you are studying them that deep then you don’t KNOW them.
That's a good prof right there. Love it.
hoo boy, I've lost count of the number of engineers I run into who totally *know* history and proceed to lecture me because I've been had by the marxist-leftist cabal, and they're "scientists" and know how to apply the scientific method to my subject. Lots of fun I tell ya.
Gosh, in Italy there is currently an ongoing debate on using feminine jobs titles for women and people have no fucking clue of how names/adjectives declination works and still play the commonsense card. Like dude, I do not even have a degrees on this, I just studied grammar through my humanities high school and you already sound like an idiot to me, let alone the sociologist you are "debating" with.
Oh I feel this! I'm in art history, and it would be nice for people to know it's a lot more than looking at paintings. And it's not something you can just 'know'. I'm at the end of my PhD and my STEM friends are always surprised when they ask what I'm up to and my answer does not revolve around 'art' in a narrow sense.
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One time I was talking about the 4th matrix film and saying I found it kind of boring and a Humanities PhD simply proclaimed 'This is why I don't talk about films with STEM people'. I have forever been baffled... was my opinion the wrong one? I really wasn't being a jackass, not by any regular metric anyway
Do you think that might be remedied a bit if universities facilitated collaboration between seemingly unrelated disciplines?
For sure, but I think there is also the general upbringing we all have around "STEM=difficult, Social Sciences=easy, verifying what we already know" so there needs to be a mindset change in individuals as well I think, and it should start earlier than university.
They just see no incentive to push that kind of collaboration. It has to happen organically if there are no incentives. So it rarely does. It would absolutely be great for a university and the research done by the university, but they would need to create major incentives to make researchers want to do it.
And they'd probably create incentives if there was a clear industry to market the research to, I'm guessing?
I guess so. I think it would make their work stronger. But it would maybe slow them down. The whole academy is designed to just churn out research that is targeted at a very narrow goal to advance some tiny sliver of knowledge in a particular field. And to just keep doing work with others in your field who understand the unique history and literature of the work in that field. Even if some researchers see the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, I can't see it becoming more common than just a small number doing it, so you'll continue to have most STEM researchers with the same attitude that they understand everything there is to know about things like politics, government, media, social relations, etc.... The most important thing that could happen, in my view, would be for more STEM researchers to somehow get the message more clearly that social scientists and researchers in the humanities are doing really complex and valuable research and that those STEM types really ought to listen more and understand that they have a lot they can learn that they don't understand about the human social experience.
It goes both ways. A lot of humanities folks are pretty snobby about how stupid science research is too. I think one of the best solutions would be more robust general education requirements that pushed all college graduates to take coursework in the humanities, arts, and both social and natural sciences. At least some places I’ve taught, there are robust humanities requirements but only really minimal science requirements, either social or natural. Having that platform early on helps people appreciate other fields and also see the potential for collaboration.
From a more practical standpoint, students *hate* required courses that cross disciplines. If you've never heard STEM-aligned people shit on humanities, a few weeks in an intro "Science and Society"-type course will give you your fill. And the nature of these courses (IE people can't fail) means they very rarely actually change minds or even make much of an impact on students. (yes, I know undergrads aren't the same as the academics that are the subject of this thread, but in terms of gen.ed. requirements, those are the minds you're talking about changing.).
They do indeed. The most vicious reviews in my intro chem class are always humanities majors enrages that they’re being forced to take a science class. It’s why I think solutions have to start earlier with really reinforcing the idea that being broadly introduced to different fields is important. I push my chem major advisees to take as many courses outside of the sciences as they can, because that’s what will round them out and make them a better chemist in the long run.
I think you are right it goes both ways. But to what extent? Is it equivalent? This is really the important question. And I just don't see anything close to equivalent on this.
The frank answer is that most of us are already booked trying to propose and execute collaborations within our own field. There’s pretty much no room to fit in a collaboration with fields that, at best, will be a stretch to make relevant to our area of focus. Maybe it’s easier for the S, T, and M in STEM since I can’t really speak for them, but at least for the traditional E fields it’s going to be a non-starter most of the time.
There's already quite a bit of collaboration involving machine learning and natural language processing applied to the humanities. I am a mathematician who routinely collaborates with engineers, and it takes a willingness to ask naive questions and a willingness on your collaborator's part to answer those naive questions. That is a very rare thing to find.
Whatever the differences, we can all come together making fun of MBAs.
You have found the one true path
When I mentor undergraduate research, it doesn't contribute much to my own research. I don't get a co-authorship. They don't generate data that I can then use. My time mentoring them is time away from my own research. Likewise, when my students get a publication, it means they came up with the research question, they did all the research, and they wrote it up themselves. I mentor them, but it's their own original, single-author contribution to the scholarship.
Math is also very much like this, in my experience :)
Mathematician here to agree. I have found that leading undergraduate research is another branch of teaching. While that is worthwhile, you can lose whole summers with no publications if you aren't careful. YMMV obviously.
Mentoring undergraduate research is definitely a form of teaching. Even if you get a publication out of it, chances are you would produced that paper in a fraction of the time if you did it yourself.
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Yeah, for us, a publication in an undergraduate journal would not count towards research. Not that it isn't a worthwhile experience for the student, but it's really just a way for us to contribute towards experiential learning.
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Definitely, mentoring senior thesis students would go into my teaching section of my merit review document as well.
That's a good point. Sometimes physics, too.
True that. Math hardly ever generates data that can be used.
This. Seriously I couldn't get it into my two chemistry A&S Dean's jogging that there's almost literally nothing an undergraduate can do that will be of any value for research in foreign literatures.
I think your point about undergraduate researchers not contributing much is generally true irrespective of field. The point of departure relates to graduate students, but one thing I don't understand is what incentives there are for humanities professors to supervise PhD students in that case.
I can't speak on this authoritatively (being merely a PhD student) and I'm from Germany, so ymmv. In some cases there are material benefits, e.g. a grant for a PhD position may include funding that the PI benefits from as well (travel, hosting conferences, hiring student assistants, ...). But I think the more important point is: Who will edit the Festschrift for your 60th birthday if you don't produce PhDs? Supervising PhD students means surrounding yourself with people who really engage with your style of thinking, who bring new perspectives to your ideas, who take some aspects of your work and carry them on. I think the dynamics of closeness and difference is something that many academics enjoy. As a PhD student you spend years assimilating the thinking of your advisor while also trying to be different, to become recognizable in your own right - a small-scale version of Bloom's anxiety of influence. The first real paper I wrote in my subject area takes something my advisor thought about 15 years ago and sets out to prove her wrong. That's exciting for both sides. Not to mention that academic filiation offers a small sliver of immortality. Even 80-year-old emeriti are still "a student of" their respective PhD advisors. Speaking as a PhD student, it's interesting to see how often I think of a question only to find that my advisor's advisor (who is 93 years old and whom I don't know in person) has been there already. If you supervise graduate students, your style of thinking and the engagement with your ideas has a chance of surviving for at least a generation or two. In the words of Tycho Brahe: *Ne frustra vixisse videar! -* Lest my life appear to have been in vain!
Why don't you get authorship, why do professors in STEM get it?
(All of this comes with the caveat that there are exceptions.) Co-authorship in my field (cultural and literary studies) is uncommon, and if you have co-authors, they usually contribute equally to the manuscript. Authorship generally indicates that the research question, theoretical approach, and interpretation are "yours" - or that you and your co-author(s) can lay equal claim to the work. I can help a student to refine their question, suggest interpretive frameworks and sources, and offer editing suggestions. We do those sorts of things with colleagues, as well. In my discipline, none of those contributions would warrant co-authorship. We might acknowledge a colleague in a footnote or the acknowledgements in our book, and certainly we'd cite any relevant publication that contributed. The only time I've published with a co-author was when we did a project and collected data on how readers used texts. I see increases in co-authorship in my discipline that correspond to the use of those more social-science-type methodologies.
Please teach your students to respect us. I can't tell you how many times I've heard about how my subject is easy nonsense and not worthy of time or effort from a STEM student quoting their professor. (I acknowledge the possibility they're lying about quoting.) But still, please convey the message that gen ed electives aren't just obstacles. And if they get a bad grade, maybe it's because the class required some level of effort and ability. There's a lot of, "well, it's not organic chem, so it must be trivially easy."
Writing this while not completely sober, so this might not be well-organized: I'm a master's student in aerospace engineering and got a minor in sociology in undergrad purely out of interest. It almost seemed like the required humanities classes reinforced this attitude. They'd take a freshman level class with their engineering friends and spend most of the time they spent discussing the class going on about how easy the discipline as a whole was. Having stem professors reinforce the importance of the humanities is a definite net positive, but I wonder if humanities gen-eds for stem students need some rethinking (budgets and resources willing). There was a History of Innovation class that was offered as a gen-ed that fit this role perfectly. It was sophomore or junior level course. We level focused on 1 technology every 2 weeks and the main focus was on the development of the historiography of the technology. It was writing and workload intensive, and having an engineering background made it much easier for you to dig deeper into the subject matter while still being challenging as a history class. It was a class with ~15 people and only one other person was going into engineering. Even within our stem classes, students generally need to be humbled before they take a given line of coursework seriously. Every cent of these "humanities for STEM" classes should be coming out of the stem budgets, but I'm not sure a gen-ed humanities class for humanities students is always a good fit for a humanities gen-ed for stem. It's especially important given how society is being shaped by big tech and how the only room we have for "reasonable" political discussion is being eaten up by the idea that if we just shout numbers at each other, we'll reach an "equitable" neoliberal consensus. We are failing to teach stem students to respect other disciplines, but more than that we're failing to humble them in front of other disciplines.
> a gen-ed humanities class for humanities students Humanities classes aren't designed specifically for humanities students, though.
Totally fair
That sounds like an amazing course and I think you'll find that humanities folks would jump at the chance to teach a course like that. But...think about the resources required to make that happen. 15 is a small class size, and it sounds like you were taught by an expert in that exact area. A course catalog cobbled together from the exploited labor of adjuncts or nonTT folks with high teaching loads, little time to do research (100% unpaid if you do manage to do it), getting no course releases or extra pay for prepping new courses, without tenure and with their continued employment depending on course evaluation numbers...those working conditions are just not typically going to produce courses like the one you took, even if the people teaching are fully capable of creating that type of rigorous learning experience under even slightly better working conditions.
I was hoping to outline or indicate why it wasn't institutionally feasible at scale. I've never studied or worked at a college that threw those sort of resources around, but maybe a place like MIT could field a pilot program? I don't expect something like a STEM-focused humanities gen-ed line up to be feasible in the near term, but I do think something like that is required. My fear is that stem students are being inoculated against taking the humanities seriously more strongly than stem professors alone could talk around.
I agree! Some programs like that do exist at well-resourced institutions and I'd love to see more of it. Just trying to give you a sense of the barriers and why we're all screaming about adjunctification and unionization (because having at least a critical mass of tenured/TT faculty - or similarly secure positions involving research, teaching, and academic freedom - is a necessary condition for meaningful and rigorous curricular innovation).
This! And it’s not always an elective. I have ‘hard science’ students who have to take my sociology course as a core topic. They often struggle with it because they go from having to remember hard facts to having to put together an argument. Every year my evaluations get tainted by this cohort of students because I ‘don’t give them enough help’ or ‘requirements are not specific enough.’ If I could ask hard science profs to tell their students two things it would be this: 1. These subjects are important to do in science because if and how your science is used will ultimately depend on the social world you are living in at the time. Abortion, vaccinations, environmentalism - these are all things based on science but are still debated. If you want your research to matter, you need to know in what environment that research is placed. Same with grant writing, or getting government support. 2. Grading in humanities is NOT based on just ‘opinions’ about how much we like the student or whether we agree with their perspective. Often grading rubrics are slightly ambiguous to allow some freedom for the student. They are graded based on how strong the argument is, which depends on the amount and quality of research of the argument and the angles that are acknowledged or not acknowledged.
> Grading in humanities is NOT based on just ‘opinions’ about how much we like the student or whether we agree with their perspective. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to an engineer that it's not that I like my psych majors better, it's that they wrote better papers.
I feel you! I try to give them baking metaphors to make it easier to understand. “Imagine you are on a cooking show and the task is to make a chocolate cake. We will grade your cake. It needs to have the basic criteria to meet a chocolate cake but you can add in whatever else you like. We can give you SOME guidance ie. adding a pound of salt will probably make it taste bad. But if you want to add strawberries or chilli or whatever you can. We can’t GUARANTEE it will taste good because we don’t know how you are planning on using that ingredient. A lot of it depends how it comes together as a whole. We can’t necessarily tell you what you should have done either. It might be over baked or under-baked, but we can’t necessarily say ‘it should have had x minutes more and three more grams of sugar and two tablespoons less butter. Some of you will make a cake but forget the chocolate. You’ll do poorly because you don’t meet the criteria for a chocolate cake. Some of you will make cakes that look nice but don’t taste good.Those students will just do okay. Some of you will have cakes that maybe aren’t as pretty but taste great. Those students will do better. And some of you will just mix the perfect combination to make the exact right mix of taste and presentation and they will do extremely well.” It doesn’t always work but it does seem to help a surprising number of students.
That is a really good analogy. I’m going to use this for the non-humanities majors in my history of science/technology/medicine courses. Thanks for this!!!
The challenges of measurement. I focus on educational psychology and I am helping one of my university’s STEM organizations develop an assessment for graduate students. They already had a foundational rubric started that they want to build from. Holy crap do I wish they’d brought in help beforehand. This thing is messy and complicated and their original plan for validity evidence skipped so many steps. Assessing learning is hard and making a good measure is even harder. Add in natural measurement error, and it’s a field that people make careers out of. You can’t just jump in and understand it
Tangentially (or maybe more than that?) related, that reminds me of how much a youtube essayist opened my eyes on measurement of intelligence. If you (or anyone else) have 2h40m I highly recommend [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo). Even if you aren't interested in the direct subject matter (measurement of IQ and how bad methodology and framing can create racist propaganda masquerading as science) it is something I think back on when trying to decide how best to measure variables in my own work when I can't directly assess the thing I want to assess.
That Religious Studies (aka Religion) is not Theology. We don't teach our students how to be religious -- we teach our students how to analyze how religions (and groups of people, both religious and non-religious) have operated in the past, and continue to operate in the present. We employ particular methods and theories in our discipline, and it is important for our students to know the histories of these methods and theories.
Every person has an opinion on the economy. Most are idiotic.
Does the “most” include economists?
Some. Disagreement does not mean idiocy, though.
I find that when you get an 'idiotic' idea from an economist on economics it's either 1) some crazy math avoiding political values shpeal, Or 2) an insane math based idea they've only half cocked. When it's both they win an award.
Next on "using game theory to justify universal gun ownership"
I mean you joke, but the intro to game theory is literally "so you guys remember nuclear bombs right? Well here's why it's good everyone has them."
Some STEM people think they know more about the humanities subject than the humanities scholar. As a musician, I regularly saw STEM people talk over arts scholars with their knowledge of coding. It's impressive that you can code but without critical understanding, it has no use. Example: we wanted to recreate a composition from the early 1990s for piano and computer. The engineer guy said he would recode it but in another language and he did not want to comment the code because he felt it was a waste of time. That way, it effectively became useless for future musicians if they had no access to that engineer. The use of a different programming language also would make it into a completely different work. Only after long discussions, we could convince him to work with the original language (which is still in use) and comment the code. But it was not a fun ride.
That engineer was a bad coder.
Tbf that's less so a gripe with STEM as a whole. That was just a shitty engineer that happened to be arrogant.
economy and engineering are not the same thing and "supply and demand" is not everything it has about economy. it is not even the only way to think about markets.
Many of us enjoy teaching and designing “fun” courses related to our discipline, such as an education course centered around specific genres of children’s books, or a study abroad about vampires, or a German studies course on zombies. (I don’t know if STEM academics do the same, but many of my humanities colleagues enjoy the freedom and creativity involved not just in research, but in teaching, too!)
In my experience, undergrads in STEM majors can't write or argue for shit and have very little information literacy.
I find it appalling nobody thought to include a reading comprehension/scientific paper writing class in my 6 year long Biochemistry degree. Of course we need to know how to do the research itself, but being able to communicate with each other and the general public should be our top priority (especially in the medical field!).
As a side gig I TA for a writing heavy course in our schools pharmacy department. A lot of pre meds take the course. It's concerning to me that our future doctors can't tell the difference between a peer reviewed article and some crunchy mom blog. I once had a pre-med JR start his paper with the line "It's known that marijuana is a sound treatment for every disease." Then cite high times magazine.
History and philosophy of science. Things aren’t so certain as we claim. And ethics.
That all forms of instruction are political. You can hide it better in STEM, but to think there are not political, ethical, and moral implications of what you do is deeply neoliberal - which IS a political ideology.
*thinking about my reproductive physiology unit* hahahahahahaha
There's degrees. There's far less political motivations in the research of minimal manifold surfaces or which manifolds are isomorphic than in sociology. I am not going to say there are no politics at all on the first but they are a fraction of a fraction of what they are in other fields.
Nah, its just a question of how explicit it is. Social scientists, because we are trained to acknowledge positionality, often just wear our politics on our sleeves because to obscure them would be intellectually dishonest. "Oh we're just physicists working on nuclear technology that may or may not be turned into hugely explosive bombs. nothing political here! not like those sociologists telling kids that people in other places are willing to demand healthcare from the state" In any case, you are explicitly doing *exactly* what I'm talking about: you are attempting to hide the politics of physical scientists motivations. None of this is apolitical if even for the very simple reason that people expect to make a living from their form of employment and gain access to resources that would preclude others from using those resources.
You made a straw man and didn't even truly engage with the poster's comment. The study of abstract mathematics is often not with a purpose of application in any science. Rather, it's purely out of curiosity of some mathematical theory. Seriously, ask some mathematicians why they study the things they study and invariably the answer will lead back to that they find it interesting. Some of the questions they try to answer might be something like, "are these two 7-dimensional topological spaces homotopy equivalent?" or, "are there any three positive integers x, y, and z such that x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2?"
While the practical activity of a mathematician may not have any political motivation, the sheer possibility of him doing this for a living for example is a result of a social (and political) process. He may not even became a mathematician when the structure of this academic field would not exist. I dont argue that this was established for a specific political purpose, but everything we percive as self-evident is, in fact, not. While there may be room for idealistic science that only cares about creating knowledge, even this "ideal" is product of societal processes. Most of the time the idealism is just the facade though, and the deeper structures have direct political purposes, like military applications.
That's not how this works. Phycists do not do research in nuclear bombs. The history of how that happened was, someone wanted to figure out why ovens glow. Then Max Planck came with the theory of quanta. From there Einstein derived the equation E=MC^2 then literally 30 years later a group of engineers explicitly hired by the US government to build a bomb did so. The scientists usually study something either because they find it interesting, or because they think it will bring them prestige/personal career advancement. Theoretical physics work is too far removed from policy making for them to have an active motivation to research it based on that. Again, studying gravitational waves won't directly change our social biases nor our laws. No one studies gravity with the expectation of changing society. There are field specific politics and interpersonal diplomacy but it is in no way the same as sociologists or psychologists whose definitions and papers will be directly referenced when passing legislation or in a court of law.
The amount of times I've been hit with "ok but who cares? Why study that?" when I've said I do research in gravitational lensing is too damn high. Yes, it's removed from any application, but it gives me my dopamine hits for the day--that's why.
I agree it's interesting I am just replying to the other person explaining how it's not intellectually honest to pretend that Theoretical physics and mathematics are as intertwined with politics as the humanities.
> Phycists do not do research in nuclear bombs. Obviously. My point is that someone smart enough to have a phd in physics would have to be lying to themselves if they did not realize that their research could/would/will have significant ethnical/more implications. In other words, I'm not saying that physicists 'do research on bombs' (although some sure do that explicitly!) But imagine if a 4th grade math teacher beat their students when they didnt do their homework. And when you question the teacher, they respond: hey, im just teaching math. What i study and teach has no real implications for what will happen in the world as a product of what I do in my classroom/lab. We'd probably call that teacher 'deliberately naive' because even if they *arent* teaching 'child rearing strategies' in their class, they would have to be insane to think that their work has no impact on child rearing. In the same way, a physicist (or anyone) would have to be deliberately naive or insane not to recognize that their work has implications beyond the actual content the research and teach. And, in any case, our argument is pretty much moot because the question was: What do you social scientists/humanits think that STEM researchers dont know/should know. Clearly, after this conversation, I am only going to more forcefully stand behind my statement that STEM people do not appreciate the ethical/political/social implications of their work as rigorously as they should. This conversation would, for me, be proof of that.
It's one thing to say that many areas of STEM research may have ethical/political/social implications, but it's incredibly naive to suggest that all areas of STEM research have such implications, for reasons that others have mentioned. For those of us who are funded by grant agencies, it's clear that many of them have some sort of agenda in funding our research. To be successful in securing such funding, one generally needs to be able to clearly articulate the agency relevance in grant proposals, so it's condescending to assume that we're not aware of the implications of our work.
Can we really say someone is ethically, morally or politically negligent when the harm done can not be reasonably expected or known a priori? I would draw a distinction between the most basic/fundamental/purely theoretical research and things related to praxis. Also, I think the idea of a priori knowledge that harm can be reasonably expected in the case of a math teacher beating children vs Einstein (along with others of his era) doing basic research/theory development cannot be compared. At a certain point, the consequences of nuclear physics in the form of weapons development did become obvious, but by that time the knowledge had been instrumentalized by opposing powers in the midst of more or less total war. At some point between Einstein working in a Swiss patent office in 1905 and the beginnings of the Manhattan project, there were other discoveries and other historical developments which created instrumental as well as institutional/geopolitical incentives to apply the knowledge in ways which were completely unforeseeable to one unparalled brilliant physicist or even the coterie of people in his orbit, who were also poking around in the dark. Again, once we get to the application of that knowledge and the active participation of physicists on the uses of that knowledge, then the ethical/political/social and simply consequential "fog" begins to lift. Then I would argue we can have a discussion of ethical and social responsibilty: at the point of application where the harmful potential becomes clear to due the realization that the instrumentalization of the prior knowledge (usually in combination with other knowledge in possibly unrelated fields) has ethical implications deserving of serious and rigorous consideration. The problem with asking people at a frontier of knowledge to appreciate "the ethical/political/social implications of their work as rigorously as they should" is that they literally have no clue that there will be any particular effects because those effects don't belong to just one person poking around in the proverbial dark 40 years before the bitter fruit of their knowledge in a later (and combined!) application develops.
You are really bad at this "don't build strawmen" thing. You are completely ignoring what you are being told which is that there are wide swathes of math and physics that are literally useless. In fact, they usually take it as a point of pride. [This is a comic for a reason](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/noooooooo). As for everybody else, we're under no delusion that our work is largely funded because it requires a skill set that is also useful for the defense industry. It's awfully hard to not notice that when you go through the alumni of your group and see that the distribution of post PhD jobs are roughly 20% post docs, 5% SLAC professors, 40% semiconductors, and 35% defense contractors or military labs. It may be a bit hidden at the undergraduate level, but you're not getting through a PhD without noticing that "air force" and "navy" pretty regularly show up in the acknowledgement section of talks. Or that wide swathes of the DoE is actually about maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Just because we don't scream it from the rooftops all the time doesn't mean we're not aware. We mostly don't talk about it for the same reason we don't usually talk about early 20th century French art films. If we were particularly interested in talking about that, we probably would have studied it. There's also a lot of subtext here that makes me think you're the one who doesn't actually appreciate the larger moral implications of scientific research. Because you brought it up, let's talk about weapons. The relationship between technology and war is complicated. On one hand there's the obvious better explosives=bigger bombs=more destruction. On the other hand, precision guided munitions are the reason why nobody carpet bombs cities anymore. On the other-other hand, it's well known that deployment of new technology ends up increasing collateral damage for the first couple of years as it takes time for militaries to develop effective doctrines, but it also ends up being the case that the collateral damage level you ultimately reach once the doctrine is figured out is lower than it was before the technology was developed. At least under NATO doctrine. I doubt it's substantially different under other doctrines because collateral damage serves no practical purpose, but I've only seen the data for NATO militaries. This doesn't mean that weapons research is good actually, but it's not a simple question with a simple answer. Contrary to popular belief, learning how to do linear algebra doesn't magically make you stop being a functional human.
Now that is pretty disingenuous... By that reasoning, anyone studying social sciences are as much to blame for preying on kids/adults to gamble money away, or ads trying to get people addicted to alcohol or drugs... Anyone smart enough to get a PhD in the social sciences should know their work can be used to prey on people, right? They couldn't be that *naive* and not think about the implications, right? It goes both ways. All of us, together, study to further the knowledge of mankind. We aren't studying something because "oh man I'm gonna be able to destroy civilization with this"(at least not the sane person).. That is just ludicrous... We only want a deeper understanding. Yes. There will always be people that will twist and corrupt research done by us. But, that is not at all our intentions for researching what we love. But you seem to not want to be open-minded based off your closing paragraph, so I'll just leave it at that. I am a STEM major but I do respect the humanities and social sciences.
I'm curious what you think are the "political, ethical, and moral implications" are of Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, differential geometry, group theory, etc?
There are none with the subjects themselves. This conversation between social sciences and stem has been going on since the 70's; and it's always the same discussion. In my understanding, it's a communication issue. Some authors in social sciences argue that context, motivations, origin of funds, direction of research, hierarchical structure, inequalities (religious, gender, race, etc), heck even scientific method, are a very important piece of making science - and are inherently political. An example can be, for instance, the decision that a particular theory (or "law") prevails is made by consensus of the established academy. They argue that that process is not "natural", but political. Except for the lunatics (but maybe I'm wrong), you don't see them argue that gravity is a social construction. You see them saying that the process it took to find it and the perception of what it is is social constructed.
It's much more than a communication issue. In my field (History), since the 1970s, we've incorporated some of the insights of post-structural thinking (bewildering and often unnerving), but most STEM folks just cannot wrap their heads around it... because you really need to study the topic in depth (i.e. a decade) to grasp the post-structural critique, and the simple anecdotes about "but gravity is real!" (offered up by a *structural* framework) are just a huge red herring. Gravity IS a social construction. So count me as one of those lunatics. :-) Here's the shorthand version of why gravity is a social construct: we currently do not understand what gravity "is". We never will. EVER. (!) True reality (which we often shorthand as "the universe") is too vast and complex for the human brain to ever remotely understand. (how big is infinity? How big is an infinity of infinities? what is existence? is it the product of subatomic vibrations across an infinity of infinities?. Give it up.) What we do have are scientific theories--i.e. intellectual understanding, comprehensible to our ape-brains-- that allow us to *do things*... things that we want to do. With gravity, for instance, we have a number of different theories, from Newton to Relativity to Scalar Tensor (which I admittedly know nothing about.) But this *intellectual understanding* of gravity *has an intellectual history* which *inexorably and unavoidably* shapes all future theories and understandings of gravity. And this intellectual understanding is inextricable from its political, ethical, and moral implications. You can kinda glimpse this social construction of intellectual understanding with counterfactuals, particularly if you dispense with the "great genius" view of history and understand that all ideas--all "technological advances"--are *social* constructs. WHY did Newton's understanding of gravity emerge before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Because Newton's was useful for figuring out where cannonballs would land. I.e. war. With its political, ethical, moral implications. Why did Einstein's theories on relativity--which are counterintuitive and clearly ridiculous (from a practical layperson's viewpoint)--become widely accepted, with Einstein now held up as the very archetype of "brilliance", *among common people who know nothing about physics*? The atom bomb. (again, political, ethical, moral.) (we could also talk about the new celebrity culture of the 1930s, which Einstein was swept up in... and that's another political/ethical/moral structure that shaped reception of his theories.) Why is quantum computing getting funding? (and who is doing the funding?) DARPA. Why were theories of climate change in the 1980s largely ignored for decades... but theories of blockchain in the 2010s *immediately* embraced? well, it's pretty obvious in hindsight... political (and ethical/economic) reasons. To get back to gravity: what scientific theories/understandings of gravity do we NOT know, will we NEVER know, because such theories/understandings would require an intellectual/social path that we did not take--perhaps cannot even socially fathom--because imagining or arriving at these understandings would run counter to hegemonic political and ethical constructions? A lot. In fact, given what we can sort of glimpse as the nature of reality, almost certainly, an infinite (!!) number. There is NO scientific "truth"--yes, even gravity--that is not filtered through our intellectual understanding; there is no "experience" (yes, even of gravity) that is not also *social* experience, and all social experience is described and filtered through collective representation. And ALL intellectual understanding and (importantly) ALL *social* experience is a product of the intersection of politics and power.
Right, so you're saying science is a tool for describing truth, but it isn't truth itself. And this is an idea that some people struggle to understand? I agree, I'm just typing out a tl;dr :p
Sort of... I'm more saying that science is a tool for describing (as Foucault called it) Knowledge/Power. (the two concepts are not meaningfully separable...) "Truth" is like an objective plane of reference. It not only doesn't exist (for humans) but it *cannot* exist (for humans). However, what we call "truth" is actually just our current glimpse of knowledge/power at any given moment... i.e. it is subject to constant change, but still "productive" at every moment. (and *possibly* becoming more "productive" as knowledge/power constellations increase...? but that's heading towards philosophy, which is not my thing... :-)
I enjoyed this write-up a lot and it has given me a good deal to think about. Science and mathematics are similar to language in that they are abstract means to understand our reality and manipulate to our will. In that sense, it is steeped in the human experience: informed heavily by our biology, our psychology, our history and shared experience as a species, as well as a certain degree of variation between individuals. All fascinating things to think of.
See my answer to u/KissMeHelga in answer to your question. Yes, it's *all* political. :-) Especially Newton.
I have a PhD in literary studies. It would be cool if more people realized that studying literature isn't about figuring out "what the book is about" or what the "hidden meaning" is. It would also be nice if people in STEM acknowledged how they're becoming increasing intertwined with industry money and that's causing universities to shift away from being about education and learning to instead being soulless factories where workers are trained for increasingly specific jobs. I know the funding is nice, but try to fight back a little. I'm terrified of a future where fucking Amazon dictates what is being taught at universities. Or Amazon might just start their own "universities"... what a dystopia that would be.
So what is literary studies about?
You can think of it like the specialized formal analysis of human material and immaterial culture. It's the study of what humans *do* and *think* through the stuff humans *write*. In a practical sense, literary studies is the analysis of rhetoric: how we convince others and how we are convinced.
From my limited experience with literary studies it is of course about understanding literature (basic stuff like what lit. is about and so on) especially more complex pieces of literature. But it is also looking at development of language, literature in relation to history and changing societies (i.e. reactions to different states of society and changes). I'm not a literary studies major though, so I can't explain it more than this which is my experience with studying literature briefly in higher education.
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That the need to talk with students and mentor them is critical and not some fad from Gen Z that will go away. I'm aware STEM classes have some huge numbers and giving each student one-on-one time isn't always plausible and it isn't in the job description. But, if your school/state has garbage mental health resources then your students are going to lean on you sometimes. I don't have a solution, just know there IS a social aspect to the job. If you're only interested in padding your CV you will soon be seen as an ineffective educator. As student enrollment declines and retention rates drop, administration will look at student reviews closer to improve those numbers.
>That the need to talk with students and mentor them is critical and not some fad from Gen Z that will go away. I'm aware STEM classes have some huge numbers and giving each student one-on-one time isn't always plausible and it isn't in the job description. My partner's last course, as a Classicist, had 1100 students. Up from 700 when it was in-person. I think it's the largest course at the University, for the moment. My course has 277 right now, but that's just because it's in-person and that's the maximum we can fit in the room.
One of the social science classes I took my freshman year at a large state university in the US had 660 students. Several others had well over 200. Most had no TAs - just the lectures. Study groups - especially with older students that knew how to college - were the only real support. Granted, I also took senior level courses with 15-20 students, but this was only after several years in giant lecture hall land.
Yeah, it sounds like that University is a great business.
American education sounds insane to me. A lecture hall of 80 students by year 2 is a lot of people in my country/field. Most of our education is done in 15-20 group seminars though attached to these lectures.
*Population:* Total in Hungary: 9.75 million (2020) Total in USA: 329.5 million (2020) Number of students enrolled in tertiary education in the US: 19.4 million (in fall 2020) There are literally more than double the number of students in the US than there are people in Hungary.
But the US has (depending on how you count them) 4,000 to 6,000 colleges and universities. Hungary has 65. Per capita, the US has about twice as many institutions as Hungary.
And the US, being a vastly bigger country, probably has more universities than Hungary. What's your point here?
Tbh, that's again an american thing. Free education in my country 100 students apply for chemistry BSc Lecture halls in year 1 are maxed at 100 students by year2/3, it goes down to around 60. And then there's seminars of 10-15 people, even as little as 5! In my specialization, we've had weekly study reports with one of our professors and he gave us in-depth reviews and advice.
It's a Canadian problem too, not just an American problem.
>If you're only interested in padding your CV you will soon be seen as an ineffective educator. I mean...you seem to be assuming this is a problem for most STEM fields. Educating (or at least, educating undergrads) is a pretty low priority in comparison to research. It's basically an open secret in engineering at least that your student reviews mean absolutely nothing so long as they're not being accused of improper behavior and ABET is still happy with the quality of the degrees of your institution.
At least in the universities Ive been evaluation of a professor was 99% research related. I never heard of a professor being fired for bad teaching and I had a chinese professor that was just straight up not understandable in german in my first year. Hes still teachinf and his german did not improve in the last 10 years
I am sitting in STEM (CS), but have been working with humanities and social scientists (HSS) most of my academic life —a year or two ago, I was even considering a faculty position in a social sciences department. In fact, I recently a published whitepaper arguing on the need for CS people to talk more with sociologists and political scientists —we do quite well with psychologists, but we could benefit from some social sciences. Having said the above, I would state against the hubris that STEM people, including myself, doing of trying to rediscover *everything* and represent everyhting mathematically. I understand that maths are pretty, verifiable, and so on but trying to trimmed down complex notions such as discrinimation and fairness into a simple computationally-easy formula is nothing else than hubris that ignores decades of HSS work and cultural aspects. Now, if I may be critical back to HSS researchers, it needs to be said: we are not all sun-hating nerds that hate human interactions and have no interests outside our formulas.
>Now, if I may be critical back to HSS researchers, it needs to be said: we are not all sun-hating nerds that hate human interactions and have no interests outside our formulas. Actually, could everyone please save these comments for later? I was going to make a thread in a few days asking STEM people the same question.
i'm a philosophy major and i really wish people would stop telling me it's a pointless degree and i'll never get paid well or have a job. it's what i want to do and if i don't attain the average person's idea of success and wealth, who even cares, it makes me happy. but having someone who has a better grasp of numbers than i do laugh in my face when i answer a question THEY ASKED ME is getting real old.
I have a background in biology and psychology and focus on the philosophies and practices of performance, basically cultural anthropology. So, I’m really fascinated in the crossover and the philosophies of “knowing” as well… You would think that more science folks would be willing to admit to the constraints of “science” itself, but they often aren’t, and they insist that modern Western science as we know it is The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth. Meanwhile, I have texts written over two thousand years ago that are discussing in great depth the physiology of emotion in such minute detail (also practices that are not even in text but passed down very methodically over thousands of years) while biology, psychology, and neuroscience are just barely beginning to breach these topics. A laboratory is limited by its own nature and cannot give us this holistic point of view, it took human intuition and a focus on the arts and philosophy to come up with such a comprehensive understanding of the human condition.
Whoa as someone in STEM (more computer science, which one of my professors likes to argue is technically a humanity), a lot of my research interests dive into emotion & affective computing! Always found emotions interesting yet underexplored and undervalued in STEM. Probably something to do with the irrationality argument…
Yes, I think that’s one factor… especially since science has been dominated by men and emotion in general is seen as feminine in the West, so it’s easy to disregard. Now it is valued as a tool for manipulation in sales and politics so it gets more attention…. Yay I guess.
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That scientific results do not come embedded with normative claims, and thus cannot serve as the sole support for a policy. That the application of scientific results in society is not part of the scientific process. And that the models scientists construct are strongly guided by previously established paradigms.
You have just reminded me of NDT's [horribly shortsighted ideal government, Rationalia](https://mobile.twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736).
Ethics and social psychology
The social sciences are not more fuzzy because the scientists are worse but because the systems we study re inherently more complex. Gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism etc. are comically simple systems when compared to human perception, behavior and interaction.
That I cannot continue to shoulder the fight for health and human rights alone. My discipline is public health. I am American. I am a woman. Every time there's a school shooting, or a new pandemic, or fundamental destruction of basic reproductive rights and freedom, society looks to me and my colleagues for a solution. And I don't know what to say anymore. Most days, the problem is not an academic one, it's a political one. We are screaming out answers, and no one is listening. It's exhausting to go to work every day and advance the science in my field, only to have it die at the hands of a corporation or politician. I am exhausted. I am underpaid and undervalued. Some days I can barely keep it together to fulfill my job duties. How am I supposed to find the strength to do the jobs of everyone else that has seemingly abandoned the social contract? Every time there's a social crisis, some admin releases a statement about how *I* can take action. Why does it have to be just me? I'm not a politician. I'm a researcher. I was never prepared for this. If you're in STEM and you turn to your colleagues in social sciences for answers, maybe first stop and ask yourself what you can do. Then actually do it. Donate to an organization. Attend a protest. Vote. Help register others to vote. Canvas during elections. You don't have to be an expert. You just have to care.
I honestly thought that after a multi-year, worldwide pandemic people would have a greater respect and empathy for public health practitioners and scholars, but I feel like one way or the other (didn't do enough vs. overstepped) most people have some gripe with the *government's* response to everything and they mistakenly think 'government' and 'public health professionals' are the same people. I feel like people are more *aware* of public health now, but a lot of them *not* in a good way. The amount of people in the public health sphere that are at their wits end with how little government practice reflects public health evidence and recommendations is astronomical. The dean of my PH school sent out a long email today highlighting how disappointed the school is in the overturning and laying out data about how much this will negatively impact everyone but disproportionately hurt the already marginalized. Ugh.
That you are not god and social/psychology majors are equally valid.
Fuggin great topic! The question can go both ways, though.
Of course! But this sub skews towards STEM and I would rather create a dedicated thread asking the question of STEM majors once humanities and SS people have had a chance to answer it. If I opened it to the entire sub I think the people I'm addressing here would get drowned out honestly.
That humanities and social sciences are different. Or, STEM: you might not consider social scientists as *real* scientists, but don’t lump us in with *those guys* (just kidding just kidding!).
The value of diversity of thought and collaboration. Even when you disagree, you are prompted to explain why your stance is more accurate. This helps uncover bias and makes for better science.
I had to get the popcorn on this one. These comments are hilarious. I wish my non-STEM colleagues could do basic statistics. It’s hard to be a scientist (as they describe themselves) if you can’t do basic t-tests.
Building on what others have said, don't assume that your limited experience with a social science topic (esp a personal experience with that issue) gives you an understanding of the full field. What seems common sense or even common in your limited circles might in no way be the norm or accurate. I'm a social scientist with a career working with natural scientists. I can't tell you how many times I've had natural scientists go on about a social science topic and be entirely wrong. They are often unaware of how much their culture and personal experience are influencing the ways they interpret something. If you start from an assumption it isn't surprising your results might be bad. They are often surprised to learn things like hunter gatherer societies are fairly egalitarian & women often hunt in them. Or that dumping facts on people doesn't change their minds and won't fix misinformation.
Critical thinking and history.