Oddbean new post about login | logout When facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?
@f8064376 @c77148e1 I agree with you substantively, but rhetorically you might be making an error given the ideological priors of the people you’re trying to persuade. The platonic ideal of a STEM booster would reply to this, “yes, of course, if you have a ‘humanities’ problem then you’re doomed since ‘humanities’ isn’t Real Science. You need to transform every problem into a STEM problem and then we can solve it with math without involving fallible, annoying *humans*”
@f8064376 I'm a STEM person. STEM's important, but holy damn humanities are for everyone. I'd not even argue about including mathematics in the humanities. The study of math - really to study it - encompasses art, music, history, and philosophy. You cannot really understand math if you don't understand these things. I was a musician before I was a mathematician. Music theory made me interested in math. If we don't have humanities, STEM is meaningless.