Today's post treats STEM—Science Technology Engineering Math—and how an emphasis on training people in these areas fits into a broader narrative of what society is and how individuals should fit into it.

You may have heard some quote about "technology being indistinguishable from magic" or something similar. Indeed this is often the case, as I will lay out in this article—the complexity of modern technology often requires people to be highly specialized, and thus put in containers/modules/departments in which they have relatively narrow knowledge of how the system as a whole operates.¹

The good and practical

Clearly, there are many things you can learn from studying STEM. In terms of "soft skills", the STEM fields have objective criteria by which to evaluate students. It is not a clear-cut question which of two essays is better, however a definite winner can be declared between which of two student performed some large number of calculations correctly.

Studying STEM fields trains students to be careful and to recognize when they make errors. It can also teach teamwork, as working on complex projects with teams will require breaking up tasks, some people taking up leadership roles, and so on and so forth. In contrast, students in fields like the humanities may find that their in-depth studying and hard hours of work are often spent alone—for some students this can lead to agnonizing self-doubt ("imposter syndrome") while for others, unwarranted self-confidence can produce more confusion rather than clarity in the academic space.

You can look field by field, but generally speaking you will find many viable, well-compensated career paths in STEM.

The stereotypes about immmigrant parents wanting their children to go into STEM mainly—I think—have to deal with this idea of good economic opportunity. That is why, if you instead landed a job as a lawyer or a highly paid real estate agent or so on and so forth, this would be OK in the eyes of most "practical" people. You probably wouldn't be accused of abandoning the noble pursuit of truth and giving up on engineering utopia. Rather, you would be recognized for having chosen another path that pays the bills and is respectable in society.

"Science", "Technology", "Engineering", and "Math" are Different

Here's some broad definitions,

• Science: using testing to improve methods of doing things
• Technology: using tools
• Engineering: building stuff
• Math: shuffling symbols

Science

To talk about "science", you will need to understand the model(s) you are working with. Someone could work in a lab, take measurements, dispose of toxic chemicals, and so on without understanding why they are doing what they are doing (at least from a scientific perspective; that person probably knows they want to keep their job and get paid).

The term "science" is used in many ways. One common way it is used is "the consensus view of (expert) scientists". So a person that is called a "science denier" is one who rejects a main stream view which is predicated as being a "scientific fact".

Philosophically, the above views are quite... uninformed. Statistical methods (which are used in all sorts of science) offer a practical solution to the problem of induction—how do we move from particular observations to generalized patterns? Statistical methods allow us to make sense of many measurements, manage the "noise" of accident/variation, and then use that information to refine models about how stuff works.

Lots of the math of the Science of STEM has to deal with creating well-defined (mathematical) models of stuff. For instance, if you're predicting some fruit fly population will grow exponentially you will need to have a mathematical model to describe how some independent variables you control (like number of flies you are starting with, how much of some sugar solution you're feeding them with) corresponds with some dependent variables, probably the population of flies, but you might also study other things like rate of mutation by counting flies born with 4 eyes or something.

Note that for science to "work" you just have to do the scientific paperwork, propose more experiments, and so on. Science doesn't have to produce results beyond some information, e.g. that X works better than Y to get Z result.

Engineering

Let's contrast the above thing with engineering, which I called "building stuff". ² Engineering might use many models developed by scientists. Engineers apply models to solve "real-world problems". So in addition to having engineers build things like rockets, we can also have "engineers" building other types of systems. The two areas I have looked most at are productivity/workflow and software engineering (and also the intersection of those two areas).

One thing I realized being in the social sciences is that lots of the engineering that is done is for the purpose of social engineering—that is, designing how society at large should run. Let's give some examples:

• Education: figure out how to get students to assimilate bodies of knowledge, develop certain attitudes towards institutions/authority
• Personality tests: quantify traits to optimize things like "career fit"
• Linguistics: measure and correlate aspects of speech with societally relevant categories—race/ethnicity, gender, class, etc ³
• Software engineering: creating the systems/channels by which people communicate, shop, submit homework assignments, etc.

Note that engineering requires you have the infrastucture in place to implement some system. You can't do much with software engineering to a place that isn't already all hooked up to computers. In today's world, where everything from banking to grocery deliveries gets routed through digital channels, software engineering controls powerful systems indeed. Studying "education" as a type of engineering requires that you have the schools/system set up in order to dispatch the products created by scientific teams (who look at stuff like standardized tests). Without a homogenous/controlled setting, the science that feeds the engineering can't be done.

Technology

Is becoming a plumber pursuing a STEM career? I would say yes in the sense that a plumber deals with plumbing technology; they maintain systems that require specialized training to work on. Simialrly, in my work as a web programmer, I've described myself as an "internet plumber". I work with the (data) pipes of the Internet, usually working on making pretty sinks (front-end, web design) which can interface with existing services (pipes, sewage system).

The tech industries of 20 or so years ago might have been dealing with big UNIX mainframe things, writing bash scripts, and so on and so forth (nerd talk). Nowadays, lots of tech work takes new names—such as DevOps.

What brings all "technology" work together is that you are using previously engineered things (which may be informed by scientific studies).

Math

Math is shuffling symbols according to rules. You can know what is "right" and "wrong" in math because you're dealing with abstractions.

What isn't STEM

As discussed above, lots of STEM has to deal with designing, manufuacturing, and using technology. Obviously, there's a lot of interest and money (no pun intended, har har) behind this stuff—as a society, we're constantly pushing towards a more "technological" society. You can see this in all sectors of industry, from agriculture/farming to healthcare to education. Much of it is centered around technology.

So, what is not STEM? One way I think about this is... disregard or indifference to technology. You can use whatever technology is available to you as it is useful, but your activities need not be driven by technologies.

Consider,

• A restaurant that uses traditional methods of preparation
• A teacher that likes to use the blackboard, memorization techniques, and other "low-tech" solutions
• Organic farming
• Trader/merchant—will use stuff like stock exchanges, but would just as easily trade at the Bazaar in another time and placd
• Going for a walk/run, lifting heavy objects, doing calisthenics—doesn't need the latest fancy "exercise science"; sweat and discipline are the essential ingredients

Note that the above approaches are not "un-scientific" in the sense that you can certainly test stuff, learn from data, and so on and so forth and also choose to go with an older, time-tested way of doing things.

Conclusions

Pushing STEM sounds good in the sense that we want people to be able to live lives where they can work hard, increase in understanding and learn to better serve one another with whatever tools are available. For this reason, it is a pretty politically correct thing to promote STEM broadly and ideas like "teaching kids JavaScript" sound appealing to many.

Stepping back though, we can see how the promotion of STEM is predicated on a kind of technophilic worldview—a society that is built around the continued development of technology and pushing these things into all aspects of life.

Just as talk about "globalization" has been presented as a kind of inevitable thing that will just happen to us, we hear similar talk about how we're just going to have to deal with robots and Aritificial Intelligence replacing humans. Why is this?

As discussed in this article, it all falls under the ideology of lots of STEM-think—designing systems that are engineered to be fault-proof (by getting rid of the pesky human element) ⁴ The prevailing narrative is that using technology, we've created a healthier society, where we have better control of disease and famine, and where equality/human rights are better than ever.

You can go for a walk outside and let me know if you think that is the case.