Meanwhile our actual MIT engineer nerds are mostly doing crypto scams and trying to find ways to make people click on advertisements more frequently 
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
145 points (98.7% liked)
politics
22728 readers
170 users here now
Protests, dual power, and even electoralism.
Labour and union posts go to The Labour Community.
Take any slop posts to the slop trough
Main is good for shitposting.
Do not post direct links to reactionary sites.
Off topic posts will be removed.
Follow the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember we're all comrades here.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Don't forget falling over each other to work at palantir also!
Also 
To be fair though only some are ok with Palantir. They made some useful generic developer tools and quite a few refused to use them.
And there is a lot of free software ethos was born out of MIT. Free as in libre, not free as in beer. This may all have been a mistake, but quite a few people in our are ok.
Not to mention designing robots that will later be ideal to be retrofitted with weapons and sold to the police
They'll strap guns to the robots, legally declare the robots to be police officers, and allow the robots to use lethal force to defend themselves. We'll have robot officers pulling people over in traffic stops, and they'll be just as trigger happy as human officers. The robots will be programmed to screech, "I'm in fear for my life" as they take a human life.
conflating stem degrees with merit, but leftistly
Maybe not merit but a STEM PhD at least establishes some pretty high baseline understanding of scientific method and contribution to humanity which is more than you can say about 99% of other certifications
If a STEM degree doesn't include mandatory ethics and humanities credits then the graduates it produces are mostly only useful for raising Lockheed Martin's stock price.
Ethics in engineering don't teach you to not build weapons for Lockheed Martin. They teach you to not cut corners while you build weapons for Lockheed Martin. It's about the ethics of the actual engineering process, not what you engineer
People are much more affected by their social environment and material conditions than a miniscule amount of required humanities classes. Most STEM students I know who took humanities classes openly told the other students and sometimes even the teacher that they only took it because it was an easy class
Required ethics and humanities courses doesn't change the fact that in the West, they graduate into a ton of opportunities worth six figures to do highly unethical shit, and those opportunities were probably the reason why they even chose to study engineering in the first place
People can understand right and wrong without studying it.
Most STEM PhDs are working for ordinary, banal, good. Testing water, improving infrastructure, serving coffee, trying to make stuff more efficient etc. Yeah a minority go into like banking and weapons and that is a horrible thing to do with the legacy of human knowledge but most are just people.
Yea, especially the math related PhDs that are in academia and don't do any industry work at all since that means they chose to not work for companies making 5+ times what they're making in academia
Knowing the difference between first-order ethics and second-order ethics, and being generally knowledgeable about the study of ethics doesn't seem to make one what most people here would consider to be morally good.
Not sure why the other humanities fields are supposed to be relevant in this regard, at least if we separate them from social studies.
If your primary exposure to ethics and humanities is six 3-credit-hour college courses, you are not "well-rounded".
I know lots of STEM PhDs. Lots of them. The majority of them have an attitude that they're well above basic humanity. That is not the mindset you want from a leader of any sort.
How dare those evil communists be educated. A real man is dumb as a box of rocks and proud.
That actually doesn't give me confidence in the CPC. If the US government officials were STEM brains we'd be even further cooked than we are now. They are all Dunning-Kruger's when it comes to economics
The problem with STEM brained people isn't the interest in science, but rather how they only look at science in terms of money or profit. They also dismiss anything outside of their chosen field because it all becomes a pissing contest. This isn't everyone in STEM, just a widespread attitude and a symptom of what created it, exploitative American capitalism.
I don't know much about the Chinese education system, but it's better than ours in most things so I'm gonna guess it gives a more rounded education on science including ethical considerations and its history. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering for instance and he's not someone I'd call a STEM brain.
In my experiences, Chinese tech bros are on average definitely significantly more well rounded in humanities and much more intelligent in non-math/tech fields than their Western counterparts. Much less ego and arrogance too
This only applies to the ones that only studied in China and recently moved to US for work though, the Chinese ones I've met who did studied post secondary here and lived in America for 10+ years act way closer to your American tech bro
Chinese tech bros are on average definitely significantly more well rounded in humanities
Half my classmates in engineering school were Chinese nationals, this isn’t true at all.
So my experiences is a pretty extreme end of the spectrum of tech bros. I'm comparing against largely MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU tech lords grinding their ass off to climb the corporate ladder in big tech
I compare the talks about politics at work between the Chinese group chats and the English group chats and the Chinese people definitely have a much better understanding of what's going on. The English group chat discussions is literally indistinguishable from r/worldnews level of intelligence
And to be clear, I'm not saying they're very well rounded, just more so than the low bar for American tech bros lol
They are all Dunnig-Kruger's when it comes to economics
Economists have even worse Dunnig-Kruger when it comes to economists.
True!
I think a bit more scientific method would be great in economics, and I think we've seen that with the CPC, e.g. in having local experiments before rolling out broader changes, and in accepting when something doesn't work.
Contrast with trickle down economics with tons of experiments and evidence that it doesn't work (Kentucky), and economists still push for it. Obviously in the US the goal isn't that things work better, so naturally the conclusion will be that we need more concentration of wealth.
But approaching government policies scientifically, based on gathering data, hypothesis, experiment design, peer review, etc all sounds pretty reasonable.
Where things gets yucky is when STEM brains decide that they know better than other folks, and hopefully that's kept in check.
But that's through a capitalist lense where we assume they will sell out for the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat. They have no reason not to be educated champions of the people when it is rewarded in China.
Xi, Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, all had merely Bachelors of Engineering. Most of the current politburo have PhDs in normal political areas like Law, International Relations, economics, Political science.
after checking the current Politburo, I found the following people with PhDs in Engineering:
Chen Jining: Civil engineering
Yuan Jiajun: Aerospace engineering
in addition, the following have related graduate degrees:
Li Ganjie: Masters in Nuclear Engineering (?)
Li Qiang: Masters in Engineering Management
Liu Guozhong: "Graduate degree in artillery system fuse design and manufacturing"
Ma Xingrui: PhD in Mechanics
I think that statistic includes non STEM PhD. Xi has one in Marxism
No wonder China is so good at building high speed rail
STEM nerds are reactionary fascists. Proof? Thatcher was a chemist, so was Merkel!
Macron's wife is his highschool chem teacher lmao
Oh I thought she was his literature teacher, dunno where that came from
Nope youre right it was literature and I was mistaken
STEM only produces creeps