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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The second is that because these subjects are useless and worthless, nobody who is smart really chooses to do them. If you’re a smart individual looking to study something, you’d go toward things that actually matter.

This is just the reverse of the phenomenon @RenOS mentioned. STEM people think STEM is the best thing and people studying other fields are wasting their potential (at best) or never had it. It's just as valid, which is to say it isn't valid at all. Some of my smartest school mates were humanities majors, they aren't just less capable people studying something easy.

It's not that STEM is the best. It's that there are sciences with a tight feedback loop with reality, and those without. In the former, which is most of natural sciences, it's hard too go off the deep end, in the latter, which is most humanities, it's extremely easy. There are a few special cases such as math - math has a tight feedback loop with some very basic parts of reality through its assumption - proof - conclusion structure - but you can still go some crazy places with weird, hard-or-impossible-to-prove assumption. This makes clear statements and fair marks in the humanities almost impossible, so the researchers and teachers err on the side of kindness.

In particular, this makes the humanities appeal to a certain kind of person, mostly activists, who don't actually care much about reality but care a lot about forcing their worldview on the rest of society. Also, classes in the humanities are easier on the account of literally everyone I know who has ever taken them, including full humanities majors, some even flat-out told me they're taking humanities specifically bc it's easier. It's also an objective fact of universities that there is a pecking order of difficulty where people who fail one degree always move down, but never up, when trying again even if the NC (numerus clausus, the required marks to get started) of the upper fields is technically lower. As an example, at my medicine-focused university, "applied math in life science" is among the top despite having literally no NC at all, one of the next is "molecular life sciences", one of the next is "nutritional sciences", the next are all the "care sciences" (midwifery etc.). As in this example, humanities are almost always lower than the STEM fields in this order.

There are also many great, smart & careful students & scientists in the humanities, since they still are very valuable and interesting fields to study but tbh at this point I think they're probably in the minority, and definitely not in charge.