It is completely inexcusable that people in STEM fields are so reactionary, considering how capitalism utterly destroys science.
If universities were actually “left wing indoctrination factories” like the right thinks they are, every STEM grad would be taught, for example, what Kropotkin had to say about innovation.
What really bothers me is that people implicitly don’t consider a lot of STEM work to be “work”, e.g.
A: “Lol, you like socialism, even though capitalism created your smartphone?”
B: “Labour created the smartphone. Capitalism just determined who got paid.”
A: “Yeah right – like a bunch of idiot factory workers could design a smart phone!”
…Implicitly ignoring that the people designing the technology are doing work.
That could be driving people away. People who hear about labor being in charge and not realizing that that’s them.
Engineering isn’t labor though, and I say that as an engineer. The vast majority of engineers in the US do nothing resembling actual design or innovation. They find ways to cut costs, to make products go obsolete, to make workers obsolete, and to sell shit and manipulate people.
Plus their knowledge about history, art, social science etc is extremely limited.
This is a bullshit cope. The average STEM student knows more about history, art, and social science than the average art student knows about math or science. Yes, a lot of engineers are proudly ignorant, but people who can complete a Bachelor’s in a hard science or engineering generally have some sort of intellectual curiosity.
As a mechanical engineer who went to university in a pretty conservative area, yeah, it’s tough. Because of how Americans like to define “smart” I make sure to tell people (especially when they think I’m “smart” just because of my degree) that engineers are some if the dumbest smart people you’ll ever meet. Sure, they can do math and make a CAD model but god forbid they spend 2 seconds thinking about any kind of social issues. While I grew up firmly middle class, both of my parents worked union jobs majority of my life. This kind of working class upbringing is super rare amongst the majority of engineers I’ve know. They come from landlords and pharmacists and doctors and engineers and just basic petite bugeious backgrounds, and man does it show.
On the bright side I’ve met some of the other incredibly rare based engineers at the job I started this year, so they do exist.
But, tl;dr: as an engineer, fuck engineers
You hit the nail on the head. The place I’m at used to have an engineers & designers union but it ended up dissolving. There’s a few dudes close to my age who were in it but they don’t have fond memories for it. Felt like all their union dues just went to subsidize the pension funds and any future for them was getting negotiated away. Which it did though because after it dissolved only guys with ~20+ years in will be getting any pension.
But now it’s all completely fucked because everything is so outsourced and leaned down there’s no leverage to be gained; let alone a realistic shot of changing other engineers on coming together. And it’s only gonna get worse from here.
So yeah. Also fuck engineers.
How many people do you think are in STEM out of a pure love of their field versus a desire for wealth
There’s your answer
But seriously, I think the amount of the former is a lot more than people might assume. There are people who want to become an engineer to earn an engineer’s salary, or who want to be the next Elon Musk, but outside them, you won’t make it very far in science and math without a legitimate love of the material. If you’re in it for the money you’re wasting time and should just get a business degree or something.
And even among those engineers, aren’t they basically in the same boat as doctors? It’s not like doctors are massively reactionary just because many of them chose that path for the salary.
I like to make the distinction between scientists and engineers. I think that because of the sheer amount of money pushed onto engineers, they can often become more reactionary simply because they are sucessful under capitalism (this is of course a generalisation). Another problem is the influence of the defense industry and other morally bankrupt industries at universities, on more than one occassion I’ve heard people express their desire to build weapons and drones for the defence industry. What the fuck. On the other hand I think that many scientists are more left wing because they see how privitisation of industry and government budget priorities have wreaked havoc for science. As well as this, scientists get paid significantly less than engineers, which is almost certainly a factor (again, somewhat anecdotal). My biggest issue with STEM is the idolotry of Elon Fucking Musk. Musk is one of the biggest pieces of shit in the world and I can’t say what I would like to see happen to him.
Engineers, as applied scientists, are also not trained to do the scientific method, they’re trained to apply already accepted scientific principles, so it tends to attract a completely different type of person than hard science does.
For applied scientists, they’re used to treating science like religion: edicts handed down from on high.
As a personal anecdote, spending the first year and half or so of my post-education career as a quality engineer helped radicalize me, one of the major reasons being it’s one of the few engineering positions (when done correctly) that encourage questioning the status quo. You are always doing analysis and “5 Whys” and the like to get down to root causes. I eventually went, “what happens if I applied this philosophy to my understanding of society?” And here we are now.
