fckreddit comments on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.

All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 108 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Businesses would not be terrible if business education is actually tempered with some humanities. In fact, I am strongly of the opinion that every field of study should have some humanities component to them. None of the fields exist in vacuum, we have to have at least, some appreciation of other fields, lest we risk creating silos in the name of organization. And that is precisely happening in this age of hyper-specialization.

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[–] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 55 points 1 year ago (8 children)

100%.

Children are always told that they could become a scientist or engineer one day and that this would be a great thing to achieve. Scientists and engineers are so highly regarded, yet they are often complicit in creating the necessary technology and machinery for most of the worlds worst projects. Climate change, plastic pollution, nuclear weapons, are all created by the worlds smartest and all the while they're being told they're doing a great job and bettering the world.

Ethics needs to be mandatory in all STEM studies. Jesus at least just make them watch Oppenheimer.

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[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 47 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

Ethics is largely mandatory for engineering majors (source: am finishing my bachelor's in electrical engineering), but the first job or project you take will ask you to throw that out the window. (Source: family members who are also engineers)

There are two areas of safety considered: Operator/client safety, and regulatory compliance. All other safeguards are optional and ignoring them is encouraged.

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[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a civil engineer with only a tiny bit of experience cos I switched to software. That holds true. Environmental and other ethical concerns are not even an afterthought in vast majority of engineering projects.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

As a civil engineer with only a tiny bit of experience cos I switched to software.

Holy shit, I'm not the only one?!

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[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

I think this is true of most civil engineering majors I know. After getting their degrees, very few actually ended up working in civil engineering because the money was better in software or other tech.

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[–] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago

Good point, there was also an ethics module in my engineering studies, but it didn't really encourage you to think about where you're employed, just what to do what you're there. Which is useless

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[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 9 points 1 year ago

I had very little ethics being taught in my academic career. Most of what i know is high school level philosophy (from a country that still used to care about that stuff but aiming to change it soon). I would have loved more humanity courses. On the other hand, if you had given me the choice between a course in my speciality and a humanity course, I would have chose the specialty one every time

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[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Does it have to be Jesus who makes them watch it or is there another deity we can use?

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[–] angrystego@lemmy.world 1 point 1 year ago

It is possible to degrade Jesus to just an exclamation word with no real meaning. I recommend this approach to any and all deities.

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[–] gaybriel_fr_br@jlai.lu 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Funny you should say that, because those very humanities aspects of what I studied, Economics, lead STEM students to disparage it as a non-scientific field built of gospel and tenets. As if Humanities diminished the quality of the research and teaching within the Economics field.

So while I agree, and it's good to see you being upvoted, in a different scenario the application of your thoughts about this will lead the person sharing their experience to get massively downvoted in an attempt to shame them for studying a "soft science".

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[–] Eccentric@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Big gripe of mine is the distinction of "soft" and "hard" science. I'm a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn't mean it's automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can't exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don't exist outside of human society

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[–] gaybriel_fr_br@jlai.lu 4 points 1 year ago

Exactly! So many people assume the science of economics is unfounded because of what some purported "economists" say online or because of some already-irrelevant methodologies the science has abandoned for years already...

The most egregious problem being assuming that the methodology isn't sound and scientific, and that it instead depends on the whims of the researcher (here they would place researcher in quotation marks, I imagine).

I have had to do game theory, statistics, econometrics, data science (thanks to my chosen specialisation), a lot of math especially about optimisations and linear algebra... And the quality of the academic research is empirical. Rarely will you even find a paper that only uses qualitative data in economics, except maybe in the behavioural economics field. Most often we use natural experiments to replicate RCTs within a macro environment, or double-blind experiments to investigate an economic agent's systemic preferences and responses within a micro environment...

People who complain about the superficiality of the "soft sciences" have never stepped foot in a class beyond the very basics of that subject taught in highschool. They therefore project their current knowledge on the entire field, marring it...

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[–] socsa@piefed.social 1 point 1 year ago

Immanuel Kant has left the chat

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[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

I really do wish humanities were not actually considered as 'lesser' to the sciences. But I have actually found it to be greater of the sciences, simply because of the importance and the difficulty of questions it tackles. I have spent a fairly long time reading on philosophy, history, economics. I am not an expert, in fact, I am really far from it, but I have really come to an understanding the importance of these fields. But that's just me. Most just consider them not important because they don't understand. I just hope that we can rectify with better academic curriculum.

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