Me too kinda?!?!? But if one appeared at my door tomorrow morning, I’d probably be in a state of extreme fear.
I’m super curious to hear what you’re working on Trim! I’m doing a physics PhD myself, which amounts to mostly linear algebra but I’m planning on taking a Machine Learning course just for the interest.
I’m kind of similarly a scientific black sheep in an otherwise english and sociology focused family and I’m very very grateful for that perspective outside the bubble, especially if you’re in academia it almost encourages you to encase yourself in the field to the exclusion of other things. That said, in my experience maybe 7/10 physicists have been lovely and conscientious people so I have hope for the future as long as a few of them end up in the 4% with permanent positions 
As a sidenote, quantum information is my field and I’m intrigued by that story though the headline is horrid. The obvious thing that’s kind of wrong with it is what aspect of the state is teleporting; nothing in this scheme seems to suggest to me they’d be teleporting anything other than the vibrational state of the bacterium? So it’s kind of disingenuous to insist this would end up entangled with the ‘rest’ of state. Macroscopic quantum effects are still dope though!
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Studying Computer Science at uni here. This just in: neural networks are actually WILD. Been experimenting with trying to teach one to coin words from a definition with (incredibly) limited success so far but hopefully I’ll figure it out eventually!
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I think STEAM (A for Arts + Design) is an important pushback against blind STEM worship. It’s undeniable though that there’s interesting and cool things happening constantly in tech, especially since that seems to be where most public attention/dollars are going (and more where my personal interests are).
One thing that’s really worrisome to me is the SV-driven belief in data-driven algorithms and machine learning and neural networks as the black-box saviors of personal problems at the cost of social ignorance. There’s a blind trust in some dispassionate computer crunching numbers somewhere that spits out an answer to who should pick you up in their car, where you should go to eat, what you should buy, when you should save, what articles you should read.
But those algorithms are written by people like you and me, and trained on data from the past, and without careful and mindful consideration, are completely unable to address social ills and systemic inequality. As we depend more on apps to solve an increasing diversity of problems and annoyances, it’s not clear to me that app developers are likewise increasing their diversity and social responsibility. I’m not discounting that there are a huge number of great (and otherwise impossible) solutions that machine learning can help with, but I wish there was more balanced discussion of how we need to approach and frame the training data.
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Yeah most of the headlines are garbage. In fact, some of the articles can be inadequate for anyone who is reading with a super-technical focus, but they usually do a good job of citing the original source/publication. I’ll have a more in depth response about my research tomorrow (it’s currently 1:00 am here). I appreciate the response!
Honestly, I’ve been thinking about your initial STEM education question for awhile. It’s a tough cookie. In high school, my teachers kinda just showed us some equations and how to use them, at least that’s all I can remember from then. It wasn’t till college that I was forced to start thinking in more rigorous and scientific way. That may be just because the problems were harder but I also think it had to do with the more open ended nature of my undergraduate science courses when compared to the ones I took in high school. I do know that, even though they were way harder, I got so much more enjoyment and fulfillment from the science classes I took in college. I wonder if there is a way to translate that type of experience into a high school setting, and maybe that could in turn help bring a higher baseline of scientific literacy to more people? Who knows?
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@TheElectricFields, @therealtakeshi I have some serious thoughts about both of these topics, thanks for the responses. Have to sleep now, but I’m really looking forward to this discussion.
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Oh man if y’all wanna talk poor gen-ed teaching structures and awful science headlines, hi, it me, your local Biochem PhD ready to crap all over my field’s engagement with non-science people 
I think there’s a lot of desire for people to latch onto the “cool/scary” angle for biotech, but I’d honestly rather people try more to explain how/why a lot of biotech is already a key part of your day-to-day. If we focus too much on making science exceptional, we risk making it deliberately impenetrable.
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There definitely needs to be a lot more work on gen-ed teaching for science. I’m a history/Chinese major and focused on scientific history. One thing that grabbed my attention was when a professor of mine pointed out how we need to understand science and technology, otherwise we’re looking at black boxes of magic that do things when we want. Hell, looking at technology from hundreds of years ago still feels like magic at times to me, even though it’s almost entirely just mechanics and thermodynamics instead of the extremely more complex stuff like electrical-based work and then computing and etc.
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I audited a food anthropology course a while back and we read a great paper on the role of fish husbandry in Japanese fish markets (“Hatchery Flounder Going Wild: Authenticity, Aesthetics, and Fetishism of Fish in Japan” by Satsuki Takahashi). There was a great line about the elision of labor:
“As food critics and celebrity chefs will attest, a “wild” thing appeals because
of the richness of its flavor. Preferring wild berries, wild mushrooms, or wild
mint, for example, to “regular” ones, many consumers consider wildly grown
foodstuffs to be appetizing and of higher value. Such a perception on wild
food commodities is a form of fetish, which I call “wilderness fetishism.”
I refer here to “fetishism” in the manner used by James Carrier, who—by
extending Karl Marx’s original notion of commodity fetishism—calls attention
to “the ignoring or denial of the background of objects.” In analyzing
the commodity fetishism involved with ecotourism and fair trade, Carrier
differs from Marx’s emphasis on a nearly complete disregard for context.
He instead points to a certain selectiveness among consumers: For example,
while consumers of fair-trade coffee recognize the growers, they tend to elide
human labor involved between growers and purchasers, including those by
the roasters, shippers, and merchants. In the case of wild fish, consumers
particularly remember “nonhuman labor”—such as the work of waves, reefs,
and other inhabitants—involved in nurturing the ocean’s blessings, and also
recognize “human labor” involved in capturing them at sea, whereas they
tend to ignore other aspects of human labor performed, for example, by
conservation scientists, fisheries agents, wholesalers, and fishmongers. In
enhancing the value of the fish, this “wilderness fetishism” ignores particular
human relationships involved in the process of producing them.”
I think a lot of modern science reporting emphasizes a similar fetishism - in this case, a fetishism of personality and invention rather than process and regulation - that makes it seem like science is done by individuals rather than communities. Part of education to me should include discussions of science infrastructure and democratization instead of, say, “this old dude was a genius who made this discovery.” I’m conflicted over building narratives around scientists for this reason as well, since focusing on the humanity of the researcher rather than the humanity of those using the results downstream of their discoveries feels like a form of celebritization - which I’d argue is another type of harmful fetishism surrounding science and technology. There is so so so much more to science and tech than what we report on, and I wish we did more as a community to be transparent and open about it all.
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The scientific method has much to offer but it is valuable to remember that STEM modes of reasoning can only answer the question “what is the case?” and not “what should be the case?”.
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If you want to go to a teaching-focused university, best of luck, but you are going to be poor. Universities that are willing to focus on instruction over research are increasingly small institutions with a religious bent. Perhaps it is better in physics than the biological sciences but teaching seems to be less respected than ever, even as the cost of college ascends to new and unprecedented heights.
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If you want to be terrified by the potential applications of a technology, spend an afternoon looking up CRISPR and what can in theory be done with it.
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Yet another physics Ph.D. here! I am looking to get into nuclear physics, and by that I don’t mean weaponry or anything like that but rather researching the structure of atomic nuclei and the strong force binding them. My family has little to no tie to academia and I grew up in a fairly rural town, so the academic life is something I’ve been working toward for quite a while but is also something I’m not completely sold on yet.
As for my thoughts on STEM, I of course think it is important for people to get a grasp of what it means to make scientific progress and how it is achieved, but I do not think it is the end-all be-all of rational thought and societal progress. I think a lot of the push toward science and away from the arts comes from certain stereotypes about what intelligence is and how it is generally thought to manifest as logic rather than creativity. This also leads to the tendency of wanting to apply scientific methods to inappropriate situations, as @sparkyclarkson mentioned.
With regards to tech, I’m generally not that enthusiastic about cutting edge technology, but I recently been getting involved with a small group trying to understand quantum computing and how it can assist physics research. There are already intensive computational efforts to try and understand nuclear physics, and when quantum computers can be realized they should be able to immensely cut down on computing time and allow for much bigger systems to be feasibly simulated.
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I’ve been annoyed at the idea of “STEM” as a concept since it’s inception. It gives the impression of a big divide between ‘serious’ academic pursuits and those that are frivolous – not only a false distinction but a harmful one. It’s a huge buzzword in the education field, mostly around fundraising. All the expansions of the term are silly too, STREM, STEAM, STEMM, etc. So much that people do is more multi-disciplinary than people realize and I don’t think these acronyms help people to appreciate the wealth of talent out there.
Not that being a professor isn’t a fine goal, but it seems strange to me that you would call your goal being a STEM professor instead of a physics professor. It would be hard to be a biology or psychology professor with a PhD in physics. I also find it strange that PhD programs focus on novel research and yet having one is a requirement to teach at a college level. PhD programs, in general, do not require any training that helps you be a good teacher.
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Yeah, I think it’s pretty much a scam–not to say that Science, Technology, or any of that isn’t important, but it’s part of a long-term narrative that leans heavily on the notion of personal responsibility of individual workers, as opposed to social responsibility. Which is to say; STEM isn’t going fix Capitalism, at least not by itself. The problem of automation and globalization have been identified for the better part of a century now (crystallized pretty well in Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano); it’s not that workers are dum-dums, it’s that industrial capitalism means ever fewer amounts of human bodies are part of the means of production, and that will always be a problem as long as we are scared and tricked into avoiding redistribution of capital.
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Fully Automated Wealth-Concentrated Straight Earth Capitalism
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I’d happily support any improvement in education which reduces the tendency toward magical thinking in American society. A STEM degree certainly isn’t a prerequisite for critical analysis and basic empiricism.
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I studied Creative Writing at a STEM centered University, and let me tell ya, the humanities were undervalued.
I’m more scared of emphasizing a STEM education that doesn’t provide students with moral, philosophical, and compassionate framework for contemplating their work than I am of any one nightmare technology.
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I think my problem with the way most STEM fields operate right now is that there’s a lack of room for normative discussion. My ex is working on a PhD in engineering education with a focus on LGBTQ+ issues and how the decisions people make in STEM fields have social implications. He has received enormous pushback on this from STEM folks, under the guise that it’s not really their responsibility to worry about that stuff.
In economics, a distinction is made between normative and positive discussions. Positive economics are the closest to what would be considered a part of STEM, as it’s concerned only with the facts of causal relationships. Normative economics, on the other hand, allows for policy discussions about what is good or bad.
You could certainly argue that econ as an institution values proper education in positive over normative economics (especially certain branches, such as the Chicago school), but at least space is being made for these discussions. Most pure science and engineering doesn’t make any room for ethics and that’s what makes tech like this so scary.
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I definitely feel like StEM tends to think of itself as apolitical and determinative rather than stochastic like the world actually is, and that’s very disheartening.
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As yet another Physics PhD, I think the recent March for Science discussions were interesting (and a bit disheartening) as evidence of how many scientists think science should be “apolitical”. There still is a lot of full on ivory tower shit out there.
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