There's some physics forums I lurk and occasionally post in, and every time the discussion goes beyond physics, holy shit are their opinions dumb as fuck. Just getting someone to understand a simple point that anyone could understand with like 2 sentences just feels like wading through mud with them because every time anything seems to challenge one of their preconceived opinions at all (or if they just don't understand it because they're out of touch) they get annoyed, and then they fixate on irrelevant parts of your point until you have to explain that part of your point again and again and again, and then everyone forgets what it was even about. Especially the boomers in there.
Then there's the ones "helping" people, who will basically act like they are doing a MASSIVE courtesy to you by explaining things, so they'll put people through the shredder for misunderstanding something or for phrasing the question in a way that isn't absolutely perfectly 100% crystal clear as if their compiler is giving an error or something.
And it's not just people in forums, like almost all the professors I know are also just complete morons about anything even slightly unrelated to their specialty.
Why are science nerds like that, I fucking hate it. Like holy shit grow up >:(
It's the modern phenomenon of allowing STEM and Commerce grads to get through college without taking any humanities modules imo. Often for "they won't need it in their work", or "it's a luxury we can't afford" type reasons.
It's unbelievable how it was allowed to happen, or maybe deliberately engineered. There's modern generations of graduates, highly qualified, without an education. Just highly technically trained for their narrow roles.
It is a massive fuck, I know some of these people. High achieving PMCs, just empty of politics or history or literature, and no shame about it. As wilfully ignorant as Qanon types.
The way that education was thought to be the panacea in the past, that's gone.
Can't educate them properly, they'll just become communists, or worse, sexually deviant.
...and yet the elite private schools that produce our rulers still teach Latin, Greek history, the classics. Funny that.
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In my case it was all busywork and very little of it too.
In my experience thats an incredibly american thing. I've only ever heard of someone who is taking a specific degree having to do classes about something else too in american cartoons and stuff, never seen it irl. Surely usually a person taking a certian degree would only do lectures about that degree's subject, right? On most courses in my country it is possible to take a foriegn language if you want to, but even thats kind of rare.
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Sounds a bit complicated, and, more importantly, like you'd have to pay for an extra year. Being well-rounded is great and all, but I don't like the idea of voluntarily paying to drag my dyslexic ass through another round of language classes, or watching more artisticly inclided friends cry over failing compulsory maths classes again like in school, especially if it wont actually help them contribute to their field.
Most people don't do degrees; getting an education to be well rounded and generally knowledgable should be what school is for so that everyone gets it, whereas a degree is a very specific qualification to work in a specific field. While I would like an excuse to take an art class occasionally, I think a shorter, less general degree makes a bit more sense than the american system, but I'm glad it worked out for you comrade!
Exactly.
I'm not referring to any specific college, am making a broader general point. With respect, there are a lot of colleges you're probably not aware of. Anecdotally, I'm aware of dentist/orthodontist, engineering, and Commerce/Business degree programmes, in various colleges, where students got away without a humanities module. These were internationally well regarded colleges. This was ten years ago, so it's only got worse since then. This is a general trend over the last 30 years.
More shocking to me was learning of schools where at high-school level the subject of History, with even the most basic lib syllabus, has been made entirely optional in favour of website design or whatever. Generations growing up with zero historical context. What's the Berlin wall?
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I dream of a world, a world.....that isn't the US.
In an ironic twist, engineers and natural scientists in Russia tend to heavily lean left, while humanities scientists are very reactionary (except historians, lol).
Fascinating to think how these patterns and traditions emerge over time. Is there any obvious reasons why it's like that in Russia?
Well, natural sciences were well-funded in USSR, while after 1991 funding was massively reduced, together with deindustrialisation it left engineers and natural scientists very disaffected. The only technical profession that still have significant support for capitalism is programmers, and even among them there are a lot of leftists.
Humanities were basically presented after 1991 as paragons of freedom and democracy and recieved grants for publishing anticommunist propaganda, so it definitely influenced them, also they were pretty anticommunist even before 1991.
Overall, the closer you are to actual production, the more likely you are to be communist.
Yeah my university has a large core curriculum with required courses in philosophy and political theory, music, art, and two non western literature/cultural traditions. The engineering students take half of it, but still that's more than some other schools I had friends at, and the courses were pretty rigorous. We were required to read Marx in the political theory class which was cool.
We had Marx in economics but that's only because the major economics professor in my uni is one of the most famous Marxist economists of the country lol