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The case against “STEM”

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C C Offline
Cynical Sindee: Surprise, surprise. Expected this to instead be another lament about how STEM initiatives were causing the dwindling of humanities programs at educational institutions. Which is actually a good thing, at least from the standpoint of the latter for several decades being the motivated reasoning and ideology source of tomes of Leftangelical techno- and psycho- babble nomenclature and accompanying theories on the ethics/social-engineering "utopian micro-management" front.
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...ainst-stem

EXCERPTS: Among the more influential truisms about science today is that it is essential for technological — and thus economic — progress. It is fitting, then, that the apparent slowing of American innovation has fueled a debate about the importance of science and the need for the federal government to support it.

Indeed, there is growing interest across the political spectrum in revitalizing American innovation, raising questions about how best to allocate scarce resources. [...] When asking these questions, we typically take for granted that scientific research is necessary for innovation. But while it may be a truism today, this contention is in fact a modern one, best known from the writings of Francis Bacon. And it rests on an important claim about — and, too often, a misunderstanding of — the relationship between science and technology.

Bacon was among the first thinkers to argue that scientific knowledge should not be pursued as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end — the improvement of the human condition. Science, in other words, is essentially useful, especially by enabling the technological mastery of nature. Such Baconian rhetoric is so familiar to us today that it likely passes unnoticed...

[...] When thinking about the technological fruits that we expect from science, we are now all Baconians. ... As we shall see, Bacon’s contention that scientific knowledge is useful — even essential — for technological innovation was ultimately vindicated by history. But the story of how this came to be is more complicated than we typically assume.

Even though science and technology have developed into overlapping and mutually reinforcing fields, they were and remain distinct. The paradox — what I call the Baconian paradox — is that as science becomes more useful for technology (and vice versa), technology tends to overshadow science. As a result, we fail to recognize any meaningful distinction between the two. But this is dangerous for both enterprises. When science is constrained by technological usefulness, scientific knowledge pursued for its own sake falls by the wayside; but besides being intrinsically valuable, this type of knowledge often bears technological fruit.

If we want both science and technology to flourish, we may well need to temper our Baconian rhetoric — to promote science as an end in itself, rather than as a means to technological innovation only — precisely because science has become so useful, just as Bacon predicted...

[...] The risk in conflating science and technology is that this endangers both. [...] This is problematic because many technological developments depend on advances in so-called basic or pure science. The crowding out of science by technology thus threatens technology by threatening certain areas of science itself.

[...] Less dramatically, we might simply observe that, especially when budgets are tight, funding for research with overtly utilitarian applications tends to beat out science pursued for its own sake, even if that research might eventually bear fruits. The past several decades of federal R&D policy seems to offer proof of this...

[...] The irony of the Baconian legacy is that the more fruitful science becomes, the more it loses its own identity: Whenever science is technologically useful, the two enterprises tend to appear as “different functions performed by the same community,” as Edwin Layton has put it. But “a fundamental fact is that they constitute different communities, each with its own goals and systems of values.” Almost no society in history, Thomas Kuhn declared, “has managed successfully to nurture both at the same time.” That the United States has been able to do so — so far, at least — has surely contributed to our scientific, technological, and economic preeminence.

If we wish science to continue to bear fruit for us, we may well need to refrain from judging it entirely by those fruits, and instead defend science for its own sake... (MORE - details)
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