2 ms·

i think western culture's disdain for people good at maths and stem in general is being ignored

• cafard 8y ago
  Which western culture?
  • Nasrudith 8y ago
    The anglosphere at very least but there is a long history of "practical" and mathematical being the proverbial red-headed stepchild of social classes in spite of wealth. And that isn't limited to the anglosphere. Millers were commonly demonized and scalegoated for neither doing honest work with the rest of the peasants and instead maintaining "strange" machinery that did the work for them and they worked with knowledge but neither as a part of clergy nor nobility. Worse yet knowledge outside of known and respected sources. Merchants, owing to astoundingly bad economic theories were considered to have to be engaging in fraud because the idea of the value of a fur coat being higher in the mountains than the desert never occured to those not dealing with the bleeding obvious of the profession. They were also widely considered "non-productive" - without irony given nobility. Impetus theory is another sign of the disdain for the practical - how long upperclass and "learned" men would use a theory of projectiles in triangular motions that any artilleryman or archer would burst out laughing at from how obviously wrong it is. One common factor in even more modern times is ignorance and its self-perpetuation. People fear what they don't understand and avoid it leading to not understanding and more fear. It probably isn't just from this feudal history and the causal link may be tenuous but the tendencies have been around for a long time.