3 ms·
> We're highly-skilled workers, and more of the blue-collar kind. While it’s a bit of a problem that sometime during the last century a skilled profession got
by mananaysiempre 5y ago
> We're highly-skilled workers, and more of the blue-collar kind.
While it’s a bit of a problem that sometime during the last century a skilled profession got equated with a research one (I remember hearing somewhere that a commercial pilot’s education costs about as much as a tenured professor’s, and it seems plausible to me), there’s also the fact that the people you call “workers” are more distanced from research than they used to be; my impression is that this is even stronger among engineers than it is among medical professionals, but I can hardly claim any deep knowledge here.
MIT is originally an engineering college, so is the École polytechnique, and the École normale is a school for bureaucrats. Cauchy’s seminal work on wave propagation was presented at the French academy, had an epigraph from Virgil (“how many waves / come rolling shoreward from the Ionian sea”), and was signed by “Mr. Augustin-Louis Cauchy, road and bridge engineer” (this being the title the Polytechnique awarded him).
It used to be normal (AFAIK) for articles in medical journals to be essentially “hey, look what a weird thing happened with this recent patient of mine”, and some of seminal (if not the most high-brow) mathematics journals started as “hey, solve this problem I have recently done / want to know the answer to ... if you’re not chicken to try”.
What happened to all of this was, in a word, specialization—necessitated in part by the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit and raising of epistemic standards, so not entirely pointless, but I have to admit the comparative conservatism of medicine in this regard always looked more hopeful to me than the, at times, raging anti-intellectualism of engineers or the fiddly, illogical, invented world of law.
Certainly medicine is more engineering than science in that it is driven more by immediate goals than by the pursuit of truth alone (not the only possible definition of science, but a useful distinction when it comes to the feeling of the field, cf the 50s adage about physics and military physics being like music and military music). And I certainly won’t say you’re wrong. But I’m sad, and I can’t help feeling the drive for industrialization has done a disservice to us, scientists and craftsmen both.
- pmoriarty 5y ago"raging anti-intellectualism of engineers" What makes you think engineers are anti-intellectual? Engineering is an intellectual discipline, after all.
- lazide 5y agoI suspect the poster is referring to anti the type of Intellectualism which is pure theory (or similar) and not application focused. Which I'd agree with - most Engineers tend to hate that kind of thing.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago> What makes you think engineers are anti-intellectual? FWIW, I’ve encountered the thing I call anti-intellectualism here among experimental physicists as well, and even in some theorists and mathematicians as well, to varying degrees. I don’t mean being stupid or not using your brain for work; I’m sure some of the people I’m thinking of here are much smarter than me and/or have contributed much more to society than I ever will. I’m not thinking of all engineering or science people, either; the maths teacher I had in high school is perhaps the strongest counterexample of this stereotype I know. What I mean is a certain lack of wonder and ... suspension of disbelief(?) when it comes to other kinds of intellectual pursuits (sciences, arts, humanities, philosophy, mathematics), like a feeling you’re doing Real Work while those other quacks do pointless things to amuse themselves, and are not even particularly successful at that. “Shut up and calculate”, if brought out among people who are past the basic level of understanding of the subject in question, is a manifestation of this (even though the originator of the saying in the context of quantum mechanics, David Mermin, is now a proponent of the “quantum Bayesianism” school of philosophical thought). Lest it seem that I’m dunking on physicists here, the “Two cultures” essay and Hardy’s “Apology” also contain some of this. If you’ve read the book, the shortest definition is perhaps to say that my “anti-intellectualism” is the opposite of The Glass Bead Game, even if Hesse intended it as his anti-Enligtenment manifesto. And I cannot say this sort of skepticism is always wrong—that way lies Fashionable Nonsense and New Age mysticism, and epistemic relativism scares me like little else. We do owe some advances in quantum foundations to New Age people, though, so sneering in that direction might not be right either. (If you think that this anti-intellectualism thing and the negation of the hacker spirit seem remarkably similar, you’re getting it.)
- pmoriarty 5y agoThat sounds more like intellectual snobbery and scientism rather than anti-intellectualism. This is especially evident towards fields one knows little about, towards the so-called "soft sciences" and the humanities.
- wolverine876 5y agoAre you an MD or scientist? Historian of science? It would be useful context for us.