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I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arg

I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM? Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.

all2 4y ago
Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account... And it goes on. Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on. I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine. But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others. And now we're here.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease. Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
  - all2 4y ago
    I'd be very interested in the "analytic/Anglo-American tradition" crowd. Can you recommend any books? I'd even take a college primer on the subject. I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
    - skissane 4y ago
      My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
    - techno_tsar 4y ago
      The analytic/continental split happened around the 19th century. Both traditions read more or less the same thinkers in Western philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Enlightenment Rationalists, the Enlightenment Empiricists, the Enlightenment Idealists, Kant) up until then. Once you hit the 19th century, stick with the readings that deal with the problems set out by Frege, Russell, and Moore, who are trying to get as close to science and formalizing problems in a clear, mathematical way as possible. As a result, the philosophical agenda uses conceptual engineering as a general approach. Generally speaking, any topic that fits into a "Philosophy of X" (e.g. Philosophy of mind, language, ethics, action, etc) is part of the analytic tradition. The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  I am no academic of any kind, but it strikes me as arrogant to quote that text and claim it to be drivel, while nodding in agreement to “Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]” I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
  - techno_tsar 4y ago
    Your intellectual humility is refreshing. Most of these discussions devolve into very obvious cases of Dunning-Kruger effect.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    I looked up both terms, being familiar with neither offhand. The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use. Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
    - SanderNL 4y ago
      I'll give you that the term, heck even the field, is fuzzy. I could not give you a good description of either, but that's also true of homological algebra and interpretive dance. > I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use. The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]" I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl. Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
- int_19h 4y ago
  > I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies. Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
techno_tsar 4y ago
Careful here. STEM definitely requires critical thinking, but crtical thinking is not just 'formal proofs', which is only useful when you're dealing with problems that are already obviously formalizable. This is not the case with the majority of problems in the humanities, e.g. history, literature, and large swathes of philosophy where data is qualitative. Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts. For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics... The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy. The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM. That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
That's an interesting wording. Indeed critical thinking has nothing to do with mathematics, because mathematics is preoccupied with validity of logic (logical thought), sound logic is not a concern, because valid logic can be trivially converted into sound logic by postulating the premises. In practice this results in mathematicians' beliefs in paradoxes and platonism, which are results of valid unsound logic.
- worrycue 4y ago
  You can't have a sound argument if the argument isn't valid though. A sound argument is just a valid argument with premises that are true.
gilbetron 4y ago
I live in a college town, and have lots of liberal arts friends in academia, and have had this discussion many times, a discussion that has a lot of peril, as they get upset very easily about this issue! As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic. Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)
watwut 4y ago
I studied CS and it seems to me that it did not taught critical thinking all that much. It taught logical thinking. We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories. So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on. Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering. All of these are elements of critical thinking.
- flippinburgers 4y ago
  I would argue that if you cannot first think logically then the supposed "critical thinking" you are doing is little more than you expressing things in a more or less persuasive way. In this case, persuasion is more hinged on charisma than anything material. Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
- worrycue 4y ago
  > We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories. That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
- zenapollo 4y ago
  Yes. This one is so pernicious. One problem is that most stem disciplines are built upon equation based models or something related. This works great for math, great for physics, good for chemistry, and not great for biology, really bad for psych or econ. Equation based models have neat linear-causal thinking that simply fails in understanding complex systems in all but the most reductive questions. Most stem students leave hs/bachelors thinking the world is mostly linearly causal. Hell even most doctors think this way - like a mechanic. Discussing the world’s current set of wicked problems with these linear thinkers is unimaginably painful.

all2 4y ago

Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account... And it goes on. Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on. I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine. But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others. And now we're here.

skissane 4y ago
> Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease. Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
- all2 4y ago
  I'd be very interested in the "analytic/Anglo-American tradition" crowd. Can you recommend any books? I'd even take a college primer on the subject. I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
  - skissane 4y ago
    My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
  - techno_tsar 4y ago
    The analytic/continental split happened around the 19th century. Both traditions read more or less the same thinkers in Western philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Enlightenment Rationalists, the Enlightenment Empiricists, the Enlightenment Idealists, Kant) up until then. Once you hit the 19th century, stick with the readings that deal with the problems set out by Frege, Russell, and Moore, who are trying to get as close to science and formalizing problems in a clear, mathematical way as possible. As a result, the philosophical agenda uses conceptual engineering as a general approach. Generally speaking, any topic that fits into a "Philosophy of X" (e.g. Philosophy of mind, language, ethics, action, etc) is part of the analytic tradition. The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
SanderNL 4y ago
I am no academic of any kind, but it strikes me as arrogant to quote that text and claim it to be drivel, while nodding in agreement to “Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]” I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
- techno_tsar 4y ago
  Your intellectual humility is refreshing. Most of these discussions devolve into very obvious cases of Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Natsu 4y ago
  I looked up both terms, being familiar with neither offhand. The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use. Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
  - SanderNL 4y ago
    I'll give you that the term, heck even the field, is fuzzy. I could not give you a good description of either, but that's also true of homological algebra and interpretive dance. > I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use. The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]" I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl. Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
int_19h 4y ago
> I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies. Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?

techno_tsar 4y ago

Careful here. STEM definitely requires critical thinking, but crtical thinking is not just 'formal proofs', which is only useful when you're dealing with problems that are already obviously formalizable. This is not the case with the majority of problems in the humanities, e.g. history, literature, and large swathes of philosophy where data is qualitative. Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts. For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics... The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy. The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM. That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

That's an interesting wording. Indeed critical thinking has nothing to do with mathematics, because mathematics is preoccupied with validity of logic (logical thought), sound logic is not a concern, because valid logic can be trivially converted into sound logic by postulating the premises. In practice this results in mathematicians' beliefs in paradoxes and platonism, which are results of valid unsound logic.

worrycue 4y ago
You can't have a sound argument if the argument isn't valid though. A sound argument is just a valid argument with premises that are true.

gilbetron 4y ago

I live in a college town, and have lots of liberal arts friends in academia, and have had this discussion many times, a discussion that has a lot of peril, as they get upset very easily about this issue! As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic. Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)

watwut 4y ago

I studied CS and it seems to me that it did not taught critical thinking all that much. It taught logical thinking. We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories. So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on. Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering. All of these are elements of critical thinking.

flippinburgers 4y ago
I would argue that if you cannot first think logically then the supposed "critical thinking" you are doing is little more than you expressing things in a more or less persuasive way. In this case, persuasion is more hinged on charisma than anything material. Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
worrycue 4y ago
> We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories. That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
zenapollo 4y ago
Yes. This one is so pernicious. One problem is that most stem disciplines are built upon equation based models or something related. This works great for math, great for physics, good for chemistry, and not great for biology, really bad for psych or econ. Equation based models have neat linear-causal thinking that simply fails in understanding complex systems in all but the most reductive questions. Most stem students leave hs/bachelors thinking the world is mostly linearly causal. Hell even most doctors think this way - like a mechanic. Discussing the world’s current set of wicked problems with these linear thinkers is unimaginably painful.