As a STEM graduate, I would much rather hold hands with an econ graduate than a business graduate. Economists can do real good for the world, while MBAs seem to be mostly harmful.
The real problem is believing there’s an objective difference between art, science, humanities, etc. It’s an artificial division under capitalism between what’s directly useful for profit, control, etc. and what’s not.
Regardless, yeah fuck business school. That’s got no value to anybody.
Who is holding them up in the sky?
Astrology!
Stem major checking in for an arts/humanities major to hold hands with
Good, an MBA is just a degree in exploitation. I will fight you over this take like a goddamn racoon over the last piece of food in the dumpster.
People are often young and naive when they choose what to study. There are some decent people and some assholes among business majors, just like with most other groups of people if you look closely.
Econ is for soothsayers, idiots, cultists and abusers, don’t bother to change my mind.
the entrails say… “something, something, irrational exuberance”
I find the field is only good when combined with humanities as a focal point, e.g. economic history or economic anthropology. It needs grounded otherwise it goes full American Psycho.
Yeah but an MBA is also a post graduate degree. A huge chunk of MBAs have undergrad degrees in something like STEM or humanities.
And with the power of that knowledge they decided to specialize and get a masters of exploitation.
We gotta have an economy to function as a society but the rub of economics in the West is that if it acknowledged why the economy functions the way it does, it would be peeling the facade off our supposedly democratic system of governance and folks would start taking a much keener interest in why wealth is getting so concentrated. We can’t have that, so instead we get increasingly elaborate versions of economic Lamarckism and the field’s Darwins are ostracized as cranks.
Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can’t write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It’s fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.
Then there’s business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, “business school” wouldn’t even be an option at a university.
Not to knock college undergrad core curriculum, but that strong base ought to be acquired before graduating high school.
That’s what I’ve been saying since I was in high school. Going into college, the first year felt like High School 2.0. My English professor outright asked, “Why are you in this class? I have nothing I can teach you.” Funny how we can take a test after admission to show us which subjects we need remedial classes for, but no test for us to opt-out of subjects that we’ve already mastered. Still gotta take our money and waste our time because, you know, “requirements.”
Edit: I’ve heard some people say there are opt-out tests some places, but that clearly isn’t the default. Not at the community college I went to.
No can do, gotta teach students how to pass the tests that gives the school federal funding
It irks me to no end when STEM majors can’t write, communicate,
I do have to say that humanities majors do not seem to be any better. Ask most of them to provide definitions that they use, or to communicate how they arrive at their conclusions, and quite often they will be unable to do either.
but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics
Why? In particular, why should an engineer have an understanding of how to study systems of ethics, and what first- and second-order ethics frameworks there are?
just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.
As a mathematician by education, I would also like to ask, why? What would an average historian gain from knowing that a continuous image of a compact is a compact, or that, if a diffeomorphism’s rank is less than the maximum possible one, we can construct a diffeomorphism of the same degree of continuity that works with fewer coordinates in either the domain, the codomain, or both?
The world is powered by a collective STEAM engine:
Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics.
Arts is such a fundamental component for communicating advancements and inspiring the creativity that fuels further discoveries.
But, but KPI’s are how we know line go up.
Checkmate, artists!
The artists can assist by drawing a line that goes more up. Problem solved!
Notably, an esthetically pleasing line!
Can your esthetics be reduced into a number so we can put it in a line?
Yeah, didn’t thing so…
Now, get some philosopher to understand that “meta-kpi” thing. Where does it end? Where does it start? And make them reduce both to a number so we can use their work.
MBAs have destroyed the world. We used to have good paying jobs and affordable rent.
I’m sure there’s probably a few good MBA’s out there, using applied psychology to trick assholes into spending their money on the greater good.
I’ve never met one but, statistically, you know?
Hi, 'tis me, leftist with a business degree and minor in psychology that works in marketing. 🙃
I’ve considered working in marketing, but I refuse to use my powers for evil.
“You know, spending money on welfare and education is a lot less expensive than prisons and having your stuff stolen.”
“Leftist”
.world account
Let me guess, you would have voted for Obama a third time if you could?
Businesses would not be terrible if business education is actually tempered with some humanities. In fact, I am strongly of the opinion that every field of study should have some humanities component to them. None of the fields exist in vacuum, we have to have at least, some appreciation of other fields, lest we risk creating silos in the name of organization. And that is precisely happening in this age of hyper-specialization.
They would be terrible anyway, because competition rewards business fucking over their employees and customers.
Businesses would not be terrible if business education is actually tempered with some humanities.
That’s obviously not true. For businesses to not be terrible, they would have to not operate on the profit motive, which is impossible.
In fact, I am strongly of the opinion that every field of study should have some humanities component to them.
Why? And what disciplines do you want to force people to pass exams in, even if they have no bearing on a person’s skills in the area that they actually chose?
we have to have at least, some appreciation of other fields
Also, why?
That’s obviously not true. For businesses to not be terrible, they would have to not operate on the profit motive, which is impossible.
There are many approaches for a business to be both good and also make profit. Just as an example, in the periods of comfort, they can focus only on profit. However, in the times of crisis, businesses can instead focus on doing social good, instead of profit, until things go back to normal. This can be in the form helping people in need during floods, hurricanes, etc. Of course, there are many approaches to this and I am giving just an illustrative examples, but thing is many small businesses around the world do this because many people put humanity first and profit second, especially in the times of crises.
And what disciplines do you want to force people to pass exams in, even if they have no bearing on a person’s skills in the area that they actually chose?
I am really sorry if you don’t enjoy exams, because I also hate exams. To make my argument about why, I believe, we need to be educated in humanities, first I just want to focus on the question what is the purpose of education. I strongly believe that the education helps us to be a better human being, beyond just being a better doctor or a better software developer or a better engineer. Being a good human being, I believe, transcends being a skilled doctor or engineer, etc. I am going to try to give an example from Civil Engineering to try to illustrate it. In India (where I am from and have been living my entire life), there are still villages where the access to basic necessities like clean water, electricity are either absent or rarely available. Now, when the government is planning a project to provide a more reliable access to these resources, the responsibility falls on the Engineering Team to design the project, including costs and the benefits. Beyond just the monetary cost-benefit analysis, or maybe the environmental impact (which are inevitable), there are also societal issues that are important, but are left out during the planning? But, a study in humanities will give these issues the weight it deserves. For example, caste system is a major issue in India, with population of even the tiniest villages are split into two or sometimes more groups: the so-called “upper” (let’s just called them oppressors) castes and the “lower” (let’s call them oppressed) castes. So, as it happens, the oppressors might establish a monopoly over the fresh water that reaches the village due to aforementioned project. So, despite the project providing some benefit, to the oppressors, it provides almost no benefit to the oppressed class. No engineer would consider these kinds of societal issues while designing the project, despite knowing about the casteism and understanding it’s consequences because they are not educated to combine their engineering skills and know-how with the casteism. Systematic Humanities education might actually help Engineers to understand these issues at a deeper level and might inform them on how to proceed with the project, while at least trying to mitigate the caste situation in some way.
I am trying to go beyond the exams and the academic degrees for this because the most of the life of an engineer (or a doctor, etc) is spent on practice, i.e., designing, planning and executing projects (or something equivalent). These projects should not just have economic utility, but also social utility or at least should not have negative social utility. Consider the impact of plastics, fossil fuel and their pollution on the society and individuals. However, for decades, we gladly kept building new roads to accommodate more vehicles purchased by rich people, despite knowing about them. My hope is that with a humanities education, it will make more engineers to evaluate the social utility of their projects and not just the economic utility. One interesting theory that I came across was in a book called “Development As Freedom” by Amartya Sen, a Noble Prize winning economist. In the book, he puts forward the idea that “Economic Development must increase the freedoms of individuals and society”. In essence, contrary to popular measures of economic development like GDP, Per Capita Income, he straight-up wants to quantify (or at least qualitatively) the impact of economic and market activity through their social utility.
In essence, all human activity has the goal to serve the humans (both individual and society), this world and the nature we live in. But, if we don’t appreciate this at all, can we really work towards benefiting as many people at possible, while at the same time, try to minimize or even offset the damage (both social and environmental) caused, without a humanities education, that by definition deals with humanity, both individually and as a collective?
P.S. Sorry for the long reply, but I really wanted to try to present my argument in greater detail. Not in the hope of changing your mind, but just to make you understand where my stance on this matter is coming from. Also, I am not saying that everyone should be an expert in all the fields of humanities. All I am trying to say is that with a little bit of humanities education, I just want everyone to gain some appreciation of humanities and what they do and how important it really is.
100%.
Children are always told that they could become a scientist or engineer one day and that this would be a great thing to achieve. Scientists and engineers are so highly regarded, yet they are often complicit in creating the necessary technology and machinery for most of the worlds worst projects. Climate change, plastic pollution, nuclear weapons, are all created by the worlds smartest and all the while they’re being told they’re doing a great job and bettering the world.
Ethics needs to be mandatory in all STEM studies. Jesus at least just make them watch Oppenheimer.
Ethics is largely mandatory for engineering majors (source: am finishing my bachelor’s in electrical engineering), but the first job or project you take will ask you to throw that out the window. (Source: family members who are also engineers)
There are two areas of safety considered: Operator/client safety, and regulatory compliance. All other safeguards are optional and ignoring them is encouraged.
Good point, there was also an ethics module in my engineering studies, but it didn’t really encourage you to think about where you’re employed, just what to do what you’re there. Which is useless
As a civil engineer with only a tiny bit of experience cos I switched to software. That holds true. Environmental and other ethical concerns are not even an afterthought in vast majority of engineering projects.
As a civil engineer with only a tiny bit of experience cos I switched to software.
Holy shit, I’m not the only one?!
I think this is true of most civil engineering majors I know. After getting their degrees, very few actually ended up working in civil engineering because the money was better in software or other tech.
I had very little ethics being taught in my academic career. Most of what i know is high school level philosophy (from a country that still used to care about that stuff but aiming to change it soon). I would have loved more humanity courses. On the other hand, if you had given me the choice between a course in my speciality and a humanity course, I would have chose the specialty one every time
Funny you should say that, because those very humanities aspects of what I studied, Economics, leads STEM students to disparage it as a non-scientific field built of gospel and tenets. As if Humanities diminished the quality of the research and teaching within the Economics field.
So while I agree, and it’s good to see you being upvoted, in a different scenario the application of your thoughts about this will lead the person sharing their experience to getting massively downvoted in an attempt to shame them for being a “soft science”.
Big gripe of mine is the distinction of “soft” and “hard” science. I’m a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn’t mean it’s automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can’t exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don’t exist outside of human society
Exactly! So many people assume the science of economics is unfounded because of what some purported “economists” say online or because of some already-irrelevant methodologies the science has abandoned for years already…
The most egregious problem being assuming that the methodology isn’t sound and scientific, and that it instead depends on the whims of the researcher (here they would place researcher in quotation marks, I imagine).
I have had to do game theory, statistics, econometrics, data science (thanks to my chosen specialisation), a lot of math especially about optimisations and linear algebra… And the quality of the academic research is empirical. Rarely will you even find a paper that only uses qualitative data in economics, except maybe in the behavioural economics field. Most often we use natural experiments to replicate RCTs within a macro environment, or double-blind experiments to investigate an economic agent’s systemic preferences and responses within a micro environment…
People who complain about the superficiality of the “soft sciences” have never stepped foot in a class beyond the very basics of that subject taught in highschool. They therefore project their current knowledge on the entire field, marring it…
I really do wish humanities were not actually considered as ‘lesser’ to the sciences. But I have actually found it to be greater of the sciences, simply because of the importance and the difficulty of questions it tackles. I have spent a fairly long time reading on philosophy, history, economics. I am not an expert, in fact, I am really far from it, but I have really come to an understanding the importance of these fields. But that’s just me. Most just consider them not important because they don’t understand. I just hope that we can rectify with better academic curriculum.
Part of the issue is that the quality of the research is often really low, just a jumble of untested and untestable hypotheses that certain ‘scientists’ in these fields try to push and that get traction because they sound good. On some level it comes with the subject matter that is typically very hard to research, but too many people in these fields are entirely lacking in scientific rigour.
Source: I studied sociology and history in university.
I remember joking to my philosophy teacher that my first choice for a major was business but…
Yeah lol fuck those entitled popped collar frat shitheads that were born into wealth and have zero compassion, oh and did I mention their racism
you’d like that wouldn’t you
As a marketeer, I’m fine with that!
booooooooo
Yes, yes, release your anger!
Arts/humanities majors are useless. Nobody needs them. Nobody wants them. Except for McDonald’s, drug dealer and a crematorium.
^ business school level education.
Another Lembot? Must be a cursed production line…
They keep getting banned for horrendous opinions and make a new account every month or two. I just find it amusing that they figured they’d get banned around 10000 times so they preemptively used 4 digits in their username
10000 times so they preemptively used 4 digits in their username
Wait it hasn’t been shown that this is a decimal system, it might be up to 65,536 in hexadecimal
