Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

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Looking out from this moment in history, if I wanted to prepare someone for the future, STEM wouldn't be the main focus. I know it's anathema to say. In a world where computers fold proteins and predict programmer's intentions, the value of technical knowledge is showing decay.

In the world we're hurtling toward, we don't need people who can recite the Pythagorean theorem. We need people who can cooperate with other humans, who can leverage technology to achieve their goals and who can evaluate information critically. Throw money at THOSE problems.

Personally, I think the most devastating impact of COVID will prove to be the shift of younger people's focus from the social realm to the technical/virtual. Imagine an entire generation specialized in playing Minecraft, making YouTube videos and scripting Python Discord bots... All the while, AI embeds deeper in government, gains control of resource production and perfects the mechanisms of social control.

I could not have designed a simulation with the goal of a cyberpunk outcome, better. High tech, low life. Hey, at least I know how to do long division in my apartment, alone.

> We need people who can cooperate with other humans, who can leverage technology to achieve their goals and who can evaluate information critically. Throw money at THOSE problems.

Sounds to me like you want some science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum.

I was leaning more towards curriculum that trains being able to feel and act on empathy. You know, like art or whatever.

We never needed people who can recite the Pythagorean theorem. We need people who can prove it. When you have a population who doesn't understand how the world works and is taught to simply believe facts given from on high, it is relatively easy to change who those facts come from, and in an age of easy publication via social media, this has been weaponized.

I would say a strong counter to your argument is that Covid highlighted the need for much better STEM education, because of how painfully obvious it was that so many do not understand "the science". That's in quotes because that's the phrase that was bandied about so often.

> I would say a strong counter to your argument is that Covid highlighted the need for much better STEM education, because of how painfully obvious it was that so many do not understand "the science".

I'd argue that information literacy is more important. I know plenty of STEM-credentialed people who might have insight into their narrow STEM field, but are effectively data illiterate when it comes to evaluating data that's from outside of their field of expertise.

Even then, I don't think the majority of the people that COVID exposed as "not understanding the science" really don't understand it. It's just that they don't care. We're mistaking their lack of giving a shit about the truth for a genuine misunderstanding of the science.

Definitely agree that it's a data literacy problem. But I consider that part of STEM education. For example, people should be able to look at plots of daily infections early in the pandemic and consider that they likely are growing at an exponential rate and the implications for that, rather than dismissing the dangers because the daily case numbers are still small. And understand how false positive and false negative rates of tests implicate policy decisions.

But you are ultimately correct in that most people don't really care to understand it.

I don't think science education is going to help the particular problems we have. Understanding science doesn't change anything if you don't trust the institution running the experiments, and it's become very clear that a large percentage of the population doesn't trust the institutions we have.

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