[justinlaster]

Insulting. But doesn't make it any less true or false. To presume that your average joe has bothered to play in the realm of academic, diligent logic and reason is a mistake. I am not saying you need to go into a university, I'm not claiming a piece of paper will lend you credibility in this regard. It's about the time and effort that people spend practicing these subjects.

How many people do you know outside of STEM that can comment on the characteristic of falsifiability of scientific theories? How many even bothered to take philosophy 101? How many have bothered to seriously invest themselves in substantive topics that will give them the tools and experience they need to make sound judgements in an array of different subjects?

We are talking about a society where in a large segment of the population does not believe credible scientific theories, and tend to latch onto what can and should be generally discarded viewpoints.

We (as a society) by and large do not hire people without basic math and reasoning skills; why do we suddenly pretend that these same qualifications should not be held in the justice system, or even entertain the idea that these qualifications should be raised to a higher standard. After all, juries sometimes have the power to ruin entire lives and families.

People's egos are not great bedrocks for their credibility and judgement to sit on. Let them be insulted.

[arethuza]

Do we have evidence that STEMers are paragons of logical reasonable minded virtue outside of their particular domains?

[shanemhansen]

You're getting downvoted, but over the last decade I've seen a pretty high number of STEMers that seem to confine their logical reasoning skills to very specific domains.

Example (I'll let you be the judge of which one is being irrational): I know STEMers who are adamant atheists. I also know STEMers who are pretty devout and think that science supports all of their beliefs.

For a less controversial example just look at the sheer amount of fashion trends that sweep through the programming community. Pushing those trends is literally a core function of this website. Just like many people in america jump from fad diet to fad diet , and we jump from fad framework to fad framework. The number of software engineering decisions we make that are based on actual software engineering research is vanishingly small.

Fellow STEMers please understand that you (and me) are human and very likely just as irrational and emotional as any other group of people. Ignoring that fact will lead to a false sense of superiority.

Theoretically science is supposed to be that paragon of reasoning where we attempt to falsify our beliefs and thereby make the more correct ones stronger, but my interaction with the academic world has made me realize that science is again mostly about developing relationships so that your papers will be favorably reviewed, publishing junk to make sure your boss thinks you are productive, and researching whatever the people paying your bills are interested in researching.

[fauigerzigerk]

I agree with almost all of what you're saying, but the question isn't whether or not STEMers are very rational people. The question is whether they are better equipped than the average person to understand and scrutinize a logical argument that is presented to them in court.

Being better at that than the average population isn't a very high bar. Yes we make a lot of irrational choices and often times we will defend them in pseudo rational terms. Flame wars abound.

But the meta debate about the standard of proof for our claims is never far away. It counts for something to be able to come up with some sort of test or empirical support. Every front page story about medical experiments inevitably has a comment thread about correlation vs causality and various sorts of possible biases.

Do you really want to be judged by people who never had these sorts of debates and never had to defend their own arguments against this sort of criticism?

[justinlaster]

You two are missing the point. See my reply to the parent comment of your post.

[vacri]

'Perfect' is the enemy of 'good'. Why does someone have to be a paragon to be considered better at the given task?

My friend is a foodie, but isn't a michelin-starred chef; does that mean that her cooking abilities and mine (= read instructions on packet) are equivalent?

[sebastos]

If we did, who would you ask to validate that it was statistically significant?

[justinlaster]

Science and technology would not be the fields that they are without such virtues. Your question is odd, the answer is kind of blatantly obvious.

I am not saying these people are infallible, I am saying that they are obviously equipped with better tooling and experience to make such judgements than someone who has no serious experience in dealing with "hard" subjects.

It was probably a mistake for me to explicitly list "STEM", but I thought it would hopefully convey my point a bit better. We live in an extremely technology oriented society, so it's a rather important subject to be decently versed in. However, a good, invested effort into the subject of philosophy would definitely be more than sufficient to make up for people's knowledge and reasoning errors.

Are we going to pretend this is not the case?

[wfo]

I've seen a lot of STEM people go on thinking they are kings of logic, reason, even correct thought. All the others in the world are lesser beings, humanities scum who don't understand what /reason/ is, or anything about SCIENCE. I hope your degree in the arts was good career-prep for the rest of your life preparing coffee for me and my fellow engineers, peasant! Then they write books like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion and philosophers who have been thinking about these topics laugh at them, and they don't understand why. The subject was simple! Obviously so, for if it were difficult, it would be STEM! Philosophers should be grateful a STEM expert such has Dawkins spent his precious time on their puny insignificant domain, a great man who sees a room is dark and decides to, for the first time, light a torch illuminating features that have remained dark for centuries. A question open and unresolved, bickered about by lesser beings like Kant and Russell and Liebniz and Descartes (STEM people as well, but made impure by the fact that they considered themselves philosophers first) until finally, thankfully, someone in STEM thought about it for a moment and told us the answer.

Yet we realize quickly this is not what happened. Instead of shining new light, Dawkins stumbles through a dark room, knocking over furniture, breaking vases and china. He stubs his toe and says "did you know you had a table here?" He steps on a housecat and hears a squeak, then quietly and calmly uses his superior STEM intellect to draw a deduction: a pet would have moved out of the way before being stepped on, and a single rat would have as well. He tells the owner his home is infested with thousands of rats. It was, after all, the most logical deduction at the time. Who could blame him for simply stating what's most likely to be the truth? He is promptly asked to leave.

In most of real life (i.e. the sphere of life where events are determined by human relationships and decisions, including but not limited to the law) deductive logic and scientific theory is about as useful as this (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.07820.pdf) is to someone building a bridge.

It is actually worse, because knowledge of deduction (and things like 'syllogism' or 'logical fallacies' even) impart often times little more of use than obnoxious hubris and a false sense of superiority, a severely off-putting and unhelpful sense about the world that endears its holders to no-one and makes collaboration difficult; camaraderie impossible.

[vacri]

Quite a chip on your shoulder there. And the irony is that you ping others for deciding who is the king of correct thought, while kingmaking yourself.

[wfo]

No irony here, I don't kingmake, simply deflate arrogance -- one of life's most pleasurable pastimes.

[vacri]

Does Dawkins spend much time on HN? How do you see his arrogance being deflated by this comment?

You talk about philosophy as though it's a subject close to your heart, yet you seem to define "a lot of STEM people" as being "Richard Dawkins", not to mention making the false dichotomy that STEM people and philosophers have no overlap.

I've also never heard anyone complain of Dawkins denigrating arts degrees before. Have you a reference for that? Because it seems like you're unjustly projecting an awful lot onto the man.

[justinlaster]

I think you're full of yourself.

[dilemma]

>But doesn't make it any less true or false. To presume that your average joe has bothered to play in the realm of academic, diligent logic and reason is a mistake.

To presume that your average academic has is likewise a mistake.

[justinlaster]

It makes it far more likely.