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by spaceman_2020 1118 days ago
They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them.

Remove the ability to get well paying engineering/medicine jobs from the equation and they’ll treat STEM education with the same disdain they have for commerce, or worse, humanities.

There is very little real appreciation of education. Only its byproducts, namely, jobs.

3 comments

Completely agree with this statement. I work in HFT and have Indians asking me all the time: "what should I do to get a quant job or a low latency C++ job?". 99.9% of these folks have zero interest in Math (good luck being a quant) or have zero interest/passion in low level systems programming (good luck developing low latency systems). All they care about is the prestige and high pay in the HFT industry, and that if they can have a exam-like route to crack the interviews, they'll go forth and cram the hell out of things. No thanks, we don't want folks like that.
Then why don't the firms have a psychological evaluation to ensure that only people who are passionate about math or low level programming are hired in such firms? Seems like a win win situation since such folks can nurture their interest, mingle with other like minded folks and company also benefits by their efforts.
> They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them.

Second sentence disagrees with the first sentence.

I prompted GPT-4 on ChatGPT with the following

> I read an internet comment that said "They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them." The second sentence seems to contradict the first. Can you explain if it does?

And it gave quite a good explanation. If you'd like I can share the chat, but perhaps you'd like to give it a shot yourself?

You don't have to like cows to like milk.
You don't have to like something to value it.
Distinction without a difference.