askchapo

I would dispute this:

The 20th century streak of breakthroughs in science, especially physics and engineering, has ended, and relatively little (in comparison) has come from some the 21st century's major research paths such as the search for dark matter/energy or for a theory of quantum gravity.

There have been a huge number of breakthroughs in the last 25 years. They've been in, and fueled by Information Science and technology and accelerated by the advances in communications technology.

We haven't found a complete theory of Quantum gravity, but aided by supercomputers and we did successfully detect gravity waves. The paper publishing this result has more than 1000 authors from all over the planet acknowledging the scale of the collaboration that went in to achieving that result.

Do you know how much less efficient it would have been for 1000 academics from all around the world to collaborate on a project of that scale in 1910? 1970? even since 1999 things like practically free video conference calls anywhere anytime and storing petabytes of data, let alone sending petabytes of data across the world in a matter of hours have became possible.

New theories on dark matter/energy are spawned weekly from tweaking the variables in immensely complex computer simultations of the development of the universe until they find something that fits observed reality (or as close as the model can come).

The theories, technology and infrastructure that enables these have been largely developed and are continuing to develop at an accelerating pace over the last 25 years. I don't believe that STEM has stagnated. It's just advancing in different directions than it did 100 years ago.

I don't think philosophy has been killed in stem, it is just that they are fed bits and pieces of it, without context of the whole, and in an incredibly purposeful way meant to counter revolutionary dialectical materialism.

For example, the engineering business philosophies driving global industry such as Deming or Shewart are ways of attempting to create a communistic ownership mindset within a company without actually giving ownership of production to the workers in order to have a better control over variability in production.

Deming straight up identifies poor management as being the primary cause of poor quality in products, and blamed basically all the things that we know are caused by capitalism without actually naming the beast itself. It is statistically driven Marxism without economic or class analysis, and in direct contrast to libertarian religious theory of what drives innovation. Of course, because of this, Deming is unable to come to a definitive reasoning as to why quality doesn't ever arise spontaneously in American corporations, but it is all there, it just needs to be put together with a spirit of revolution. But that doesn't usually happen because engineers in this country are still fairly well paid, move up quickly into management positions, and are also on the whole denser than tungsten when it comes to putting philosophical ideas together into a coherent whole.

I don't think it was as much of a conscious effort. Natural philosophy started formalizing into our modern conception of science, as an institution, right around Marx's time. I think Marx was attempting to formalize social/political philosophy into science as well. The formalization of physical science was welcomed and social science was not, for obvious reasons.

Industrialization saw technology opening the door for further abstraction of slavery and new arrangements between labor and capital. It wasn't long after that developing new technology became an end in itself. Industry had to cozy up to academic science in order to feed itself new technologies. That's exactly what happened. By this time we're in the 20th century and industrialists are creating need with technology. The government uses its centralized resources to subsidize science for industry. Science becomes part of the military as well.

A "secular" science, separated from philosophy, was inevitable under capitalism. You don't need a philosophy guiding science when you think industrialists are the ones who should guide science.

I would also argue that philosophy as a whole wasn't disregarded by capital. It's going to keep what it finds useful for propaganda. Go into a business administration school and you will hear plenty of philosophy. The philosophy of science, however, was largely disregarded because it doesn't help produce technology for industry.

One thing I’ve noticed is that back when I was a kid, before the term STEM was in use, when people talked about science and engineering it was all about what they produced. An engineer was great because they figured out how to make the more efficient, more reliable widget that would make our lives easier and more productive. It was all about the use value. Sure, they’d make a decent living doing so, but that was secondary to what they produced or discovered. This was the tail end of the Cold War, when capital propaganda was putting an emphasis on claiming quality of life was better under capitalism than state socialism.

In the post-Cold War era though, without that existential question looming over the political economy, it’s shifted to STEM as great because the graduates will make a lot of money. It doesn’t matter if the engineering graduate will just go work for Wall Street figuring out new ways to shift piles of money around while skimming off the top every time and isn’t making anything with use value. Capitalism doesn’t need to prove itself anymore so it just focuses on maximizing profit extraction.

So in this context, philosophy is devalued as it is both seen as not leading to big incomes, but also because it’s treated as asking a question that’s already been settled. It’s the liberal “End of History” mentality, if the big debate of society and political economy has been settled, then what good is philosophy except for navel gazing and intellectual parlor games?

So yeah, I think the dearth of philosophical understanding among STEM majors contributes to the lack of serious scientific progress (aside: if you want to tilt a STEMlord, point out that science is just empirical philosophy applied), but I think it’s a reflection of a general attitude that true progress isn’t necessary. Oh sure, there’s lip service to surface level social progress and having a slightly faster iPhone every two years, but not transformative progress. Liberalism doesn’t want another industrial revolution because that would be another reordering of the class structure and hierarchy.

Perhaps of interest:

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy:How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy

It has made it worse but the mechanisms are different. Science and engineering under capitalism has had a few major thrusts over the last century:

1. Capital itself doing the research to create products that require less labor and therefore temporarily increase their own mass of profit. Industrial capitalism's marriage to applied research.

2. Universities and independent consortia providing a link to academia that does similar work, often funded by industry, but doing basic research. The premise being that some tech doesn't come from myopic applied researcg, it comes from 1 in 50 basic research ideas and they want in on the ground floor. This also creates a researcher worker subclass that can transition to industry, preferably the company that funded them.

3. The state became more involved as part of an anticommunist push. It pumped much greater amounts of capital into centralized, coordinated work than industrial capitalists could ever muster.

4. Imperialism depemds on technological advantage, so there is coordination between capital and the state there.

Philosophy was not a driving force for any of this. Capital is front and center. Capital has no interest in anticapitalist thought, including some aspects of philosophy, aside from sometimes producing propaganda against it when it looks a little threatening. Without piles of cash, the study of philosophy is left in the margins. The cash drives who gets attention, including by faculty and administrators.

Even the small number of lefty academics was too scary for the feds so they did several red scares and purged them. In that vacuum you get a liberal shift.

Finally, the CIA used cutouts to fund and promote anticommunist thought of various kinds through academics and journalists. They don't need to convince the academics to be anticommunist, they just need to ensure anticommunist academics have an easy time becoming influential.

During all of this, liberalism became increasingly hegemonic in these circles and even outside of them. Most academics participate in this project without even knowing it. It just seems natural to them to study their field and follow the money that lets them do things in it. Rarely do they actually have sufficiently independent thought that they receive ire from funders, but they are always aware of what gets them money and what doesn't.

Finally, much of social sciences was sanitized during the red scare. Many fields have Marxist concepts, they just don't get recognized as such, they are robbed of their revolutionary character. So academics will study a topic and succeed in it but have wrong ideas about how it works, as you do not need to actually understand the philosophy of your field to engage in the heuristics of research methodology and oiblish results.

I think you're right. I think arts, humanities, and social sciences should be required along with STEM courses.

Yes, capitalism makes everything worse