Lets be clear, STEM is what put us on the top of the food chain. Without the ability to engineer tools like spears and axes we would have been obliterated by saber toothed tigers. The humanities are good for making the world prettier but are absolutely useless for actually living in it. A painting can't cure illnesses. A song can't produce enough food to sustain our species. Without STEM we all die.
Lets be clear, STEM is what put us on the top of the food chain. Without the ability to engineer tools like spears and axes we would have been obliterated by saber toothed tigers. The humanities are good for making the world prettier but are absolutely useless for actually living in it. A painting can't cure illnesses. A song can't produce enough food to sustain our species. Without STEM we all die.
Without humanities, humans can't survive, full stop. Without humanities, there is no knowledge to create hunting groups, no societies or ways to improve societeis, no language to create STEM. I'm not saying STEM isn't also important, but your assessment of humanities is nothing more than a caricature. We need both.
A head with no heart is a cold machine. A heart with no head is a wild animal. But, if you had to choose, which is more important?
I think it is a little too easy to say that the head is overworking, and that the heart should speak more, but many of the institutions we've come to rely on and associate with humanity majors and social science are just that: science. Law, economy, and leadership are all important cultural facets that owe at least some part of their development to STEM. Without logic to temper it, emotion can quickly turn into a fire. I think the recent chaos that has swept parts of the world shows how blinding emotions can become and how much a culture suffers when the social sciences it relies on fail it.
The simple fact is that humans are social creatures, and anything that betters society betters all of humanity. However, we need science and technology to protect that society and solve its problems, or else it will eventually die on its own.
Without humanities, humans can't survive, full stop. Without humanities, there is no knowledge to create hunting groups, no societies or ways to improve societeis, no language to create STEM. I'm not saying STEM isn't also important, but your assessment of humanities is nothing more than a caricature. We need both.
You seem to be misinterpreting my comment as one that is anti humanities. In fact, I believe the humanities are what make life enjoyable and actually worth living. No, my comment was a response to the insinuation that there can be a world with only the STEM students gone. There can't. Our machines would break down and then we would have nothing to compete with the forces of nature that are just eager to knock us off our pedestal. Humans are extraordinarily inept at surviving on their own. We have no claws, no fangs, no venom. We don't have armor, quills or camouflage. Language is hella useful but the amount of usefulness it provides when hunting a dear is almost negligible. And keep in mind that we would have to hunt it bare handed because, again, it's hard to make tools if everyone who tries becomes "gone". Assuming we aren't decimated by predators, we would most certainly die of starvation and exposure. And that is a problem humanities students can't provide an answer for.
You seem to be misinterpreting my comment as one that is anti humanities. In fact, I believe the humanities are what make life enjoyable and actually worth living. No, my comment was a response to the insinuation that there can be a world with only the STEM students gone. There can't. Our machines would break down and then we would have nothing to compete with the forces of nature that are just eager to knock us off our pedestal. Humans are extraordinarily inept at surviving on their own. We have no claws, no fangs, no venom. We don't have armor, quills or camouflage. Language is hella useful but the amount of usefulness it provides when hunting a dear is almost negligible. And keep in mind that we would have to hunt it bare handed because, again, it's hard to make tools if everyone who tries becomes "gone". Assuming we aren't decimated by predators, we would most certainly die of starvation and exposure. And that is a problem humanities students can't provide an answer for.
I’m a little confuse by what you mean “gone”. Do you mean like, anyone who tried to pick up a tool will just go poof? Because if that was the case it will imply supernatural.
If supernatural is indeed a factor, then that really changes everything. If supernatural is put into the mix, then all the science and bullshit can be thrown out the window and instead we focus on supernatural and humans will become even more powerful than before.
Yes, no more relying on all that science and math garbage. We can now use the power of god and anime and nothing can stop us! Ahahaha!
And on another note, what will be consider a tool that will make the human be gone? If it is just any tool, that would mean picking up a stick would be enough to go poof, yeah? Or is just the thought that something is a tool, that cause the gone? Cause of that was the case, it seems like humanity will be done for regardless since the human body is just a tool. The human penis for example is a tool of conquest and reproduction and if holding it cause people to be gone, then there isn’t much left to live for anyway.
On a more serious note, I still place humanities above STEM. True, it will be hard to survive without tools but it will be impossible to survive as a species without a sort of social interactive system. Hunting a deer with your bare hands might be hard, but having 10 hands and not having those 10 hands on each others neck is very important and to do that, you need a way to communicate. It also makes it easier to hunt a deer if there is cooperation, as you can see from most pack predators like lions. If you mean survival as a single person, then yes those tools are very important. If you mean survival as a species, then it is through human society that ensures the survival of the race.
I’m a little confuse by what you mean “gone”. Do you mean like, anyone who tried to pick up a tool will just go poof? Because if that was the case it will imply supernatural.
If supernatural is indeed a factor, then that really changes everything. If supernatural is put into the mix, then all the science and bullshit can be thrown out the window and instead we focus on supernatural and humans will become even more powerful than before.
Yes, no more relying on all that science and math garbage. We can now use the power of god and anime and nothing can stop us! Ahahaha!
And on another note, what will be consider a tool that will make the human be gone? If it is just any tool, that would mean picking up a stick would be enough to go poof, yeah? Or is just the thought that something is a tool, that cause the gone? Cause of that was the case, it seems like humanity will be done for regardless since the human body is just a tool. The human penis for example is a tool of conquest and reproduction and if holding it cause people to be gone, then there isn’t much left to live for anyway.
On a more serious note, I still place humanities above STEM. True, it will be hard to survive without tools but it will be impossible to survive as a species without a sort of social interactive system. Hunting a deer with your bare hands might be hard, but having 10 hands and not having those 10 hands on each others neck is very important and to do that, you need a way to communicate. It also makes it easier to hunt a deer if there is cooperation, as you can see from most pack predators like lions. If you mean survival as a single person, then yes those tools are very important. If you mean survival as a species, then it is through human society that ensures the survival of the race.
IDK man, the book says gone so that's what I'm saying. I took it as being supernatural because I can't see any way to get rid of all STEM now and in the future without some sort of supernatural intervention. And yes it would necessarily mean all science would have to be thrown out because anyone who doesn't throw it out would go poof. Also keep in mind the study of the supernatural is a science, (in order to understand it, one would have to conduct tests and experiments to see what works) so trying to harness it would be impossible.
As for your question of what constitutes a tool, the E in STEM stands for engineering which is the process of designing and building something. Therefore I believe that if a tool isn't designed or built it would be safe to use. That being said, the objects in nature are very rarely found to suit our specific needs. How often do you go out in nature and find an already perfectly sharpened stick that is balanced and aerodynamic enough to be thrown reliably through the air? How often do you find a branch with enough weight on one side to actually be useful as a club while at the same time having an appropriate circumference on the other side to actually be held properly. These conveniently appropriate natural tools are so rare it would be unwise to stoke your survival on the chance that you might find one.
Also, hunting a deer with your hands might be hard? What, do you think you can punch it to death? And it will just let you? First of all, animals have far superior senses and are capable of hearing or smelling or seeing us from a mile away. Secondly, most of them are faster than we are and once they sense our presence would bolt in the opposite direction. Thirdly, all animals will not hesitate to fight back if flight is not an option. If you somehow manage to surround one of these animals, that is the point when they start trying to stomp and kick you, or worse, gore you with the spikes coming out of their head!. No, hunting a deer with your hands is impossible. Lions have claws and enough bite force to snap a deer's neck. Their ability to cooperate is almost inconsequential by comparison.
*Humans actually have four major physical specialties outside of our intelligence: We have the best range of mobility of almost any animal (we're far from the best at running, climbing, or swimming, but there are very few animals on earth that are decent at all three at once), we have the best throwing ability of anything on earth (other monkeys and apes can pick stuff up and chuck them, but no animal can throw objects as far or as accurately as we can; even if we weren't allowed to craft tools, a fist-sized rock is enough to give us a potent attack from a much longer range than any other animal can manage) we have incredibly good endurance (hunter-gatherers to this day can still kill a deer with more or less their bare hands by just tracking it and following it until it passes out from exhaustion, then strangling it once it's too tired to fight back), and we can recover from injuries more reliably than most animals (A human can lose half of their blood and recover from it with time and good medical care, but most animals will die from shock with only 10% blood loss). The popular assumption that modern humans are totally helpless without technology is just flat-out wrong - or at the very least, it's only true to the extent that most of us never learn how to use our natural strengths, rather than those natural strengths not being there to begin with.
*Since the "Social Sciences" like psychology, anthropology, and economics, among others, are often thought of as "not STEM", a removal of STEM wouldn't necessarily mean a removal of all scientific process or thought. Yes, the S in STEM literally stands for "Science", but the kinds of people who put STEM on a pedestal and use it as an excuse to shit on humanities (which are probably the people someone who fantasizes about "a world with no STEM" actually wants gone) tend to devote a lot of energy trying to define what is or is not "real" science. Trying to imagine what the social sciences would look like with no math allowed would be a headache in the making, but the point is that what exactly would go away in a STEM-less world is not as clear-cut as it would look at first glance. I mean hell, there are people out there trying to argue that Chemical Engineering is somehow "not STEM".
*Here's my take on what "a world with no STEM Students" would entail: STEM as we know it today, and specifically the assertion that STEM is somehow "superior" to the humanities, was an invention by conservative deans and board-of-directors members designed to deny girls the prestige that came with being college educated when girls started enrolling in college in large numbers. At first, it was the arts and humanities that girls primarily gravitated towards, so all of a sudden they were "frivolous" and "useless". By a few decades later, the college population as a whole had become mostly female, and this change was most noticeable in the social sciences - so all of a sudden those weren't "real science" anymore, while the "STEM" sciences were the only degrees that actually meant anything - and were also "coincidentally" the last fields where the students were almost entirely boys. And you can still track this process happening to this very day - as more boys choose not to go to college (or drop out after a year or two) and the total college population skews more and more heavily towards girls, each field naturally gets more female students compared to male students, and once a field passes a critical ratio of girls to boys (not even 50/50 - just enough that the girls studying that field can no longer be considered the "exception to the rule"), that field suddenly grows a crowd of trolls insisting that it's "not a real science" and shouldn't qualify as STEM anymore. It happened to Biology a while back, and now it's hitting Chem Eng (or as the trolls are calling it now, "Fem Eng"). Therefore, a "world with no STEM Students" would simply be a world in which every academic field simply has too many girls in it to be ignored. This will probably happen on its own in 20-30 years given current trends, but if we wanted to get supernatural about it, the obvious line is to just get rid of the boys. I personally vote for crop-dusting college campuses with Mihari's shady drugs. Make sure to hit the deans and execs too - they probably need the change in perspective more than anyone!
Humanities students know the answerWorld with only the STEM students gone
