Perspective

Ex Cathedra: Is Having More STEM Majors a Good Thing?

In my last article I outlined a number of things that the scientific establishment is doing to undermine its own positions and credibility. One of the biggest problems science has, and this is true of all academia as well, is that it is simply not big enough to support all the people who want to work in it.

So isn’t the solution to this more federal funding for the sciences? Is it to encourage more women and minorities to enter the STEM fields? Is it H1B visas to Indians and the Chinese?

Nope.

The solution is to allow fewer people to major in a science.

People on the right often mock the SJW oriented classes of the humanities and arts as being bad investments. You won’t hear any complaints from me about this. Most of the liberal arts have become social justice toilets, centers of political correctness, and yes, anti-Western and anti-white sentiments that are often seen as being cool by the (mostly) white students who major in them.

They’re a good way to throw away a lot of money and time. And if the right does not respond to the left’s move on the sciences they will go the same way. Indeed if the left succeeds in taking the name of science for itself it will become a powerful weapon against us in the future.

The sciences are unique. They are in no uncertain terms the origin of the West’s success in the post-Enlightenment world. In a society where materialism and consumption are king, you have to have something to spend the tax cuts the neocons promise you on something right?

But science is under attack, not by the religious right, or young Earth creationists, but by the left that claims to revere it. I see leftists all the time saying that they believe not in a deity but in science. Never mind that science is a method of investigation and not a metaphysical belief system but hey, who’s got time for logic when you have to make signs for the protest?

I can see the Vice headline now: “Trump Just Criminalized Science: Here is How Bernie Can Still Win.”

Want a good laugh? Make some popcorn, pull up a chair and YouTube “decolonizing science.” Actually let me do it for you.

Yes she really said science is not true because it cannot disprove black magic. That is the kind of person with whom the left wants to entrust science. Because she is one of them.

Right now there is a push to get young women into the sciences. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Marxists who haven’t yet achieved total gender equality. This is partially a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the part of the right.

During the debate on the wage gap conservatives were eager to say that one of the major reasons women on the whole make less than men is that they major in “feminist studies” not electrical engineering. This is, economically speaking, true.

It also speaks to a larger point. When given a choice, women tend to pick stupid majors. The entire “X studies” racket is about narcissism. Studies programs provide an easy affirmation of your own intellect by people who shouldn’t have been allowed into college as students let alone as professors. Young people eager to learn about themselves then get brainwashed by faculty who, from my experience, have room temperature IQs. And now those types of people want to convince us that the right is anti-science and that they alone are the guardians of reason.

You’re probably wondering how we got here.

During the Cold War era the sciences were seen as nerd turf. Scientists were usually only seen in science fiction stories. They were the counterweight to the jock stereotype. Both were needed to counter the Soviet threat. Scientists were seen as a little odd and a little unusual. They got us to the moon but they were not getting a lot of dates. They were dorks. Definitely uncool.

I know from experience. I was a geophysics major as an undergrad back in the late 90s and early 00s. At the time there were about twenty other undergrads in our department. If I remember correctly about three of them were women. There were some minorities but they were high IQ Asians.

Most of the women I went to school with were just as nerdy as the men. The women I knew were capable. But what troubled the left is that there just weren’t very many of them, and they weren’t overtly liberal. They were interested in rocks not social justice.

When the universities of America and Europe started to turn co-ed few women picked the most difficult majors. And the sciences, unless they took one to medical school, or for my generation, Silicon Valley, were not seen as terribly sexy.

That changed with the rise of the nerd circa 1999. The Matrix had just been released, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings was in development, Spider-Man was announced, X-Men had just done well at the box office, online gaming was coming of age, and Star Wars was cool even for adults.

Nerd culture was, and in most ways still is, centred on young white males who grew up in the 80s. This was in large part because in the 00s the kids who studied STEM back in the 90s suddenly had disposable income and a love of nerdy things like Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction and fantasy, and…the sciences. Perhaps more importantly, most lacked families to spend their money on.

With the rise of the internet, nerds were starting to get a little respect. They had taken over the world. The geek had inherited the Earth. Hollywood took notice and with the help of their marketing departments being a nerd slowly became cool.

But the involvement of Hollywood and Silicon Valley liberals gave rise to the notion that to be a nerd was to be left wing. Then came the pop science experts like Bill “the Shill” Nye, and “BlackScienceMan” Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neither is famous for being a scientist.

Today Nye hosts a dumb show on NetFlix because the guys who grew up watching him on Bill Nye the Science Guy are now studio executives. Tyson is an astrophysicist but he will be remembered as a meme. But both are seen as “advocates for reason and science.”

And so here we are with the sciences being converted and turned into weapons against us in the same way that the humanities and social sciences were taken over by third wave feminists and multiculturalists.

Those professors tell young people that all men are rapists and that whites need to die out because whiteness is oppression. What will happen to the sciences if the cultural Marxists start teaching organic chemistry?

Encouraging women and minorities, who tend to be left-leaning, to enter the STEM fields is the Marxist’s backdoor into owning the sciences. Science is about raw intellect, creativity and due diligence. It’s about hierarchy. That troubles the left who wish the world were egalitarian.

Frankly, I think the cultural Marxists have no interest at all in science. They just like the moral authority that comes with the perception of being seen as objective and rational.

If left unchecked the name and reputation of science will become a powerful weapon against the right.

What do we do?

The solution is simple if not terribly politically correct. Rather than dumb down the curriculum so lower average-IQ minorities and women can graduate, and become agents of the left, simply make majoring the sciences more difficult. And socially, we as a society should only encourage people to attend a university if they need a credential or are truly gifted in some way.

Saddling young women with $70,000 in student loan debt so they can get marine biology degrees and make headway for women in the sciences is laughable. It also subverts the way in which people, and let’s be honest it’s mostly men, gifted (some might say autistic) enough to dedicate a life to studying something such as the intricate nature of the first three minutes of the universe, can succeed.

There is also a sadistic element to opening up the STEM majors is to less intelligent students. I truly feel bad for those who try to get through linear algebra but who don’t really have the aptitude for it. I certainly struggled with some classes.

Encouraging people to enter fields such as physics, where they will have little hope of finding a job if they graduate, is cruel. And worse, it overpopulates a field with subpar minds looking for jobs where their greatest hope is affirmative action.

I’m sure I’ll end up on The Mary Sue or Buzzfeed for writing this, but I don’t care. Let their breathless writers spill empty words and ad hominum attacks against me. I’m going to defend the people who should be in the world of the sciences and engineering. (And for the record, I didn’t pursue a geophysics graduate degree because my math scores weren’t all that up to par either. I’m a writer not a scientist).

Science is, and should be, apolitical. It is a method, not a subculture and not a weapon.

The left is trying to own STEM the way they own the humanities. This cannot happen. The solution is to make the sciences more elite so only the truly special among us can hack it.

Everitt Foster
the authorEveritt Foster
Everitt Foster is a former geologist and historian. He holds an MA in military history. He is also a novelist and short story writer. He is the co-founder and co-editor of uprisingreview.com. Follow him on Gab at gab.ai/ever

47 Comments

  • >simply make majoring the sciences more difficult
    >simply make

    Exactly how, and who will even let you try?

  • This is a very interesting subject I have thought about in the past.

    I understand your fear of women/liberals infiltrating STEM and turning into cultural marxist BS, but I think the problem is slightly different. I actually think that STEM majors, unlike humanities and social science, are simply too difficult to be infiltrated by those who are not apt in math/science. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that a vast portion of STEM can be infiltrated by leftists who are simply not intelligent enough for STEM nor do I think leftist ideologues will have the motivation to trudge through a STEM major they hate just for political reasons. Obviously, with affirmative action and women initiatives, there is a systemic push for these subpar people to get in, I just don’t think it will work with STEM, because STEM is too intellectually challenging. (This is all coming from a person, me, who is not at all STEM-minded, but has had some of the easiest STEM courses.)

    I think the bigger problem is a selection bias in STEM that causes the most useless, cucky nerds to enter the majors. Some of this is caused by diversity. In 2017, I can tell you that most STEM majors in universities are completely dominated by Asians/Indians. Asians/Indians almost always major in STEM. And notoriously, there are very few girls in STEM classes. Because of being stuck in classes that are essentially 90% Asians and 1 or 2 girls, very few normal white men, even if intellectually capable, have an incentive to be STEM majors. Most normal whites would much rather be in business/pre-med type majors, full of other normal whites and plentiful with girls. Therefore, the few whites who do STEM tend to be awkward nerds or weebs. (And some, I assume are good, normal, people, who really want to be a STEM profession). These nerds are very easily dominated and can be controlled by Leftists quite easily through various means. So for the Left, it is much simpler to just bullycide these STEM nerds to do what they want, then actually infiltrate STEM.

    I don’t know how to fix this problem. STEM is going to continue to get worse probably, because no good white males are going to give up their ‘college experience’ (the whole concept is toxic anyway, but we have to live with it for now) to get a STEM degree.

    • If you`re going to the university only to score ass, local drinking estabilishment will probably provide a much better ROI per said ass. Plus, business/pre-med? Good luck if you`re not in one of those (((networking))) places.

  • STEM isn’t over-enrolled. College is over-enrolled. Most people are too stupid to leverage a college degree for any useful purpose. Proof: majority of college students = women.

  • Random lurker here, who happens to be starting his M.Sc. degree. The scientific community has degenerated into a political left leaning bias that I would describe as, simply put ho hum, an unhinged, misguided haut-monde splinter class. To declare yourself a racial realist, or anywhere remotely conservative, would be work place suicide. Marxism is a shadow corequisite to any science degree. All I ask is do not lose faith in the honest highbrows who wish to advance the human condition, oh so deeply. We are few, but we are here.

  • Good article – except we 40-something ’80s nerds are no longer young men. Perceptive analysis of how nerd culture became dominant. The tragedy is that this as you say is the result of nerds who in former times would have married and had kids, now having nothing better to do with their time. Pre-feminism the PUA ‘beta male’ was an attractive catch for many women, they married and had 2-3 smart kids. Now among my male & female 40-something nerd peers, only a very few of us have kids – and then it’s one each. I remember going to the big London D&D/RPG convention Dragonmeet – thousands of adult nerds, maybe 2 or 3 children, including my own.

  • “What will happen to the sciences if the cultural Marxists start teaching organic chemistry?”

    Who cares?

    White ethnostates is our priority. Where there are Whites there is science.

    • The claim that non-whites are incapable of science is old-school fuckwit-level WN idiocy.

      • It’s wishful thinking. It’s hard to say what the world would look like if Whites had never existed, but now that the technological ball is rolling from the past few hundred years of advances in engineering, biology, chemistry, etc… yes, there are plenty of non-Whites who do very well in the sciences.

      • Orientals and .Indians are certainly capable of certain elements of science and engineering. Generally, though, they lack the creative ability to make anything out of their work.

        In all of my undergrad science and engineering courses, I saw maybe two black people total and I’m pretty sure that they were affirmative action tokens to be put on the cover of the college magazine.

        As Jefferson pointed out regarding the negro in the “Laws” Chapter of Notes on the State of Virginia, the nigro’s ability to reason is far inferior. Sickle cell, perhaps?

        • When I was in engineering school the one black kid in comp-sci was crying in 101 lab by the first project.

  • STEM is all well and good but nothing discredits a good argument more than numerous glaring errors and typos which have infested the Altright.com articles daily. Please, please, have someone with a background in English and Grammar proofread these articles before posting.

    • This bit was particularly amusing:

      I didn’t pursue a geophysics graduate degree because my math scores weren’t all that up to par either. I’m a writer not a scientist

      • I just wish the writers at this site would do a quick proofread. It comes off as sloppy and unprofessional when their articles are habitually rife with errors.

  • There is a concerted effort afoot now to goad the government into using Title IX (of the Education Amendments Act of 1972) to enforce quota hiring of women in University science faculties. That effort is probably stalled for now, but will undoubtedly be revived the next time the Democrats are in the White House.

    Even without a Democratic administration, scientific societies, like the American Physical Society, are becoming more overtly left-wing, just as one would expect from Conquest’s Law. The sciences are indeed becoming just another venue for cultural marxism.

  • Just rambling and complaining about the world we live in, and badly at that. No strategic prescriptions. No philosophical insights.

    This is the alt-right created by people who did not want to stigmatize the boneheads. We are now a movement of boneheads.

    Shame, because we totally could have been much better.

  • “Science is, and should be, apolitical. It is a method, not a subculture and not a weapon.” One of the best statements I’ve read in a while.

      • They did build up some propaganda about the superiority of marxist-leninist scientific approach blahblah, but how do you politicize a mathematical proof itself? If anything, it bit them in the ass with the cybernetics thing and boy did they suffer with electronics later because of it.

    • Jews and liberals weaponize social and biological science by falsifying or burying the politically inconvenient results.

  • Yeah, funny how the left denies the “settled science” about IQ differences.

    Just ask them to compare two impoverished, holdover regimes from the communist era, namely, North Korea and Cuba. Why do the North Koreans have the ability to build rockets and nukes, while the Cubans couldn’t do these things in a million years? Could the fact that Koreans have about 20 more IQ points than Cubans have something to do with the North Koreans’ greater capabilities?

    • Nah, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. It must be the uuhhh, white supremacy? Yeah that’s it! Damn white Koreans.

    • Also, North Korea is bigger and has friendly China next door. Cuba is pretty white, and punched far above its weight in the Cold War. But I take your point – might be better to compare both NK & Cuba with eg Angola or Ethiopia.

    • One of my favorite ironies is racialists who think evolution is a fraud. Sure, knowledge is not arbitrarily transferable between people. Science educators may be misinformed. Creationists usally have a similarly resolute commitment to their ignorance.

    • Um, they get help?
      Cubans were no slouches themselves in terms of guerilla tactics all over the globe.

  • It’s quite funny that the liberal crowd expects science to be about respect, collaboration and adhering to dogma, when the traditional great scientists couldn’t care less about those things. True science is about smashing dogma in a very competitive manner, producing the theory that your peers will agree is the one that best explains the universe. When I think about what science should really be, I absolutely don’t see the things the liberals see – that is, an ideological framework that people are expected to prop up.

    What I instead see is something more akin to punk rock. A man determined to subvert anything established that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. A man identifying the weaknesses in current theory and presenting a theory that doesn’t suffer from them. A man who’s hellbent on not leaving any stone unturned in his quest to destroy inferior theory and dogma. To get a feeling for my perspective, try listening to Jim Steinman’s excellent poem “Love And Death And An American Guitar”, and substitute rock music for science:
    https://youtu.be/ZIu1BZC0zTg?t=80

    Modern academia isn’t fertile soil at all for true science. All academics are doing is writing papers over and over. There needs to be less dogma, cooperation and politics, and more competition and hostility. The greatest scientist should be considered the one that has made enemies of everyone in his field in his pursuit of knowledge, and who’s devastated them with the great theory he mustered. Time should prove him right, and not the cordiality of other academics.

    • Not even giving a crap about peers. If you produce a mathematical proof it doesn’t need any other humans to verify it’s inherent truth. You plug in the numbers, and if they add up in a computer or calculator there is the proof. That’s the beauty of the method(s), one single person in a field can be completely against the “consensus” and it doesn’t matter if in the end they are right.

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