HeavenlyPossum on Nostr: Something I often encounter from STEM folks is a belief that understanding human ...

Something I often encounter from STEM folks is a belief that understanding human behavior and human society is akin to understanding a math or engineering or physics problem. There’s one correct answer that you can discover or achieve if you know the parameters, define the variables, and do the math properly.

And, if you don’t get the answer you were expecting, then it’s the people who were wrong, not the work, and so it’s understandable or even desirable to want to shove people into the correct configuration.

Not every STEM person who believes this, and not every person who believes this has a STEM background, but it’s a noticeable pattern. There’s a reason so many of the original members of al-Qa’ida were engineers. Society is an engineering problem, with a correct optimal answer, and sometimes you’ve just got to brute-force it.