Open thread for December 24-31, 2013

NancyLebovitz

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

My initial thought was what I replied above. Then when I re-read, I thought I was wrong and had misinterpreted, so I started writing a reply echoing your question: "What makes those things more 'helpful'?"

But in the second article, it's about those careers being more useful towards romance. The paragraph break seems to indicate a slight change of context, so I assume now that that's what this helpful referred to.

So I think a proper decomposition of this gives us:

English majors are more useful towards achieving romance.
STEM careers are, generally speaking at least as helpful (probably more, but that's not the point) towards benefiting society.
Humanities are perceived more as blatantly benevolent.
STEM careers are often perceived as a useless waste of time.
Medicine is a glaring exception to the above; Medicine is seen as very benevolent as an abstract, or as students, but in tangibles the nurses and MDs are often seen as cold and "just doing their job". Their overall impact and benefits for society varies, but the contributions of a single nurse are arguably much lesser than the contributions of one researcher developing new drugs.

I'm not sure usefulness has anything to do with the results of romantic priming. The simplest explanation seems to be that STEM careers are associated in our culture with unsexy attitudes and groups: aesthetically uninspiring, analytical as opposed to emotional, attractive to socially clumsy people, etc. If you've got romance on your mind, you're likely to find those associations at least mildly aversive without needing to go into cost/benefit analysis -- and indeed I predict that the results of a cost/benefit analysis, even limited to romantic opportunities, would be a lot less favorable to the humanities.

1ChristianKl12y

I don't think you missed the first part of my question "If that's the claim". I can certainly think up a vague definition of helpful that applies, but what to I gain by using that label? I can surely better label than helpful if I want to speak about behavior that society generally associates with femininity. [...] The issue is basically that you either agree that the first post is wrong and non-STEM careers get picked for a different reason than being perceived as being helpful or that there a way to see non-STEM subjects as more "publicly visible prosocial behavior". It's bad to try to be to vague to be wrong.

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Open thread for December 24-31, 2013

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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Open thread for December 24-31, 2013

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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