I think I can field this: Science is ostensibly about the study of natural phenomenon. It’s not unbiased, ofc, but that’s the ideal at least. Tech is about power—centralizing, amassing & wielding power, building ever more tools & infrastructures to design the world you want, not describe or study it - ThreadSky

histoftech.bsky.social • 124 days ago

I think I can field this: Science is ostensibly about the study of natural phenomenon. It’s not unbiased, ofc, but that’s the ideal at least. Tech is about power—centralizing, amassing & wielding power, building ever more tools & infrastructures to design the world you want, not describe or study it

Reposted from Molly Jong-Fast

One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.

Comments

jbenmenachem.com•124 days ago

I think science has historically also been focused on control (over nature). Arguably technology is the wing of scientific development which does this. Habermas has some good writing on this. Social science also from its origins has attempted social engineering

electriceden92.bsky.social•124 days ago

It's not a hard-and-fast division, but I do think that there's always been a tension between the scholarly side and the goal/action oriented side that's recently been aggravated

jbenmenachem.com•124 days ago

True but also consider where the funding for basic research comes from — mostly the military!

rschneide.bsky.social•124 days ago

Is that true for science, or for engineering? -- Those things aren't necessarily the same.

electriceden92.bsky.social•124 days ago

It's a fundamental contradiction that's reached a breaking point

moonalice.com•122 days ago

Thank you, @histoftech.bsky.social. This small thread needs to be read by everyone, but especially by the elected officials who were willing to risk democracy and the well being of their constituents to get campaign donations from tech billionaires and execs.

histoftech.bsky.social•124 days ago

Historically, science aims to be more reason than action; technology aims to be more action than reason.

nevin.playsmith.net•124 days ago

I find an interesting parallel to John Holland’s personality model; he arranges six major affinities in a wheel; conventional, realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, back to conventional. Science is investigative, so diametrically opposed to enterprising, where invention falls.

histoftech.bsky.social•124 days ago

This is not a dig at technology fields or practitioners: putting things into practice is very important, and difficult. It can also be very, very dangerous when the power affordances of tech are taken to their (il)logical extreme.

histoftech.bsky.social•124 days ago

Technology needs science, but only up to a point—& many tech leaders misunderstand where that point is, or disagree on where it is, in dangerous ways. Science also needs technology, but has less to offer it, except in particular cases like medical science, where the stakes are high (life and death).

stevemur67.bsky.social•124 days ago

My concern for the US, is that medicine (particularly vaccinations) will used as a social weapon to further alienate, control and suppress people of colour, native Americans and immigrants. It’s about to get very expensive to survive in the USA.

mapablue.bsky.social•124 days ago

there is a fragrance to the techbros that is neither science nor technology, & it is malevolent (selfish, greedy, cruel, dehumanizing). techbros short circuit scientific possibilities, forcing their (capitalistic & malevolent) framework on it. heidegger called it a 'Gestell,' a metaphysical concept.

activeoppressor.bsky.social•124 days ago

Genuinely do not understand this post. What is the point past which technology doesn't need science? 5 minutes ago I would have said that there is no technology without science.

And science needs technology, but has less to offer it? Science has less to offer technology? Except in medicine?

joi-itos-jibo.bsky.social•124 days ago

How I read it- you unveil a new electric vehicle today, the only recent science contribution is in part of the battery. Everything else is decades or centuries old science, even if the tech is new.

pukite.com•124 days ago

Consider the idea of climate science. All that climate science can do is explain the predicament we're in with respect to CO2 greenhouse gas warming. And the way it has turned out, technology is the only approach that can undo any of it, via CO2 capture & perhaps geo-engineering in the atmosphere

chanda.bsky.social•124 days ago

I’m not sure I can agree with this looking at the history of both physics and astronomy and how much technology exists as outgrowths of both *and* also how much each of them depends on new technological advances. From a practitioner standpoint, that bifurcation isn’t real.

kevinmarks.com•124 days ago

I think that many of the supposed 'tech bros' are mislabelled - they're finance bros who are only incidentally involved in tech because that was the magnet for expensively educated conformists ay the time. The Paypal mafia particularly.

chanda.bsky.social•124 days ago

I think tech and finance have effectively merged at this point. That’s why 2008/09 happened the way they did.

stevemur67.bsky.social•124 days ago

In the context of the world’s Bond villain tech bro, his extraordinarily self interested world view requires technology to achieve its objectives- global disinformation, suppression of alternative views/ opinions, active political/social destabilisation of the targeted governments in USA and UK.

jaycarmona.bsky.social•124 days ago

Not to mention the monetary forces and interests at play.

alanrichardson.bsky.social•124 days ago

Indeed but I think the question arises because we are often asked to think of technology as “applied science”—so how can you promote technology and not the science it “applies.”

opus17.bsky.social•124 days ago

Having worked in tech all my career -- the tech bros are the salesmen, the hucksters, the extroverts.... the real work is being done by the engineers, who you will never mistake for a tech bro.

bsunderlinmsp.bsky.social•124 days ago

100% this. The scientists are finding principles to advance tech. The engineers are designing to requirements using those principles. The bros are selling product to make money. If you believe Musk et al actually have scientific understanding of their advancements I got bridges to sell you.

turnerjoy.bsky.social•124 days ago

It’s actually very simple; technology is applied science

electriceden92.bsky.social•124 days ago

Applied HOW, though - science doesn't necessarily come with recommendations on how you should apply its discoveries, thought tech has a fundamental self-interest in saying that it does (evopsych, gene-centric biology, computational theory of mind, recently eugenics again)

turnerjoy.bsky.social•124 days ago

Even for psychology it is a huge stretch to call almost all Evopsych Science.

electriceden92.bsky.social•124 days ago

Agreed, but there's a reason it's the only psych a lot of tech people support

turnerjoy.bsky.social•124 days ago

Yeah it was pretty big in the “Pickup Artist” types also.

erdumwandler.bsky.social•124 days ago

And yet, to a tech-bro, Technology is just Nature, pure force, value-free, inevitable, unstoppable, fire from the heavens; while science is polluted by human beings and institutions and ideologies. Science-bros ("hard") believe same re "soft" knowledge.

queercassandra.bsky.social•124 days ago

It’s madness. Nature makes lightning; the second humans channel electricity through artificial means for our own purposes, it is not nature! It is subject to all the dirty, nebulous, contextual crap that always comes with human endeavors!

stephenroylance.bsky.social•124 days ago

I've seen, I think, a similar world view among a subset of both engineers and surgeons. Empiricism without curiosity. Arrogance and experience leading to success without any curiosity about the nature of the systems they're manipulating

chimaera.bsky.social•124 days ago

I think that's a good way to roughly frame it, although symbiosis is also at work. At National Research Corporation, working towards space exploration, Dad helped develop frozen foods, that became Minute Maid. Much space tech got repurposed.

daveparisi.bsky.social•124 days ago

Yeah a lot of this texture is flattened from the outside looking in but close up, the labor of science & the labor of tech are very different enterprises that attract different types of people.

ericlinuskaplan.bsky.social•124 days ago

I don't think this is right. Medicine and engineering are about power, and a lot of "pure" science in biology and physics is about fostering advances in medicine and engineering. And social science is not about natural phenomena - it's about social phenomena.

thedenature.bsky.social•124 days ago

I’ve also seen this expressed (assuming I’m reading you correctly) as “Science is about asking questions; engineering is about applying the answers.”

scicommstudios.bsky.social•122 days ago

📌

mosesbabe.bsky.social•124 days ago

Cynical, but helpful, thx

an.org•122 days ago

Tech is also about decentralizing and distributing power differently.

It is building towards what one wants, yes, but not every tech developer wants what FAANG and such do.

bobruth12.bsky.social•124 days ago

I guess science about your ~feelings~

shelleystamp.bsky.social•124 days ago

4got10one.bsky.social•124 days ago

cognitive dissonance, like banning books while waving flags for freedom of speech

joanmcrobbie.bsky.social•124 days ago

So insightful. And the discussion in the comments makes me wonder about the huge push for STEM in schools. I wonder how many students get to explore this philosophic question of what drives the pieces of STEM--science as inquiry, tech as power, etc. Seems important, metacogntively, societally.

grunionshaftoe.bsky.social•123 days ago

Well said

jmsantiago.bsky.social•124 days ago

Agree. My longtime partner started his career as an engineer then went back to nursing school. Engineering projects had a defined approach and definite solution. Medical care requires throwing solutions at a problem until you find something that works. Entirely different approaches.

historiken.bsky.social•124 days ago

So, science is about understanding and technology is about control, and the two are not exactly parallel?

objectiverodeo.com•122 days ago

📌

sonyahuber.bsky.social•124 days ago

“Tech is about power.” Omg thank you this is do simple and clarifying!

iconoclast88.bsky.social•124 days ago

Neatly demonstrates the tremendous discrepancy in pay between the two fields too

davirios.bsky.social•123 days ago

Another corollary is how the tech bros disregard social sciences when it doesn't provide avenues for immediate applicability (or better said, exploitation).

compositionkat.com•124 days ago

This is a fantastic point

lojikul.bsky.social•124 days ago

📌

moderatetexan.bsky.social•124 days ago

Thank you for this. I’ve been thinking about her post since yesterday.

bennokrojer.bsky.social•124 days ago

I think it gets interesting and tangled up in AI even when it's in an academic setting like a university lab: you often take a lot of action as well, open-sourcing models, releasing demos, engineering new software, collabs with industry

bethan.bsky.social•124 days ago

Technology productizes / monetizes science, to your centralization point, and provides increasingly varied methods of extracting money from us, the consumers.

wellerstein.bsky.social•124 days ago

I think if I were trying to field this in an essay, I might also talk about how tenuous the historical linkage between science and technology has been until recent times (and the reasons for it being tenuous), the cultural/social differences between engineers and scientists, ...

wellerstein.bsky.social•124 days ago

(con't)... the differences between "producers" and "users" of science, and the particular kinds of "science" that the tech bros disdain the most (things that either compete with their beliefs/desires about nature and society, or things they deem as lacking obvious utility).

wellerstein.bsky.social•124 days ago

(And perhaps their anti-intellectualism and anti-educational tendencies... which is not unrelated to the above. These are people whose mythical heroes are all college drop-outs who supposedly made big bucks working in their garages.)

sladner.bsky.social•124 days ago

well done! I might have gone into a rant about Heidegger and standing reserve but yours is much better

toybuilder.bsky.social•124 days ago

Early tech people came up the science path. I think the current crop came up the business path.

robhelfenbein.bsky.social•123 days ago

Good post and good comments here. Thanks! I also agree with one commenter who noted that these probably aren't monolithic (i.e. likely some tech folks who are scientists at heart)

fcpcal.bsky.social•124 days ago

A lot of the tech is also mostly vaporware. See tesla

rouhiroo.bsky.social•124 days ago

Also, don't most of these tech-bros get their understanding of science from #sciencefiction Books like SpaceCorp: (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23445502-spacecorp) which they probably didn't finish and lots of Ayn Rand, which they did? (Thanks to @wyattcenac.bsky.social for the insight)

pecus.it•124 days ago

Science is observation and explanation. Tech is transformation. Transformations involve energy, thus, power.

pecus.it•124 days ago

Your reasoning helped me focus on this. Thank you for putting it into words.

jasonread.bsky.social•124 days ago

Reminds me of when I asked a doctor friend of mine why so many doctors were anti-vaxx or fell for other quacky ideas. He said you have to think of doctors less like scientists exploring and investigating and more like mechanics fixing things. Many know what they know how to do and aren't curious.

ogreorgy.bsky.social•124 days ago

When it comes to the technological exploitation of scientific knowledge being aware of the intentions of ALL involved is key, but as we all know even the best intentions can lead to horrific outcomes.

litwicki.bsky.social•124 days ago

Exactly: It's a lot harder to bend science to do your bidding. The tech can be designed for that from the ground up.

djbelieve.bsky.social•124 days ago

📌

joshuwa.bsky.social•124 days ago

I think (at least some of, but i’d argue most of it) is the kind of computationalist mindset alot of tech bros have. They think they can intuit the solutions of social or scientific problems just from their own brain alone. Their wealth reaffirms this.

joshuwa.bsky.social•124 days ago

But it’s also why alot of them are reactionaries. It’s easier on the psyche to assume that the only things you need to understand the world is your own common sense, intelligence, epistemological viewpoint, etc.

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