• mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I went to a major medical university and studied humanities. The amount of soon-to-be doctors and nurses complaining about why they needed to study things like ethics, philosophy, or history astounded me, it’s like these people didn’t want to deal with the human aspect of medicine and instead just wanted to make money.

    I wouldn’t be shocked if more medschool students dropped out from the humanities courses than the medical ones, they hated it

    • Smite6645@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I didn’t hate them, but it’s tough when every professor assigns homework like they’re the only class you’re taking.

      Not meaning to imply they should be dropped, but looking at the state of the world most people aren’t internalizing anything from the humanities.

      • CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I had a professor that said a good student will study Monday to Saturday the amount of hours a day as the amount of credits you take. Take Sundays off. We all had 15 credits a semester.

      • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I was interested in the humanities, so I interacted with that material very deeply. I would say that most of my classmates weren’t interested in humanities, but they weren’t really interested (as in curious, questioning, interacting) with the STEM classes either.

    • Surreal
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      1 year ago

      Did any of those courses succeed in teaching empathy, sociality, ethic? If it’s similar to what I experienced in my university, it didn’t do jack shit. University is great at teaching scientific knowledge but horrible at teaching philosophy. I learn more about ethics, philosophy and history via YouTube than from university

      • mommykink@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Students have an obligation to respond and receive the materials. If you chose not to engage with the classes, then that’s on you, but it’s generally a good thing for doctors and people working with the public to have an education on things like empathy and history (specifically the history of discrimination against marginalized groups).

        I learn more about ethics, philosophy, and history via YouTube than from university

        Oh, you’re one of those people.

        • Stoneykins [any]@mander.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Why do you have to be rude? They were simply claiming the classes were not effective at their apparent goal of making students more ethical. It doesn’t mean they don’t think doctors should be ethical.

          I also had to take a required ethics class, and it was the worst taught class I ever took there. It wasn’t effective at teaching me about ethics, it was just a pile of bad tests, and it certainly wasn’t effective at convincing me and the other students to be more ethical in our respective careers.

          The free website where many people put up easy to access high quality educational resources is a great way to learn stuff on a budget. Not all of youtube is great but being rude to people who watch youtube videos to make yourself feel bigger is shitty.

    • CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Noticed the same when I studied computer science. My fellow students complained about having to study the history of computers, ethics, social studies and especially ex.phil. "I just want to program all day, not study things I will never use!’

      I switched bachelor programmes after a couple of years

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I had more fun studying the required courses than CS at my university. I read TAoCP for fun in high school I could sleep through most classes. If I could do it again, I’d do geology as my profession.

    • ComradeR@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There was any soon-to-be psychologist or psychiatrist among those students? And, if so, how did they reacted? 👀

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I’m incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn’t been thrown in jail.

  • tootbrute@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I still think we should try it on musk himself. Those monkeys just didnt have moxie

  • DrVortex@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    You are confusing taking a class with actually having ethics. No amount of attending a lecture about ethics will convince you if you do not, as a basic premise agree with the ethical principle that loss of life is a bad thing. And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.

    • girthero@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ethics class gives you tools to analyze a problem. Any good class is part of the philosophy department and leans on the classic philosphers approaches to analyze the problem. Many engineers would have no exposure to this otherwise and i think its a good part of any Universities’ engineering curriculum.

    • And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.

      Deonotlogists and other Moral Realists and Universalists are shook

      But yeah, let’s imagine moral ontology was solved, and that moral relativism and nihilism are the only ethical theories around…

      • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        That sounds like a fun paradox.

        Is “The only objective moral fact is that there is no objective morality” a truthful statement? Is it rational?

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Classes don’t solve the problem entirely, but they’re a start and without them in this case a company so large and powerful that it has a space program and foreign policy planks is being guided by nothing but the intuition of someone who grew up spending money earned by child slaves and who thinks that scuttling an army’s mission in-progress is pacifism

  • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The other 8 died, too. In excruciating pain. One of them vomited to death. These people are barbaric and should face animal cruelty charges.

  • SwampYankee@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it’s not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.

    Ethics!

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Eveyone needs it. Aristotle starts out his Nicomachean ethics stating that virtuous acts are first and foremost for the benefit of the virtuous person.

      Platonic ethics should also really be taught widely, even more so than Aristotle’s because they’re easier to receive. Even if he has some hard to accept views such as that commiting injustice is worse than suffering it, everyone would benefit if children grew up with the notion that everyone does what they think best, and that those who do “wrong” things do so out of ignorance of what is good, rather than what we currently have where everyone knows what is objectively good, and those who don’t do it are willfully wrongdoers and you just need to punish them enough and they’ll become good.

      Although you can have the best educational plans in the galaxy if the educarional system is crap. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but where I’m from all education from primary school to a master’s degree is just a bunch of information being thrown at you with 0 context and reasoning behind it, and when you’re able to reproduce that information on demand (without any context): congratz, you’re educated!

    • Albbi@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Wow! Been a while since I’ve seen a Michael Crichton quote. I think I’ll have to do a reread of Jurassic Park now.

    • Dhs92
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      1 year ago

      I mean, we really don’t want a repeat of the Therac-25

      • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Still can’t believe it happened the first time.

        “Oh let’s just reuse the code and forget the hardware breakers on the machine it’ll be fine.”

        Like I have no ethics training but they even had a (human operated) control rod in the first chicago pile who trusts a radiation gun to a SOFTWARE toggle?

        • qfe0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          It wasn’t collectively known that software was hard to do right at that time. If it always performed as intended it would have made for a less expensive and perfectly safe machine. It’s the textbook case in doing software wrong because there wasn’t one that happened before it.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I only learned about it from the “Well There’s Your Problem” podcast. Can’t believe my school never talked about it. We did hear all about Challenger though as well as a few other disasters where the lesson was “If you cut corners, or take chances, people can DIE”