#we should fund the humanities because studying history or English or anthropolgy is cool stuff for Us collectively to know about

[phaeton-flier]

This was originally vagueblogging about the Neurovista case, which like many posts got misrepresented on Tumblr as "the cyberpunk dystopia is here" rather than "a trial for a experimental implant didn't end up being worth the resources, and the 3-year battery in the implant meant it had to be removed" (This is just a fact about trade-offs, not about capitalism; Even in a world with fully publicly funded medical research, you are still sometimes going to find something that helps someone but isn't as good a use of resources as something else). I have no idea where leftistcrap got the line about them repo'ing the implant to resell, but it caused everyone else to pattern-match to Repo! The Genetic Opera instead of asking basic questions like "Sell to who?" and "Wouldn't the cost of surgery be more than the value of the implant?".

More specifically: One of the responses to this, which is incredibly common whenever one of these posts goes around, was "we need the humanities because otherwise we will get unethical STEM types". This is, to be frank, dumb, because large parts of the most unethical people had majors in English or History or Sociology and then went on to pass horrid laws. Ted Cruz got a degree in Public Policy, then went on to become Ted Cruz. Ron DeSantis got his History Degree Magna Cum Laude, yet that did not stop him from trying to become America's Next Top Fascist.

Ultimately, teaching classes on ethics is not going to be anywhere near as good for getting better outcomes as actual laws regulating or incentivizing good conduct; That's what the police thing is a metaphor for.

We need to fund the humanities so we have better ethics, unlike all those engineers and scientists in Congress.