Our educational system helps foster a bias against technical and scientific minded individuals - from the first grade through university. Even among university faculty there is a strong sense of boundry between the humanities and the technical fields.
Whenever a humanities faculty member would make a patronizing remark about engineers or scientists, I usually responded that the technical and mechanical fields were fathered by philosophy, and art was the mother, so why the hostility towards their child?
Part of the problem is the (perhaps inevitable?) subject compartmentalization in our educational system. Maybe most human minds are not capable of grasping that knowledge is an (infinite?) continuum, not a group of isolated fields. I used to challenge students who talked glowingly of their chosen major, to the exclusion of all other fields of study, to show me the exact boundry between Philosophy and math or physics, and then to define where physics stopped and chemistry began. And so on for the borders between chemistry and biology, biology to psychology, and psychology to philosophy, where we started. My point to them was that life is a diamond. The more facets you see, the greater the sparkle. If you only stare closely at one facet, you are looking in a mirror at yourself.
Maybe a modular, throw away society also breeds a cavalier attitude for "things" and the technicians/technologists who maintain the "Things". Maybe as the devices of modern society become more complex, and more dependent on disposable modules, people develop the attitude that technicians just replace the parts a computer told them to remove. Maybe it is just that life has grown so complex that people ignore or trivialize anything outside of their own work, family, and social groups.
This forum has many experts, and it is great to see people with so many different backgrounds meeting and exchanging ideas. I would hate to see the actions of a rude or selfish individual dampen the enthusiasm of the participants.
Whew - got a long way from MBs on this rant. Sorry for the length.
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JCE
87 300E, 65k miles
Smoke Silver