I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.
I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.
I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.
None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.
I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.
I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men.
You’re right - women have significantly better access to higher education than men, and have demonstrably better education outcomes as a result.
For example, women are significantly more likely to receive scholarships and grants than men in undergrad.
Partially as a result of this lack of access, men have dropped to almost 40% of undergrad students, while women make up nearly 60%. Women also receive more doctorates than men, and almost twice as many Master’s degrees as men.
I’m not trying to minimize the bigotry that you observed (or faced), but it’s objectively false to claim that women have worse access to higher education than men.
A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:
In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.
Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.
Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.
Big-endian versus little-endian. i.e. which end to crack a boiled egg to scoop out the contents with a spoon. (The other end goes in the egg cup). Gets some use in computer science due to the way certain numbers are stored in memory, and also with date formats. US format is middle-endian. Got to wonder how Swift would have run with that observation.
The allegory of the cave is deeper than that. Sure, perhaps there are unseen others guiding your world view, but it can go the other direction into the concept of qualia and the nature of perception itself. Perhaps some façades are necessary as we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything otherwise.
That Earth was in fact way older than 6000 years.
Did you believe otherwise growing up?
Yes. I grew up in the Dutch Bible Belt, with very strict evangelical parents. They sent me to a Christian school that taught a literal interpretation of the Bible. So I was taught at home, in church, and in school that Earth was created about 6000 years ago.
