This little thread and the various side-conversations under it serves very nicely as an introduction to discussing Sciencism and why Silicon Valley is full of idiots with no sense of object permanence selling moldy Slimfast and magic beans, and running illegal taxi services. https://twitter.com/_lizharvey/status/1305230234900459525

Perhaps you are familiar with this common argument from particularly smug atheists:
"Everything about how the world is actually really complicated, so rather than try to actually understand it all, lots of people just answer every question with 'God did it!' and remain ignorant."

I'm sure there's some people out there for whom that really is true. But I'm also sure there's people, with honestly a hell of a lot of intersection with the aforementioned smug atheists delivering that quote, who answer every question with "Science did it!" and equally fail to

engage with any of the actual complexities of the world around them.

I'm sure to some degree this is just inevitable, but the way we teach people about science in schools really doesn't seem to help it any.
See, we have this really terrible problem of teaching simplified models.

If you really pursue a particular field, and go for a doctorate in that field, eventually you get exposed to enough of the actual research to learn what a truly complicated messy half-understood at best pile of weird hard to manage exceptions and edge cases that field really is,

but for every other field, and for most people of course, that's literally every field, all you're ever taught is simplified models. Usually models so simplified in fact that they can be turned into a framework for children to just do some basic math problems.

"Gravity makes any

object fall at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2!"

"Chemistry all boils down to how many electrons are in the outermost shell of each element! Beryllium has 2, and oxygen has 6. Everything wants to add up to 8, so those elements will bond with each other!"

"Let's do some Punnett squares!"

The idea, I assume, behind teaching things this way, is to at least give the average person the basic gist of the broad strokes so they work out the practicalities like "the danger in falling grows exponentially the higher you're falling from," "be careful when handling chemicals

because some combine with each other to make very different things," and "if some of your crops are weird there might be a recessive trait in there that'll be really hard to separate out." Plus, you know, our whole educational system was originally designed just to train factory

workers, so everything has a huge focus on double checking math and taking careful measurements while seeking consistency.

There's a certain mindset though that finds this exercise in reducing everything in the world down to easy 6th grade science problems VERY COMFORTING. Maybe

the world feels like a big chaotic jumble, but really it's all controlled by just a few very simple math formulas, and if you can just learn all of those, you'll understand how everything works!

These kids then proceed to really get into math, while withdrawing from everything

that hasn't been turned into a simple math problem for them. They get way into algebra and geometry. They engage heavily with the simple models of most sciences they encounter but lose all interest once they're introduced to physics (through abstract simplified exercises) and get

WAY into computer programming because it's the one "sciencey" field that really is literally nothing but doing math and creating simplified logical models of things. And meanwhile they start bouncing off everything else super hard, not wanting to engage with complex fuzzy thought

like weird conjugations and psychology and history and all that. At least not without being filtered through computer games that simulate everything with very basic math (research points, affection points, etc.) where they MIGHT learn things through osmosis, mixed with junk data.

So... by any sort of practical standard, we have these people actively rejecting any higher understanding of the world around them, or basic social interactions, retreating into this ignorant quasi-religious obsession with simple math problems, but since our educational standards

suck, base everything off test-taking, and rely on standardized tests that favor getting the right answers to math problems over any sort of essay questions, we tell these ignorant weirdos that they are actually incredibly smart, giving them perfect grades in all the STEM fields,

and those being their favorites, which make the world feel more sensible to them, they're generally OK with terrible grades in anything less math-y, counting it as further evidence that those fields are all unimportant illogical BS to be held in active contempt.

There's also a

pretty common step in here which selects for straight white cis men from wealthy backgrounds as the arrogant elitism fostered by "good science grades so who cares about the rest" mixes in with discovering pseudoscientific garbage like eugenics and general bigotry based in sorting

things into simple categories and identifying The One Right Answer, so some people hit a crossroads where they need to learn some messy truths, and others can reject all that to keep their worlds simple and mathy.

One big logical modern end point for this is of course tech bros.

Just... a bunch of sheltered idiots who society at large is willing to pretend are "very smart and well-educated" because they got good grades in math and learned programming, hitting a point in life where any further education would require them to think too hard, going off to

start companies where they try to force some aspect of the world or other to fit to some simple mathematical model they thought up to "move fast and break things" and replace some aspect of the world that they're too ignorant to properly understand. So we get crap like some idiot

thinking you can just look at a nutritional information label, order the cheapest things from a chemical supply company total it all up to 100%, and "replace the need for food" while some other idiot works on self-driving cars without thinking to account for pedestrians, and at

least half of them are enthusiastic neo-nazis.

It's worth noting though that it's not like this is a recent phenomenon. Look up the Pythagoreans. Exactly the same sort of people getting sucked into the same pseudo-religion and becoming a bunch of weird creeps as a result.