Why STEM and Data Science skills aren't enough
We need tech-curious artists, social care workers and ad execs just as much as we need data scientists and coders.
Recent years have seen a big push by the UK government to get more people to study Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently pledged to get more kids to study maths up to the age of 19.
At the same the study of the arts and humanities in the UK seems to have been under threat for nearly a decade now.
As someone who failed his maths GCSE I find this particularly depressing (there’s no way I could have studied math to age 19 without far better investment in teaching and support as a teenager, support that just wasn’t there).
As a tech-curious nerd who flourished studying the humanities I also think this focus on STEM at expense of creative areas of study is a massive error. Much that is useful or economically productive originates from simple curiosity, play and imagination.
You might be the best coder in the world, but if you struggle with creativity, or have a limited hinterland of interests, your ability to solve real world problems or create new products is likely to be low.
Employers with an interest in data science constantly talk about the need to get the right mix between data knowledge and gut instinct. The human mind can make great leaps in creativity that an algorithm can’t come close to.
It takes millions of neurons working in sequence for me to think of and unerstand a single metaphor. That computing power doesn’t exist outside of the human mind.
Data can uncover a hell of a lot of noise , but it takes creative minds to make sense of that noise, to summarise and interpret it, to make tools from it. Put simply, we need STEM but we need the arts and humanities too.
This blog sums the situation up well:
“Creativity in data science is so necessary because the data that you have is rarely the data that you want. Creativity is the skill required to bridge that gap.”
All of which is not to say that STEM experts or data scientists are not creative. Steve Jobs was clearly a great PR guy as well as a nerd. The Esteemed data scientist David Spiegelhalter’s books are great at making the practical application of data, to illuminate and help solve social problems. But we bank on STEM to the exclusion of other disciplines at our peril.