oce 🐆

Get out of your stem bubble (Lemmy being one), do some local sport or activity where there is actual social mixing. You will notice the gap between your bubble and people who barely finished highschool. For me the gap is rather having the privilege to be educated to abstraction rather than being smart (~ IQ). Being able to manage abstraction better is often why you are better paid in STEM.

The tobacco industry is a good historical example of all the shit world dominating companies do. The most sneaky thing I can remember is that they finance perfectly good research on a lot of causes of cancer, except for tobacco, so researchers were too busy and happy to get some money to work on something, to investigate tobacco. They also have been buying companies that used to finance legitimate research so researchers that depended on them are now forced into a conflict of interest. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1153

Personal anecdote, a young female data scientists left my current department to join Philip Morris, it blows my mind that young educated people would join this industry willingly, I guess it was for the money.