Science, Engineering, and Uncoolness; Here and Now, Then and There

Some possibilities:

Visibility effects —

• Bullying of nerds always happened; but it's less shameful for successful adults to talk about having been bullied now; so we hear more about it.
• Scientists have always been weird, but until recently one didn't talk about others' eccentricities. (See, for instance, how treatment of mental illness has gone from locking the crazy person up in an attic or sanitarium, to a matter of public identification.)
• You're young; it looks different when you're older (which doesn't mean either position is more accurate).

Generational effects —

• Going to university once meant that you were both smart enough to pass, and that your family was rich enough to afford it. But the post-WWII boom in public universities (and the GI Bill) meant there were now enough college-educated people for there to be greater intellectual competition for scientific and technical jobs, which favored the more abnormal minds.
• In the 1960s US, being in higher education was a way to avoid the Vietnam draft. Middle America tended to regard draft-dodgers as cowardly, and this emphasized the nerd/jock distinction.
• The rise of college sports as a big-money institution created a nerd/jock dichotomy in colleges which propagated into mass media (especially via popular comedies) and thus into the culture.

Nerds really are uncool (and new) —

• Home computers in the 1980s provided massive intellectual rewards for kids who got into them … at the expense of keeping them home and indoors.
• Differentiation between students headed for science & technical careers has happened earlier and earlier in life, impairing social development.

Other historical effects —

• It's tied to suburbanization. Science was (and is) cool in successful booming cities, but not in conformist suburbs or in socially collapsing cities.
• It's tied to class mixing. Science was (and is) cool among the productive rich, but not among the productive working class, the idle rich, or the lumpenproletariat.
• As science has accumulated more knowledge, there's simply more to learn — and thus a bigger gap between the worldviews of scientifically literate people and everyone else.

This may be an American thing: the particular American flavour of anti-intellectualism. I am told it doesn't work nearly like this outside the Anglosphere.

(The Australian variant is related and tends more toward "poofter: someone who likes music more than football therefore must be beaten up.")

Stop complaining, you nerd! You people... you have the high IQs, you can go and work in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, or end up on TV as some famous geek scientist, or you can even be paid to spend your life studying the mating habits of the lesser crested wallaby or whatever weird shit you're into. But no, that's not enough, you want to be regarded as heroes, and you want everyone to bow down to whatever world-smashing or social-engineering scheme catches your fancy this week, and you want your chess club to be the centre of all social activity. Well, get in line, everyone else wants to be the centre of attention too. The difference is that you geeks are the ones who really might blow up the planet while trying to make your rocket, or your robot, or your sex potion. So of course the grown-ups have to keep you in line, until you can grow up yourselves.

I read a novel published in 1905 which has a comic scene with a scientist going on a date:

"Professor Frisbane asserted the other day, during a brief conversation with me," he remarked learnedly, "that, in his opinion, direct communication with the planet Mars was a mere matter of time."

" Indeed?" returned Christine vaguely, and silence ensued.

"I have been deeply interested in a series of articles now appearing in the Scientific American," volunteered Mr. Marks with renewed animation, "which discuss the subject of ossification in all its bearings. I will be glad to lend them to you."

"No, please don't," replied Christine hurriedly.

It also makes fun of his unfashionable clothes and his need to write conversation starters on notecards rather than talking informally with a woman. So the "scientists are socially incompetent" trope has been going for at least a century.

I don't know what it was like in the 70's and 80's, but smart people seem to enjoy plenty of coolness today. I've seen people bullied for being gay, having poor hygiene, being poor, being opposed to pornography, and being too religious. But never for being smart.

Is your premise true? My impression is that being a nerd/geek has increased in acceptability over the last decade or so (perhaps due to the popularization of the internet).

I think that how "connected to reality" scientists are has to do with this trend.

In older times, being a scientist or an engineer meant being able to exert real, measurable, almost magical force upon your (and people around your's) surroundings. You made a bridge come to existence, you created a vaccine.

Nowadays, being a scientist or an engineer is associated with spending long days holed up in a room doing work which is incredibly complex and expensive, yet does not seem to create net benefit except in rare occasions. Furthermore, this isolation is considered to reduce social aptitude (which is high-status). Compare this to people with capital or social skills, who can almost magically navigate and cause things to happen in our modern very-social world.

The two castes of scientists or engineers which can still "make things happen" are the mad scientist (going against social rules) or the startupist (and his friend, the DIY Maker), and from my local zeitgeist, they are considered positions with status.

Also, this trend is supported by the fact that (As Mitchell_Porter pointed out) scientists get payed to research obscure subjects with questionable value to the world at large. I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying that it makes people correlate scientists with obscure subjects.

And how do we fix it? I have two ideas (both of which I actively pursue, and (I believe) let me enjoy a high status life as an engineer and science-lover (Given, I live in Tel Aviv, Israel, where engineers and scientists (I feel) are higher status than the US).

1. Gain actual real-world power. (Either via capital, social skills, connections, or applicable real-world skillsets)
2. Use your advantage as a scientist to make people's lives better in the real world. (Make stuff! Explain stuff!)
3. PROFIT (Please! No! Not the lol tax!)

Yes, this isn't as rewarding as learning more about your favorite subject and requires taking risks, but (and sadly I can't find the reference for this right now) doing hard, risky, not very rewarding work is in itself a way to create status.

Or, in other words, go out and do stuff :) We'll all benefit from it.

My friends think science is cool. My guess for why some think science is uncool is they think people who like science are uncool, which (among other things) could be rooted in regularly being annoyed, confused, or humiliated by people smarter than themselves. Teaching the dumbest, most resentful portion of society to change their mind seems futile.

Also, is money the sole measure of status? Consider lottery winners, poetry professors, hipsters, oil rig workers, prostitutes...

Science and Coolness attract different types of minds, IMO. Science attracts those moved by epistemic truth, Coolness attracts those moved by social truth.

As a lesswronger, I find what follows ironic: In Islamic countries, "scientists" are called with the same word use for religious leaders and other teachers, "olama", literally "knowers"; historically, there's been a huge overlap between the two, and, when one of these folks speaks, you're supposed to shut up and listen.

A "shut up and listen" attitude is contrary to technical culture, and detrimental to it. In technical circles, it's what you say that matters, not your status or authority.

How much does the perception that science and engineering became uncool come from bias in what gets recorded, and in particular the fact that most of us attended high school within the last decade or two?

Most importantly: how can the process be reversed?

I do everything I can to show people that a scientist can still be awesome, e.g. this, singing karaoke every week (and being very exuberant at it), etc.; also, I try to bring up Feynman and his awesomeness in conversation whenever I get a chance.