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Clinton Foundation: Kids' Lack of CS Savvy Threatens the US Economy
theodp writes: As the press digs for details on Clinton Foundation donations, including a reported $26+ million from Microsoft and Bill Gates, it's probably worth noting the interest the Clintons have developed in computer science and the role they have played — and continue to play — in the national K-12 CS and tech immigration crisis that materialized after Microsoft proposed creating such a crisis to advance its 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy, which aims to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas. Next thing you know, Bill is the face of CS at the launch of Code.org. Then Hillary uses the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference to launch a Facebook, Microsoft, and Google initiative to boost the ranks of female and students of color in CS, and starts decrying woeful CS enrollment. Not to be left out, Chelsea keynotes the NCWIT Summit and launches Google's $50M girls-only Made With Code initiative with now-U.S. CTO Megan Smith. And last December, the Clinton Foundation touted its initiatives to engage middle school girls in CS, revamp the nation's AP CS program, and retrain out-of-work Americans as coders. At next month's CGI America 2015, the conference will kick off with a Beer Bust that CGI says "will also provide an opportunity to learn about Tech Girls Rock, a CGI Commitment to Action launched by CA Technologies in partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America that helps girls discover an interest in tech-related educational opportunities and careers." On the following days, CGI sessions will discuss tech's need for a strong and diverse talent pipeline for computer and information technology jobs, which it says is threatened by "the persistent poor performance of American students in science, technology, engineering, and math," presenting "serious implications for the long-term competitiveness of the U.S. economy." So what's the long-term solution? Expanding CS education, of course!
The possibility of a good paying job in software development when they graduate college. Maybe even with the company paying off their student loans for them.
Instead of the chance to compete against low-balling H1B applicants...
These kids should learn by running their own email server at home!
-Women aren't in tech because the STEM world is misogynistic
-I'll bet you are a women's studies major
-Yes I am, what has that got to do with it?
-Why didn't you study STEM?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Your damned H1B visa program threatens the US, as does allowing outsourcing of jobs that work with PCI data of American Citizens.
Fix those fuckups first, then you can talk..
I've got a PhD in CS, and I grew up with the U.S. education system of the 1970's and 80's. I had playground time, and little formalized national testing. I'll bet few of the Turing award winners or ACM Fellows were educated in the manner advocated by today's politicians and Plutocrats.
If they're so eager to make good computer scientists, one might ask if they're willing to reproduce the educational environments of those luminaries.
You don't need more than a crappy second-hand computer with a compiler and a couple of programming language textbooks in order to learn how to program.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What ever it is they are on about, you can be sure it is NOT Computer Science . Maybe they're talking about programming skills, or maybe even the inability of many kids to operate an interface without instruction, not sure... I did not RTFS.
Does it really make sense to spend money on CS education while importing cheap H1B labor?
As long as you're spending someone else's money.
One 'institute' after another banging that drum. We need to make sure a different story gets out.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You know the GP has a point .. if the children are learning that science is what we want it to be, or that the world is 6,000 years old, or that humans rode dinosaurs, or that fossils are a big scam ... then at that point you might find they lack the critical reasoning and logic skills required to do anything in the STEM fields.
Reality exists. Cause and effect are real things.
But an increasing amount of people (it seems) choose to go "la la la" and loudly say reality is whatever their beliefs tell them it is, and that objective science is mostly just a guess.
And that is going to be a huge problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Please come and show us your CS skills so lovingly inculcated by your parents. Also, we would like to know how they helped you in your career so far? Or were there other factors in your success?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
One big problem with equating CS with "coding" is the fact that low-skill and high-skill jobs get lumped into the same bucket. Same thing in my side (IT) where systems architects and help desk guys get painted with the same brush. If you teach a student to just "code" then all they're going to know is a few web front end tricks and they'll be difficult to train for the next thing. The students coming into the profession now need to have a science background, not just a 9-week coder bootcamp. Remember MCSE bootcamps from the late 90s/early 2000s? We in IT are _still_ working with some of the products of these.
If anyone is serious about fixing the skills problem, the following needs to happen:
- Salaries need to be stabilized at a level that will attract new entrants to the field. No one is going to waste time and money studying something that doesn't pay off later on. Look at all the little private colleges that are going out of business after burning through their endowments. Lots of students know that they can no longer expect a job after graduating studying just anything.at any college. (I was one of the last graduation years where that was true.) Unfortunately, college is a trade school now for most people.
- Jobs need to be available. Companies can't cry "skill shortage" while outsourcing their IT department to the lowest bidder or throwing people away when they turn 40. I think a technical career provides a very fulfilling job if you're lucky and choose your employers well. But, if I were faced with a choice of what to study, and saw stagnant wages, mass layoffs, and a career that can end at 40, I would probably pick something else.
- A career progression needs to exist. My career progression was help desk monkey --> desktop support monkey --> data center guy --> system administrator --> the strange hybrid admin/designer/architect/integration combo I do now. Now, it doesn't exist to the same degree. Help desk is in India, desktop support is significantly reduced and the pay is much lower than it was, data center monkey jobs now consist of replacing parts in Google or Amazon or Microsoft data centers, and so on. Where are the next generation of IT people and software developers going to be trained? On the dev side, the QA and maintenance coder jobs are increasingly in India or automated. Getting rid of low level jobs means that new entrants can't grow into the better jobs.
I'm an advocate of taking the different tasks in IT and dev, and splitting them into "technician" and "licensed engineer" tracks. Licensing the top tiers of the job field might mean higher quality of systems and software, fewer major security hacks, etc. The technician track would allow people to grow into these jobs, steadily gaining responsibility and salary over time. The thing we would have to avoid is what lawyers are going through now...the Bar Association threw open the doors to the profession a while back, opened tons of law schools, and allowed the offshoring of routine legal work. Now, look online sometime -- lawyers who spent $250K on school and passed the bar exam can't find work. The only way to make money as a lawyer now is if you manage to graduate at the top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford -- otherwise, don't even bother.
So yes, definitely find ways to keep students interested in STEM -- but don't be shocked if no one signs on for the long haul when they see what's coming at the end...
sure, let's do more CS education in schools. but let's also eliminate H1B visas so computer science jobs are available in the US.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It's because the USA schools SUCK. utterly SUCK. Most schools do not teach a lick of CS, and MOSt of the money the school has is not put into sciences and math, but the worthless sports programs.
American kids will graduate as scientifically illiterate dum dum's until this is changed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
which aims to increase K-12 CS education AND THE NUMBER OF H-1B VISAS
Emphasis added on what this is REALLY all about.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
One of the problems is that American corporations are both lazy and greedy. Too cheap and lazy to train local intelligent educated coders in their unique coding operating procedures. So, they lobby to hire foreigners that will keep costs down. Oddly, the foreigners also need training. So, claiming that American't aren't suited is a bold faced lie. They simply want to keep costs down and screw you if you are a qualified American software engineer that has a B+ average and is willing to work hard. Someday, you might become great at what you do and want more money or leave the firm. Hiring H1B applicants keeps costs down and reduces churn, which wouldn't be bad if the cheapskates paid appropriately in the first place and were honest about their hiring needs. Western education is excellent. As a side note, it seems that the Clinton's no longer feel your pain. They help cause it now.
I know you just want to dig at creationists, but keep in mind - since "scientific consensus" is considered an alternative to hard evidence, the problem is just as bad on the other end of the spectrum.
Worse, really - at least creationists don't pretend to have scientific backing when they're making shit up.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It says all you need to know about the culture of the political class that encouraging middle class girls to pursue STEM jobs is higher on their list than ensuring that boys in the inner city and the sticks are getting educational opportunities anywhere near what is accessible, but often avoided, by middle class girls. Maybe Tyrone in the hood would love to make a solid salary working with computers as a sys admin or developer? Jim Bob in bumblefuck, Nowheresville might like to have choices beyond working as a low skilled worker or working minimum wage retail.
Reminds me of a joke about a SJW approved version of Game of Thrones. Sansa Stark starts a social media campaign to highlight the difficulty of being a high lord's daughter and spends most of her day on Twitter telling peasant boys to check their privilege. That is, more or less, where are now with "equality" in America. We let the privileged put on the airs of being proletarian because heaven forbid we tell them to shut up and use their privilege for the good of society and the less fortunate.
Scam that spends more on office supplies and expenses than it gives to actual charity. Tax fraud investigation in progress....
I've had interviews go wrong many times, for dumb and dishonest reasons. It comes down to the fact that the employers weren't actually interested in hiring, had too many candidates to consider. So they hoke up an excuse that you don't have enough experience in a bunch of narrowly defined areas, and you're out. Deep down they know perfectly well that you could do the job. But they manufacture some desired experience that you supposedly lack, and start thinking of you as a liar for even applying. Never mind that the whole hiring process is packed with deception from start to finish. Of course you should never outright lie, but spinning and twisting the facts is fine, even encouraged. They focus on superficial skills and miss the big picture. Overqualified is another fun reason for rejection. Why would an employer ever want to reject a candidate for being too smart? Yet a PhD is typically seen as a negative. The standard excuse is that the employee will get bored and leave, as if there aren't hundreds of other more compelling reasons anyone might leave. More like, there's a good deal of prejudice against geeks and nerds and smart people in general, which has been getting worse in recent years with the upswing in anti-intellectualism. When a job application takes a turn like that, when they start hunting for excuses not to consider people, you know the employer wasn't serious.
So I'm skeptical of this push to get more people into CS. On the one hand, maybe there should be a 4th "R", 'rogramming. Maybe programming is such a fundamental skill that it should have a place in elementary school. But with all the noise over H1Bs and the demonstrated facts that many employers really don't value, like, or trust engineers as a whole, not just the individuals among them that aren't competent, it's hard to be sure. They know they have to have some engineers, but they don't have to like it, and many don't. Very tiresome having to always watch your back, be ready to defend yourself, and not give them any openings they can use to drum you out. However, this attempt to reach people when very young is such a long play, beyond what such short-sighted companies can conceive, that perhaps it is genuinely meant.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The offshoring of high tech skills in computer related sciences will soon turn into a flood as more and more state universities loosing funding to instead support building and staffing more prisons and more draconian law enforcement necessary to maintain the status quo, more tax deductions for the 1%, and more special tax breaks for corporations, all further driving up the cost of education and sending the best faculty overseas and increasing the costs of tuition. Improvements in world-wide networks will only facilitate this trend.
This shift in investment is creating foreign universities that are increasingly more and more competitive with US universities and as things are going now we can soon expect the most advanced research, such as that in particle physics, stem cell research, high speed train and subway technology, and robotics, to be dominated by non-US based enterprises. Its largely a function of ideology on tax policy, which says lets pay as little taxes as possible (especially for the 1%), and consequently invest as little as possible in education and leading edge research (and many other things as well, evidently except military spending, fossil fuel production, and good old fashioned special interest).
Ironically, the solution proposed recently by Saunders, would largely solve this problem by providing free college education by imposing a Wall Street transaction tax that would directly fund education of all kinds, thereby allowing the best and most creative to develop their talents. American exceptionalism notwithstanding, the reality is that human minds and talents aren't so different among countries (the differences lie predominantly in the consequences of geography and cultural history). Consequently, progress in education and technology is predominantly a function of the laws of large numbers and there are simply many more foreigners than there are Americans.
Of course commerce has been global since the late 19th century so large corporations can take advantage of local differences in talent and wages so no one should expect programs like H1B visas and other forms of special interest legislation not to emerge. The fact that they thrive is ultimately a function of lowered US investment in education and research of all kinds and sadly, a modern GOP and a significant fraction of the Democratic Party that have bought into the politics surrounding the ideology that lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy will trickle down to to improve the lot of the rest. Although it may well be true in some cases, the amount of its success is far way too small to overcome the advantage to other nations that invest more in education and research for the broadest possible segments of their populations.
I'm not talking about the Slashdot crowd. I'm talking to the politicians pushing the ludicrous idea that "not enough" kids learn CS/STEM and the nodding heads in the audience that think the problem isn't so nuanced that all "winning the future" is really going to take is pushing enough kids to do things that they weren't interested in doing to start with.
Outside of that, I'm regretfully not terribly surprised that the logical conclusion of pushing the misbegotten idea that kids need computer science (despite everyone in the conversation not knowing what it means) hasn't made its way to the mainstream press: that is, flooding the employment pool with applicants to drive down salaries, for positions that aren't filled with H1Bs anyway. It's funny how none of these talking heads talk about THAT part.
Nope, it's always about how sexy these jobs are; spoken by people who have at most done little more coding than the obligatory "Hello World" script. Except, no, they really, really aren't. In the immortal words of Jonathan Coulton, in a song about this very topic: "This job fulfilling in creative way/such a load of crap."
It can be long, grueling, and irritating. It's filled with demands for certification by people who barely understand how to use Outlook. And it's a career that requires lifelong learning. Which, for the record, I find nothing wrong with, BUT if you have a life-plan that doesn't involve any severe paradigm shifts and long hours of self-teaching (fuck's sake, half the languages people use now weren't even a thing fifteen years ago), then CS, coding, or whatever the hell non-techie types are calling is isn't sexy or fun. And the people who make the big bucks doing this ARE the kind of people that are willing to put up with all the long and grueling stuff that comes with the turf.
I don't blame anyone for the life choices they make. I just get pissed when I hear politicians make a career field out to be sexier than it actually is, and trying to turn people into miserable worker-bots.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
What developments? The emails are a SNOOZE. They show nothing other than the mundane.
You know, in the past, they used to equate the amount of skill and experience it took to be a good coder to being similar with a skilled surgeon. There is some truth in that. In fact, being a surgeon is easier because you don't have to worry about basic human anatomy changing every few years. In IT, however, platforms and languages evolve and your skillset has to cope with these changes all the time.
Now they would have us believe that you can take regular people, and teach them to be "skilled surgeons" in a short period of time.
The reason there is a shortage of good coders is because it takes a lot more intelligence, skill and discipline than most people realize. There are simply not enough people with the capacity it takes to meet the demand.
Proverbs 21:19
I disagree that the threat to the economy is a lack of CS education. I'd argue it's a lack of finance and business management graduates who are trained to think more than 4 quarters ahead. Short-term thinking is the problem in US businesses today. A lack of highly trained CS grads is arguably a symptom of that problem, but is not any kind of root cause.
You are definitely framing the perspective correctly. However, H1B visas are only a symptom of the larger problem, the ideology and politics of trickle down economics.
One can see the hand of corporations in the new Transpacific Trade agreement, which locks in Malaysia's use of slave labor and America's and China's use of prison and parolee labor as acceptable parts of the agreement. No wonder Obama and virtually the entire GOP are working together to keep the whole things secret until after it passes. It isn't just software development but microcircuit manufacturing as well.
More likely they have more money because they work in the only expanding job area - Sales.
The laundry list of shady deals is so long as this point that the organization itself has lost all credibility.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not just CS, a bigger problem is more lack of understanding about networking and more operational details.
You see it especially well in educated people in other fields in their interactions. A particular friend of mine is a chemist. He is aware enough to recognize a web browser with noscript, but his answer to that is to go to a site and based on (when discussing it after) "this site is reputable" hit "allow all temporarily" without any awareness of the actual issues involved like whether affiliate sites can be considered "reputable".... case in point, the site in question referenced doubleclick.
I of course used this as an opportunity to describe using a web browser in the most common way using my favorite analogy ever... "Imagine if we replaced hand shakes with unprotected anal sex. You get a party invite, and you go. You know youre friend is reputable but, does that mean you want to 'greet' all of his friends too? That is what web browsing is like by default, the website is a crowded diner table, and 'greetings' are going around the table"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Red pens and *gasp* telling children they got the wrong answer! A failing grade inflicts unforgivable trauma on the psyches of our little snowflakes.
if little johnny snowflake cant handle a red mark on his paper, then compiler errors are gonna beat his ass and steal his lunch.
OMFG! The RED mark!
You've solved the gender inequality problem in STEM!
More men than women are red/green color blind!
They didn't have their souls crushed by getting red marks, they thought they were doing well, and so continued on in STEM! By the time they realized that they had actually been screwing up the whole time, they had already been writing Java and .Net code for 2 years!
The only way we're going to be able to drive wages into the ground while simultaneously getting/abusing the creme of the talent crop will be to flood the market with CS people. Doesn't matter if it's schools or immigration... just flood the damn market already!
--All Fortune 100 Tech Company CEOs.
IMO, the "bigger picture" problem is simply that America has jettisoned most of its decent paying jobs in favor of automation and/or outsourcing. What do we really produce here in significant quantities, that we can actually export to the rest of the world? Entertainment and software. (And both of those keep hitting limitations because many parts of the world don't respect the whole concept of intellectual property as something you give heavy legal protection to.)
Furthermore, the music industry is struggling in America today with the shift towards "all I can listen to via streaming for a cheap monthly rate", vs. actually buying the albums or songs individually. Expect the same to happen with movies, post initial theater release, as broadband becomes more commonplace and less expensive.
In a word, we're pretty screwed. As someone pointed out last week on Slashdot, self-driving trucks are on the way. Whenever that becomes acceptable on our roadways, you're going to see all of the middle class "truck driver" jobs vaporize, ALONG with all of the business they used to bring the hotels, truck stops, diners and restaurants along the highways that served them.
There are still some good paying jobs in the medical field, since humans haven't really found a way to stop getting injured, catching various illnesses or diseases, or aging. But even there, the healthcare system (whether you think "Obamacare" was a net positive or negative) is slowly imploding. People don't earn enough money doing OTHER jobs to afford the cost of the healthcare, and insurance can't keep covering it without A) taxing the heck out of you, or B) extracting it on the front end from your employer so you salary diminishes.
IMO, this big push for STEM and software coding is just a way to try to mask the reality as much as possible that we don't produce enough jobs anymore for all the people who want to work. To an extent, automation will increase the need for these folks. (Self driving cars and trucks, for example, will need software and software code updates on a regular basis, as well as engineers and mechanics to keep them going.) Fast food places going to automated touch-screen ordering systems or food processing/vending systems will need them too. So do farms that go to robotics for harvesting crops. But the very *reason* these technologies add value for the people implementing them is the REDUCTION in labor they bring. You're talking 1 person taking care of one of these systems for at least 4 or 5 people they put out of a (lower paying) job.
In the long run, I can't really see a scenario that doesn't result in a whole bunch of unemployed people and a relative few with decent paying jobs taking care of the machines that keep the rest unemployed. I *hope* I'm wrong and has been the case in previous history, new things will emerge that create jobs I'm not even thinking of right now. But it looks to me like it's got to get pretty bad before it gets better.
The Clinton Corrupt Slush Fund for Easy Policy Change..
Need some weapons deals pushed through? Donate millions to the foundation! http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton...
And who really cares where the money goes.. Charity Navigator won't even rank them due to their "atypical business model." It's a slush fund for the Clintons to doll out favors to their political toadies. Nevermind Hillary's absurd "I can't carry two devices" excuse for hosting a private mail server in her house to conduct State Department business.
After reading a interview with Randall Munroe (XKCD) i find myself wondering if what is needed is a computer engineering course alongside existing computer science courses.
http://www.maa.org/publication...
"And there's another distinction: There's coding, and then there is computer science. The best explanation I've ever heard of that is that coding is writing programs, and computer science is the study of computers only in the sense that astronomy is the study of telescopes. I think that's a really concise summation, because computer science isn't the study of computers, it's the study of what you can do with a computer and what stuff you can explore with a computer."
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Wait, why aren't there initiatives to determine why STEM in general is experiencing "poor performance"?
I know! Not enough women!!
But if there's a problem with the US falling behind and not doing well, could it be a problem with teaching methods? If we don't have enough people in STEM but the ones in STEM are doing well, then it's a problem with not enough people in STEM. But if the people in STEM are doing poorly, is it a problem with the teachers? Why add more people if the teaching methods are not working?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
This seemingly contradictory policy - asking for more H1B visas while promoting more CS education at home - has a sinister end game.
Either way, big business wins. More H1B's means an endless supply of cheap labor. More CS grads at home means that the market gets flooded with CS grads, thereby driving down the labor rate.
The real goal here is not to get more women into CS or get more people of color into CS. The goal is to provide a steady stream of cheap labor that places like Microsoft and Facebook and Google and the rest of them can exploit. It is nothing less than a sinister ploy to drive up profits.
The Clintons are already taking money from every tinpot dictator with a checkbook. Big business is more than willing to drop a few million here and there to make sure that favorable policies are enacted.
CS != Programming. That is all.
I really doubt I'd have a career as a web application developer if I had programming classes in school, at any level.
Peace, or Not?
How about this: Clintons' lack of CS savvy in setting up an email server threatens US national security.
Critical thinking is not wanted. People might understand the present economic system and fight for another (no not communism or socialism. both terms are burned and most people only understand suppression when they hear them). If you want that kids can leave the trailer park, they need to share class with kids from the middle and upper classes. You don't have that in the US. You can find that in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Work perfectly. However, this eliminate those trailer parks. And then you need someone else to work for minimal wages. Someone abroad maybe.
Seriously, rather than pushing CS exclusively, they should push STEM in high schools, esp so that those going to college enter decently, and those going into blue collar, can make things.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Rote teaching of CS to students not interested in CS will just turn people off to it. Teach children critical thinking, teach them about all the cognitive biases that we suffer from. Teach them to think and how to figure shit out. Use puzzles and games to promote exercising these abilities.
Or continue to crank out students that know how to take a test. Which is a surprisingly useless skill once you're out of school.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I've had the opposite experience. My first encounter with computer programming was on my own with an old copy of turbo pascal during middle school, but it wasn't until I took classes in high school that I had any interest in pursuing it as a career.
On the other hand, if the class had been mandatory and taught by someone without a passion and/or good grasp of the subject I suppose I could have easily found it discouraging.
Scientific consensus is based on hard evidence. Scientists are creative, and if there's no strong evidence about something they'll come up with all sorts of ideas that can't currently be verified. When they all agree, there's solid evidence and theory behind it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Free" tuition would not fix it because there is already lots of ways of getting tuition paid for without running up any debt.
From government programs that are under utilized where they will pay your tuition if you work, and get paid, in places they want you to and in position related to your degree for a few years.
I thought the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed indentured servitude. And even if these programs are structured not to qualify constitutionally as indentured servitude, how do they handle a graduate who faces structural unemployment in positions related to his degree?
If you are talking something like teachers the ones I know that have done this fulfill their obligations with completing the school year as opposed to the physical year.
Structural unemployment means the labor surplus associated with widespread layoffs in an industry. You're referring to seasonal unemployment, which is generally excluded from structural unemployment. Structural unemployment happens on cycles far longer than a year or is permanent. How is someone supposed to work off student loan debt if he comes to find that nobody is hiring in his location and field?
Kids' Lack of Creativity Threatens the US Economy
FTFY, Mr. Clinton... What threatens the economy are kids that are not allowed to have the time to think and be creative. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as replacing a school's art and music department... or giving kids time to rest and play from learning, thus allowing them to mentally-chew on what they were just taught. Creative people are in every profession, but to be creative means they were exposed to many different concepts of thinking, rather than just rote presentations of 'STEM' subjects. I think the jury's out regarding how damaging to kids' focus technology is... like tablets and mobile devices.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Scientists are creative, and if there's no strong evidence about something they'll come up with all sorts of ideas that can't currently be verified. When they all agree, there's solid evidence and theory behind it.
You realize these two sentences are directly contradictory to one another, right?
"Scientists are creative and will come up with" == "When we don't know, we make shit up"
"ideas that can't currently be verified" == "shit that can't be proven because we we made it up"
"When they agree, there's solid evidence..." == "If we all agree to agree on the shit we made up, no one should ever question it"
So basically...
"When they can't show it scientifically, they make shit up. But if enough of them agree about the made-up shit, we should accept it as fact because they're scientists."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese