When Joshua Summers was in elementary school, his dad would come to class to perform science experiments. One time, they did an experiment to show how lightning bugs lit up.
“That was pretty cool,” he says. There was never one moment that drew him to science, but it may have helped that his mother was a nurse and his father was a mathematician.
“I was raised in a house where the benefits of science were made known,” says Joshua. “It can help you get ahead in life if you align your beliefs with something that can be proven. You’re just going to be able to do more.”
The popular science-infused YouTube channel Vsauce and his high school physics class helped him get into the University of Pittsburgh, where he recently completed a degree in mechanical engineering. So too did Minecraft, the sandbox multiplayer game where players can gather resources and build structures.
“I think Minecraft actually had a huge effect on me,” he says. The game’s constraints made it interesting. “You can’t do everything in the game, but you have to use the building blocks of the game to do what you want. And to me, that’s what engineering is.”
These days, he designs printed circuit boards at a lab. He’s hoping to pursue graduate study in engineering, with long-term aspirations to work in a university lab or for the Department of Energy.
“Being a scientific thinker can help you avoid a lot of fallacies,” he says. “You can have as many beliefs as you want, but believing in science helps you make sure that your beliefs are aligned with reality.”
That mindset applies to realms beyond engineering—including politics. An independent voter, Joshua seeks exposure to different viewpoints. Collecting many perspectives, like data, helps him sharpen his political positions.
“Imagine you’re looking at a house,” he says. “If everyone is standing on the north side of the house and looking at it, you’re only going to have twenty-five percent of the picture. You don’t know what exists on the other sides.”
However, hearing different voices can clarify the picture: “If you have people on the other side all looking at it, and you’re all communicating, you can have a better view of the house and a more informed view.”
A more informed view also entails going beyond the Democrat-versus-Republican binary. “I think if there was a two-party system and one of the parties perfectly represented my views, maybe I wouldn’t be complaining.”
Yet, he says, nuance across many political issues prevents him from affiliating with either party. With guns, for example, he sees some value in safety regulations: “I think you can treat a gun in some ways like a car,” he says. “But I’m not someone who’s like, ‘we should ban all of them.’ I think giving some power to the common citizen is a good thing.”
On foreign policy, he doesn’t identify as a hawk. “But I’m not pro-appeasement. As a Jewish person, I look at the historical background of what happened in World War II, and obviously, I don’t want that to happen again.”
But he doesn’t allocate too much political attention to the big issues. “If everyone spends their energy and money trying to get, for example, abortion or gun laws changed, we’re at a political equilibrium. We’ve been debating these issues for hundreds of years.”
In contrast, government reform has greater potential. “I think something like entropy exists in the government. It’s like rust. In general, the forces of business interests and all of these people add rust to the machine. And I think our government could operate more efficiently, like a brand new car. We can do things to get rid of the rust.”
Some starting points include making it easier to pay taxes, imposing term limits, and instituting prohibitions on stock trading by members of Congress. These issues go beyond viewing politics through a “Democrat” or “Republican” lens.
“From a general standpoint, only having two options is a terrible thing,” he says. “If you went to the grocery store and there were only two types of bread, two types of fruit—they only had apples and oranges—and there was no variation, it would suck.”
Harry Patton is Managing Editor of Independent Pennsylvanians and a Swarthmore College Lang Social Impact Fellow.
