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Comment by miloshadzic | Hacker News Reader

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miloshadzic

Another reading of this paragraph is that it's essentially douchebaggery.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13731079 and marked it off-topic.

This paragraph? Which one? I see three.

I'll never understand the techie disdain for the humanities and liberal arts.

I am not endorsing miloshadzic's comment in any way, but one can be skeptical of postmodernism without being disdainful of the humanities and liberal arts in general.

Maybe it's partly because of anti-intellectualism, the idea that being very smart is bad. I had never heard about the idea, until recently. It was some article about American anti-intellectualism and why it is so popular. Reading that article was a very weird experience for me. I believe this concept doesn't exist in the culture of the country where I am from.

That's a very strange thing for us Europeans. When I meet a new guy I will scan some cultural fields and see if we have some common ground where we can sit the discussion for a while, it could be post-modernist philosophy, classical music, anime, or porn even, but we need to find place to settle. Younger, I did the same with some people from the US and noticed big "!name dropping!" flags. Right, I was name dropping, just to try to find a common topic. I wasn't trying to shower anyone with "intellectualism", though: it is perfectly ok to not have read Proust. (But it would be weird and a no-go to have familiarity of no parts of cultural life except baseball and "football")

>That's a very strange thing for us Europeans.

It's even worse in Britain. Anything remotely smart or cultured is considered "pretentious" etc.

Britain's tired of experts, apparently...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/10/michael-goves-gui...

https://www.tiredofexperts.co.uk/

Tired of people taking quotes out of context too. What Gove actually said was that the country was tired of self-proclaimed experts who always turned out to be wrong. Which is not an unreasonable thing to assert.

In some defence of the quote: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/michael-gove-was-accident...

Really, it was a joke example, but few people actually self-proclaim expertise they don't have - tough even being tired of such people being wrong isn't at odds with the comment I was replying to about anti-intellectualism.

Most tech people I know have an above average knowledge and respect for the humanities. Maybe you cannot excel in both but you can enjoy both. There is always a subset of the population, intersecting also technical people, that increase their self perceived value by decreasing the value of the others.

I didn't realize my first paragraph might come off as being dismissive of the humanities. It was just meant as a self-deprecating yarn, nothing more.

Isn't computer science a liberal arts? At least it is a feature of lib art schools on the east coast, not necessarily always an engineering degree.

It depends on your definition of "liberal arts". The classical liberal arts (i.e. arts of a liberated person, as opposed to the servile arts) are music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. So if you boil down computer science to its mathematical principles, you could make a decent case for it.

These days, the liberal arts generally relate to the humanities: language (e.g. English degree in the USA), fine arts, history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, etc. It's the study of people and groups of people, instead of the physical world and the laws that operate on the physical world independently of the people that occupy it.

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