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Comment by happywage | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time thinking this is a bad thing. While people should be free to study whatever entertains them, I think most of these majors contribute little to making the world a better place or making us better people.

Two exceptions, in theory, are History and Philosophy, because knowledge in these areas has the potential to improve the quality of thought and discourse. However, the views of most people on these subjects seem to be so guided by partisan identities that it's not clear that mere education can overcome that. People refuse to reason well because they want to fit in with their friends and family.

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I disagree vehemently.

Like it or not we need excellent educators in ALL the humanities. That requires people with deep and diverse ways of being able to teach HOW to do it in as many different ways as possible. That means we need more exposure to more people. Discourse is hard and demanding.

Hell, being able to communicate and know without a doubt your message has been received is hard and demanding, but most people can't be bothered to admit it.

Are you sure we need ALL the humanities. There are an effectivly infinite number of potential avenues of exploration in the humanities (as in the sciences), so we cannot possibly host all of them. In general, I am in favor of letting academics self organize which areas get the attention and support at the ground level, but part of this is that some subjects will naturally lose interest and die off.

Without naming names, there are certain fields within the academic humanities that I think worthy of this die off (insert rant on postmodernism) to both free up resources and let the good parts be absorbed into adjacent fields.

"While history, English, and the rest have faded, only one set of humanities fields without a foot in the sciences has clearly held its own: the much newer (and smaller) disciplines the statistical agency joins together as ethnic, gender, and cultural studies."

Just because I want somethint, doesn't mean I think its true.

History, English, Philosophy, Communication, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, Linguistics, Political Sciences...

The cultural/gender studies I tend to lump in as subsets of those major subjects. I used to laugh at them coming from a Sciences background only to find that any advancement I could make filled me with doubt that the world was ready to use it responsibly.

These fields are critical. We have no chance of being able to really breakthrough our major problems as a species without being able to understand what it means to be human, or even what the same damn mundane things look like from another culture or person's point of view.

Trying to hand off something so portentous as something like halfway successful ubiquitous facial recognition to a society so poor in the humanities as our society today is like letting an infant learn to walk in a minefield. If we can't even coexist with the people around us without trying to strip everyone of civil rights, or getting into pissing matches about borders, we've got a long way to go before we start messing around with massively disruptive technologies with high social impacts. The recent social media fiascos and trends toward weaponized disinformation causing panic and hysteria should be evidence enough that we as people need to pull back and shore up the basics so we can at least ATTEMPT to try to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.

For heaven sake, with enough attention to detail, and a convincing enough Facebook profile, you can influence the sentiments of MASSES of people. It doesn't matter whether truth or lies... It gets said all the same. During Lincoln's time as President, he said something very poignant during the lead up to the Gettysburg address when he was staying at the Wills House, composing the Gettysburg Address.

>"In my position, it is important that I should not say foolish things...[If you can help it! Is exclaimed from the audience]...It very often happens the only way to help it is to say nothing at all!"

Imagine the horror he would experience to find out that we as a people have devised a technology that forces EVERYONE, not just one in a position of power to have to express the same torturous care in crafting our communications lest our "foolishthings" exact a cost through bloodshed or imprisonment?

None of that can be done without good communication, understanding, and empathy for your fellow man. We all don't have to agree, and war will always happen, but Goddamnit, we should be able to formulate a better excuse than "It's the war on <insert nebulous concept here>". That can only be done with a thorough understanding of the ways we communicate as people, cultures, artisans, polities, etc.

And EVERYONE has a duty to know this stuff, or at least be aware enough of it to keep themselves safe from those who would use it against them.

It isn't easy, but it is the only way.

If we can't even coexist with the people around us without trying to strip everyone of civil rights, or getting into pissing matches about borders, we've got a long way to go before we start messing around with massively disruptive technologies with high social impacts. The recent social media fiascos and trends toward weaponized disinformation causing panic and hysteria should be evidence enough that we as people need to pull back and shore up the basics so we can at least ATTEMPT to try to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.

If the idea is for people to pull back from seeking credible opportunities and shore up "the basics" of History, English, Philosophy, Art, Art History, ... -- this is elitist and unrealistic. History provides little support for the idea, that societies pro-actively prepare themselves in this way. For most people, "the basics" are and always will be about working for a living.

The question of whether it's worth studying the humanities is orthogonal to the question of how many people we graduate into them.

Philosophy is a good test case. How many people should leave college each year to be philosophers, or even philosophy professors? Probably not very many (though I would be interested if you have a different answer); but that doesn't mean lots of people should not study philosophy.

Many people play golf. Yet few are professional golfers or golf instructors.

> These fields are critical.

I would agree with that.

But, we can do with 10x less humanities majors. Even if we start that process now though, it'll be decades before it's reasonable again.

> to reconcile the new avenues of life opened up by global interconnectivity of data and logistics with some of our more basic fears and prejudices to which we are ALL still subject.

I have actually studies Philosophy, and uh. I found it disappointing. It sounds good. We should be able to just reason our way to the next great paradigm shift, and adapt to it intentionally, in a controlled fashion. In order to do that we should study the past.

Except, when it comes to mathematical philosophy, there's 2 kinds of humanities majors:

Humanities majors that first got a PhD in mathematics (or some other scientific field). These have large contributions, but ... mostly to failed mathematical endeavors, like the axiom of choice and proving Turing wrong. But ... great contributions, it would be very wrong to say people like this didn't contribute. Note that pretty much every last antiquity philosopher we know falls in this category. I would also like to point out that it takes pretty exceptional people to achieve this. Most math professors can't do it. Most philosophy professors can't do this.

Pure humanities majors ... these have had many theories about math, physics even machine learning. Almost without exception, they were wrong. And worse, some of these people were great impediments to progress because they managed to get high positions in important universities ... and used them to sabotage advances, so there is an argument to be made that their sum total contributions are actually negative.

Studying the past doesn't work because of the same reason that a lot of statistical models fail. If you have data points A and B, "predicting" anything between A and B can work pretty well. However, what you want to do in the humanities, when you have A, B, C, D and then predict E ... that fails spectacularly more often than not. Again, same in statistics as in philosophy.

We shall drop any concept of middle-class and lets get back to slave-master society already then. I'm almost sure we'll have more people contributing to making the world a better a place then.

You miss the mark completely. Humanities have traditionally been studied by the leisure classes who didn't need to work for a living.

I think you make his point. In feudal societies, the majority of the people were stuck in devoting their lives to survival-oriented tasks, while only a privileged few could dedicate themselves to higher pursuits. And let's not forget that traditionally "STEM" was also reserved to the leisure classes.

Now, in 2018, we have unthinkable prosperity compared to the feudal era. And yet, there is now this constant political pressure to get rid of the middle-class and have most people dedicate their lives to survival (a.k.a. "employability"). Don't take a year off work or it will look weird on your CV! Don't let the kids play freely, they must prepare for their Ivy League admissions! Etc, etc.

Isn't it the main purpose of technology to free humanity of labor, so that we can pursue higher interests? And yet, technology seems to demand that everyone works for technology now. Must have a fucking STEM degree! (I do, btw). Weird, no?

Would you care to rephrase what you have written?

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