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Comment by sakri | Hacker News Reader

People use the 'set in stone' phrase all the time, it puts a different spin on it when 6000 years later, we are still analyzing some poor guys tax returns. This is fascinating stuff, too bad data mining the mundane lives of social media users pays better.

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"A tablet with beer allocations – a good 5,000 years old – pinned up in a glass case like a butterfly for all to see. What can be interesting in that beyond the fact, obvious enough when you think about it, that hard-working individuals throughout history have always wanted their glass of beer?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/TnAQ0B8bQkSJ...

Irving Finkel, mentioned in the article and quite a character (check out Youtube videos with him; the latest BM Curator's Corner has him teaching someone cuneiform and then suggesting they leave their clay tablets on the floor of the Ashurbanipal exhibit to see who panics).

Can't sell a Sumerian a new model iPhone.

And to play devil's advocate here, what does this old data potentially get us? Like OP said, it may just be some dude's tax info. Nice to have, and maybe useful for painting a picture of day-to-day life, but that's not going to do anything for climate change, stagnant wages, or Mutually Assured Destruction?

I had an illuminating conversation with a friend once. We were contrasting the values of our respective areas of interest (her - business, me - research) and I realised something odd.

To her, non-commercial research is a nice luxury we can afford in addition to the principal purpose of society, advancing material condition.

To me, material advance is mostly the necessary price we must pay to accomplish what's truly important - advancing our understanding of everything around us.

Obviously I'm simplifying somewhat, research is often necessary for material advance and I'm not about to trade in my creature comforts, but the two worldviews are fundamentally at odds, and trying to understand the purpose of one in terms of advancing the other is fruitless.

Research into history isn't designed to answer your priorities. But to those interested in it, it's the fundamental point, for which addressing your priorities is merely necessary bookkeeping.

Thanks for taking the time, that is an illuminating point.

I remember spending countless hours arguing with someone who genuinely believed 'greed is good', a total waste of time, no progress whatsoever on either side.

Thinking about it now, my sparring partners attitude makes some sense, if 'advancing our material condition' is indeed the end game. It's like two engineers arguing about implementation details, without realizing they are designing different apps.

Buzzwords like 'Goal Oriented' or 'Understand your clients motivation' fly around, but your point gives them more dimension. Thanks.

If I'm not mistaken, generalising your question leads to: "What is the use of studying history?"

Generalizing that question leads to "How should we live, knowing that we will die?"

Attitudes like the one expressed in the comment you're replying to is exactly why STEM majors should have a required humanities/liberal arts component.

Rather, why there should be more humanities / liberal arts outreach (and funding), so that STEM majors are more likely to have access to, engage with, and fall in love with them.

I understand the impulse behind such comments, but making something "required" is generally a poor way to get people to love or appreciate something. (Think of all the people who "hate mathematics".) In education, often the system is broken, good instructors are to find, etc. (Consider Lockhart's Lament, and its generalization: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=410.) We see this in politics too (I don't mean just electoral politics, but e.g. open-source communities with codes of conduct etc), where even simple basic human kindness, when made mandatory, often seems to provoke backlash. We can't require people to be nice, and we can't require people to appreciate the humanities. We have to do the hard work of gently persuading.

Anything made mandatory always becomes unpleasant.

Consider sex, sounds fun when spontaneous and free, but slave-staffed prostitution is not so fun from the slave's perspective.

Consider food, how could a nice meal be unpleasant, but force feeding has been used for torture, not so cool anymore.

Consider religion, or politics, or housework, etc...

To some extent if you're allowing people into higher ed who are not higher-quality people, they're not going to appreciate a wide ranging education and a wide education is useless for most vocational training (engineering, programming, etc) anyway. Historically higher vocational training was only pursued by the highest class of people; not so much anymore; probably time to remove legacy nobility from higher ed for the masses.

Are you genuinely comparing educational requirements to slavery and torture?

I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them. Going through a mass of required reading only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea doesn't seem like a good use of time.

"...only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea."

Actually, essentially all of the suggestions agree that living for "bling+bitches" is a pretty poor idea. For different reasons, of course.

Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it. The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just think hedonists are punks.

This is true. On the other hand, many of the approaches that get kicked around as "hedonism", like Epicurus, are pretty far from "bitches+bling".

>They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them.

...that's the point.

The entire purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn about what is important to you personally, what it means to be a person in a world full of other people making that same journey, how to understand the events that lead to where we are today, how to think about and approach new ideas, how to evaluate and process new information and so on. Your comment that shows a misunderstanding of the liberal arts reflects a core failure of the education system that is unfortunately all too common.

I've seen this attitude in engineering majors who have been required to take humanities and liberal arts classes. Maybe such a requirement helps some people, but I suspect resentment is a more common outcome amongst people already predisposed to devalue the humanities.

I've seen that happen personally, but I think that's a failure of the instructor or the system (or both), not of the subject matter itself. The liberal arts should be fascinating if taught in a compelling way. It's the story about what it means to be a person, which is the only universal activity of humans both present and past.

Unfortunately, many don't seem to see the point of things as learning "what it means to be a person". They want everything to boil down to a nice engineering problem that, while complex, is solvable with one solution being better/easier. I remember reading an HN post about "Not everything is an engineering problem" and, if I'm not mistaken, the top comment was basically "Like hell it isn't." That's the bigger issue, imo, the mindset we've pushed into people about STEM being the end-all-be-all, and how it's the One True Way, or whatnot. We have, as a group, completely devalued the liberal arts and now are seeing the effects of that and wondering why people don't see the need for them (and I say that as a former STEM-Lord convert).

As a physics major who the requirements helped, especially my philosophy courses (an intro one and a Philosophy of Science course), I think a lot of it comes down to teachers, and how the material is presented. It was never presented to me as boring, and the teachers never tried to claim it was more important than science or the end-all-be-all of the future. And all of that eventually led me down the road where I'd rather do more work in the humanities than anything science related, and would love to do humanities/liberal arts research professionally.

That said, I think some of the problem is the mindset STEM people are kinda forced into -- one solution, and it has to be a scientific one. It makes the whole world boil down into an engineering problem, and anyone who doesn't like it/doesn't agree can be damned because "look at what science has done"/

There is also a great deal of lost history recorded on (some of) those tablets. I do find that quite valuable. So much history has been lost, and destroyed. ISIL/ISIS actually destroyed a lot in the last few years in this area. I find this INCREDIBLY sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_herita...

Knowing one's past is knowing one's self.

To put it more geekly: it's like uncovering an old git commit from a dead branch. Is it useful? It's only useful to try understand where things came from. Is that useful? In the grand scheme of things if we don't know where we're coming from we don't have any reliable way to asses where we're heading towards. In addition, the exercise sharpens our existing tools.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past.*"

William Faulkner. Or possibly Yogi Berra.

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