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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

"...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".

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"/

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