Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.

I am sick of this weird non-logic: You are technical, so you must be bad at domain knowledge, talking, presenting, leading, social skills and now apparently of all the things even critical thinking. You come across it all the time in the non-SV business-world.

If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing.

It is your insecurity talking, not your critical thinking.

Another take: whoever wrote is writing from a position of privilege.

"A humanities major at an Ivy League college opens up higher-earning opportunities later in life, like when you take over the reins of the family corporation."

It's also simply an outdated view. The strategy of going into humanities and finding higher earning later in life probably worked quite a bit better in 1972 than 2022.

Simply going to university was a sign of privilege half a century ago, and so you wouldn't discuss the associated prospects without assuming privilege.

Those not privileged who got into that environment would have been lifted in status by the contacts and the association with privilege.

Today, having a university degree is not an earmark of privilege, and you are less likely to make relationships at university which connect you with privilege. Depending on the school.

They are using a type of logical inference called abduction: based upon one's observations of an unexplained phenomenon, one formulated a hypothesis as to why it is so.

> If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing.

The logical fallacies you are using here are ad hominem and the straw man argument.

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