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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

I've encountered people who gleefully celebrate this ("why would you study something so 'useless'?") -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn't this a failure of political economics?

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It's also unfortunate that majors that teach people how to write and think critically are panned. Those are very useful skills and give people a better ability in normal life. I understand college is so expensive that people feel a need for it to prepare you for a job, but I still hold onto the ideal that college should be a place that allows people to grow as a person and learn to communicate and think.

This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.

Such as the comment below you

a key point is that these skills - soft skills if you will - can be learned on the job, even with minimal background knowledge. It is much harder to learn programming or electrical engineering on the job if you lack the educational base.

Communication is a critical skill today as are information skills. Truly sad that they are often derided as being worth less than technical skills.

This is fair, and this may be a question of branding.

Let's call it not English major, a mostly literary scholar, but a master of natural language communication and epistemology. Definitely it's a set of skills useful in a wide variety of positions.

It takes an exceptionally affluent society to let everyone pursue their interest as their full-time occupation. I expect the few of exceptional ability to make a living off literary research pursuits, via grants and book sales, with others who love it doing it as a hobby, or after retirement. This is roughly how it worked for many centuries in the past, and the results are impressive.

It's now assumed that anyone who doesn't treat it as a vocational school is a fool. That's unfortunate, but it's how the whole institution has changed - it's too costly to NOT focus on something that has an immediate and obvious ROI.

Agree but with major caveat that students in those majors may be actually improving those skills less than you may be assuming. It’s generally true of most colleges and students that they seem to learn strikingly little as measured by pre/post tests.

It's the hidden implication that only financially unviable jobs can teach people to communicate and think deeply.

I'm sure your average psychiatrist graduate can communicate and think logically, despite having a high paying job. Or airline pilot, or naval officer, or air traffic controller, or scientist, or businessman etc.

American colleges are ideologically captured. If you think the humanities department is teaching critical thinking, you are sorely mistaken.

I find that a lot of people dishonestly conflate the avoidance of critical thinking with finding an argument lacking. These two things are very much not the same thing.

There's a line you have to draw somewhere on what kind of interests you can pursue as a career. A person who is full-time writing bad poetry that nobody wants to read provides about as much value as someone who majors in Drinking and Recreational Drugs.

So I guess if we're talking about a utopia where all our food and clean drinking water and maintenance and every other essential service is perfectly automated with no need for human intervention, then sure. Pursue whatever you want. As it is, it makes more sense for people to pay for stuff that they find is generating some value. If your passion is producing something really good and people want it, they'll pay you. But that's not the case for most people.

> A person who is full-time writing bad poetry that nobody wants to read

The only difference between that and our own industry is that there are plenty of people full-time writing bad code that no one wants to use, except there are procurement departments, execs, and the like who ring up million-dollar contracts for that software, leading to long-term vendor lock-in.

Hey, it ain't a perfect system but that's a lot of people working jobs that keep them housed and fed. I don't see how that could work if all those people just did their hobbies all day.

The larger point is that industrial civilization (or post-industrial) is probably at a point where you can feed, clothe, and shelter every human being on the planet, but our moribund systems do not permit it to. Hence the rise of critiques such as Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, and the rise of alternate proposals such as UBI, federal job guarantees, even revival in interest in land value tax. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

We probably could support a system where we have a creative class of people doing hobbies all day- after all, we did in past-industrial epochs with wealthy aristocratic patrons and so forth. But we don't because there's not sufficient incentive to build that world, yet. In the meantime we get a lot of corporate make-work and capital being thrown away at enterprises that probably don't actually create lasting value.

So what I'm getting at that what you deride as profitless passion is low value because of entirely arbitrary reasons. There's a ton of bad enterprise software out there, to pick one thing that's monetarily highly-valued, yet they don't seem to provide humanity with lasting value.

People should feel free to pursue whatever interest they want - encouraging them to go into 6 figure debt for an 'interest' is not very wise however.

I studied business and computer science in college - that now pays the bills.

I study European History in my free time, and even with all the hundreds of books I have read and own, probably haven't spent $1000 on that 'interest'.

"You just spent 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the public library." - quote from Good Will Hunting.

As others have pointed out - you could have not spent money on computer science as well - if anything that's a field that has no problem at all with the self taught.

I'd also like to propose that reading history novels isn't the same as a history education, in much the same way that reading those novels isn't the same as an English degree.

A society is always in some kind of balance between pursuing interests (for the lack of a better word) and pursuing needs (or pursuing usefulness, as put by the people you've encountered). The difference between an "interest" and a "useful need" is not always clear cut.

> genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests

I am not sure if everyone was pursuing their interests, certain degrees will be much more populous than others.

Many people do STEM, especially CS / SWE for money (which is fine), and affluent people do Arts degrees because they probably just want a degree.

I think the only way we could allow this is through some sort of UBI or other government/state/community backed right to your needs being met.

Maybe that's what you mean by genuinely affluent society, and I'd agree one of those societies would not only allow people to pursue but reap the benefits of its populace pursuing those things.

However I don't think it's possible with the current incentives in place. While being educated and pursuing your interests are allowed and in some circles lauded, your basic needs being met far outweighs any other incentive any actor has.

Maybe we should focus on allowing building that society but I don't think that means in the current society we can even begin to pretend people are encouraged to pursue their interests at the costs of their basic needs being met.

Free will/choice is one thing. I think there are also plenty of people that grow up totally obsessed with their art and feel they need to be a part of it, like they have to go to Columbia Uni to write or act, or be a historian, etc. It's an interest gone out of control.

Even if they do that and rack up the loans, they may go into the real world naively and end up not making it big. Ever.

I guess my thought is, there's something creating that desire or urgency too. As System of a Down put it, "Advertising causes need."

Philosophy is equally useless.

Until you need a philosopher to help you solve a problem...

I'm definitely in the camp of, "All knowledge has value, no knowledge will ever go to waste if you find where it is needed".

English studies is like Philosophy in a way - it lets us turn a critical lens on ourselves, our past selves, and examine how we think and what we value. There's many applications for such knowledge.

Surely a more noble pursuit than building dark UI patterns into websites.

what problems has philosophy helped you with?

philosophy seems too academic and to far removed from practical problems from what i have seen at least.

Understanding media, notably.

See: "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan.

Thanks I'll dive in!

When everyone is reduced to their "Value", things with indirect value, a la societal arts and culture, are viewed as worthless.

Marvel movies make tons of money, but do they have value as art? Do they really say anything or regurgitate quips and simple plots that could just as well come from ChatGPT?

From the opposite end, does a rogue artists self published book of avant garde poetry have much of a monetary value? Probably not, but it possibly has more original thought than the Marvel movies.

The starving artist trope has been around for a long time but the push for STEM coming from the cold war has devalued the average person's ability to make art to an all time low. We tell high schoolers that caring about literature or art will ensure they're destitute. We treat teachers and professors who continue teaching the arts like absolute trash, because its a field where the joy and personal value taken from the work allows the devaluation to continue because its still a worth while endeavor.

But hey, the stock market will go up forever so we'll never run out of Marvel slop.

people forget how recent the switch from a humanities dominated education to a stem dominated education took place people forget that this is an ongoing experiment not some manifest destiny towards Reason - and I am far from convinced this is exclusively for the better in terms of producing a stable and good society whatever that might mean - we have yet to see what happens when you raise 2 or 3 subsequent generations primarily teaching them hard sciences and also those humanities that have successfully branded themselves as "science adjacent" (econ, political science, management theory etc...) I think people who "gleefully celebrate" this cannot imagine that there is some scenario in which we overdo this or that there is no way you could have a population that is "too rational" and I worry that the history of our next century will be what proves them wrong

There are endless free and low-cost education options online if people wish to pursue it.

In my experience there's often a wide gulf between what you want to learn and what you should probably learn. If you're a software dev think about what you were interested in when you started the career and what you ended up having to learn that you may not have wanted to but you still needed to know just the same. That's the same with other disciplines. It's hard to get those areas being self taught.

Interesting, that’s not been my experience.

I’m a self-taught developer and I’ve only focused on areas I’ve been interested in, which has been fun for me.

I wouldn’t be hired as a Sr. Engineer at a FAANG but I was able to build a successful development agency by just following what I wanted to learn about.

But I could see how at enterprise scale how that might not work. But at startup scale it’s been really effective for me.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Education for education's sake seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. That's a sad state of affairs.

We are not living in a post scarcity world where you are free to pursue whatever you like. We were closer to that perhaps 20+ years ago but the world is different now.

That's a simple matter of fact. That's the reason these courses are plummeting in enrollment. The economy sucks.

The economy sucks

Based on what metrics? Unemployment in the US is low. Wages have gone up. Inflation is up as well. Companies are mostly profitable (despite layoffs).

At worst, we're seeing some mixed signals, and might be heading into a recession. But, we aren't there yet.

Interesting that no one's trying to argue against humanities being a bad choice in a poor economy. Instead you're trying to argue that the economy isn't doing too badly. Even the OP made the point that enrolling in these courses is something you do due to your own interests rather than for an economic reason.

So now take the uncertainty you acknowledge combined with the reality that yourself and OP acknowledge (even if implicitly) that humanities is not something you do for economic reasons and you have your answer.

If humanities could make a case that it's a good idea financially that might help enrollment but no on in this thread is even trying to make such a case. Instead the case being made is that you should do it out of passion, not for economic reasons. Such an argument won't win you any enrollments when things such as housing are unaffordable.

>Instead you're trying to argue that the economy isn't doing too badly.

Yes, because you brought the subject up and used it to support your overall point.

Why would you praise inflation being up if increased interest rates leading to corporate layoffs is driven by inflation

I wasn’t praising it. That was just a list of metrics, which are currently mixed.

>The economy sucks

Are you talking about the US economy? Because it is doing extremely well right now, click-bait headlines notwithstanding.

Compare the costs of housing, healthcare, and higher education itself with how it was 20+ years ago. You can argue the current economy is healthy (but then why did that previous post cite inflation being up as a good thing?) but that has nothing to do with cost of living's affordability.

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