Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

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I would be very curious to understand a bit more about why you think that formal higher education in the humanities is not "good for America". Speaking as an academic researcher in a STEM field, I strongly believe the opposite to be true- we need _more_, not less, humanities education in this country. Even just restricting myself to a STEM-focused perspective, it is clear to me that the things that I teach students about computer science are of course important when it comes to understanding _how_ to build something, but they are not particularly useful when it comes to deciding _whether_ something needs to be built, _what_ to build, and then how to decide if it's working well- for this you need understanding and knowledge beyond what can be found in an engineering or biology textbook. This is particularly important in my area of specialization (medical informatics)- many of the most important things we think about in terms of system development and evaluation, and many of our most important methodological tools, are heavily informed by the humanities.

Zooming out beyond academia, Bret Devereaux, a historian whose writing appears with some regularity on HN, wrote a superb essay a few years ago on the practical case for the humanities and puts it better than I ever could, so I will link to his post: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...

Aren't you presuming that humanities have humanity and STEM/business graduates are somehow less moral? I suspect there is an insidious presumption behind your comment. Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37097655

One effective but evil engineer in power could do a lot of damage. Hitler wanted to be an artist but couldn't get into university. Although if I'm going to use selection bias: some of our tech overlords seem morally repugnant.

I wonder if we could show that:

(1) humanities graduates have better morals, and

(2) that those graduates got those morals by going to university (versus had them as children - selection bias of those choosing to do humanities).

> when it comes to deciding _whether_ something needs to be built, _what_ to build

Can of worms: how to successfully teach people to be ethical. Certainly our churches seem to me to often fail: fail at the level of the individual (I have met enough arsehole Christians), and fail at the level of a society (a group of Christians deciding to do extremely unchristian things).

Did I miss something in OP’s comment? It doesn’t read as if it’s about ethics, so much as qualitative decision making. It seems as though you’re responding to an argument that I don’t think was made.

I’m also unclear what tax money has to do with anything - why does the funding method matter, with regards to educating students? What, specifically, makes a physics major “better” or more worthy of your tax dollars, than an English major?

Fair call. I'm probably creating a strawman by deconstruction. I should have been more careful.

I do believe in the value of the academic humanities.

I'm not sure I agree that the linked article is well reasoned (although I have liked some of their other articles). It finishes:

  We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.
  We would do well to go back to the humanities.

That probably shows the bias I stereotypically see: only humanities gives us wisdom?

I think at this point in the discussion we are getting to a very interesting question: about the meaning of the word "wisdom". To my eye, Devereaux is using the word in a way that sounds a lot like how it is conceptualized in Ackoff's Data/Information/Knowledge/Insight/Wisdom model (sometimes instead of "insight" people use "understanding" as the penultimate level). Its Wikipedia page is a little bit rambling (which is actually quite fitting given how many different ways it's been formalized), but is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid

"Wisdom" is probably the hardest part of the framework to define clearly, but across formulations it's about being able to integrate different kinds of knowledge from difference sources, and then using that to be able to know when and why to take a certain action, or to know what the right thing to do might be. Obviously this is something that is frequently informed by knowledge derived from science and scientific reasoning, but usually also relies on some of the ways of thinking and understanding that the humanities can help provide. So that's how I'd understand what Devereaux was saying (allowing for some rhetorical flourish on his part)- it's a "both-and" kind of situation rather than an "either-or"; in other words, science and humanities on their own are both necessary and insufficient.

And of course for a humorous take on the matter, SMBC is always a reliable source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-10-18

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