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Comment by holowoodman | Hacker News Reader

No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.

Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.

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> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.

Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.

Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.

So, you accuse me of being uninformed and having an unbalanced understanding.

But where are your arguments, and where is your evidence? Or should I derive from this that all arguments in the humanities boil down to name-calling?

I am not accusing, I am perceiving that from your stance.

No. You should derive from that that human life, and humanities being part of that, are a matter of experience, more than of argument/convincing. I could spend some time to argue with you about that, but you're showing you are not open to such a discussion, and my time is more valuable (and yours) than that.

It's like sex, intimacy, sight, smell, touch: you can't argue about it or explain it to someone who never experienced it.

It's definitely hard to argue or demonstrate how sometimes a book, a painting, a music can turn around your whole perspective on things.

So you argue that humanities are like art, cooking, literature, sexual preferences: a matter of personal taste, which I supposedly lack. The general consensus about matters of taste is that it is pointless to argue about those. And that matters of taste are an indulgence, important only to fans of that particular variety.

Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!

Not a matter of taste: a matter first of own experience.

I don’t know if you lack anything there. What you say is indicative of such a lack of it.

And your conclusion is obviously negated by history and experience itself.

And your final envoy is indicative of a kind of comptent that is itself a tell. Farewell indeed.

Ah. So you determine I'm not in the in-group for the magic circle that is humanities, so I can never appreciate or evaluate them. And you place any evaluation entirely in the subjective realm, such that no objectivity is possible anyways.

So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.

You are stating that a specific segment of human experience and knowledge is a cult, without a sensible argument, and as displaying a very astute contempt and seeming lack of experience towards this segment. With an absolutist stance. And then, ask people to prove you wrong. What do you expect?

Not sorry, doesn't work that way.

Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.

Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.

No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.

Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.

In addition to these points we also have a handful of weaker-than-arithmetic but provably-decidable theories, which jointly encompass almost everything done on a finite computer.

Coding does not equal logic. Language precedes every discipline and even the concept of rational rigor. The study of language, and the stabilization of its form, is what laid the groundwork for every discipline after including religion, math, philosophy, etc

Coding is not mathematics, mathematics is a deterministic axiomatic system for describing quanta. Coding is the creation of instructions for computational logic that then is persisted in non-absolute matter as state. “Engineering” did not create the internet, the desire to communicate in new ways, as humans have wished to do for millennia, led to the internet. I honestly don’t even know how physics created the web when it was literally created to share text documents

> Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything.

IIRC some early programming languages were even tailored to the humanities, like Snobol.

No, coding is linguistics.

Its disingenuous to discard the contribution of humanities. To name a few of the top of my mind:

Chomsky hierarchy is an important concept in programming languages and could be considered as originating from linguistics

Philosophy (which is counted in humanities) has had massive contributions to Logic and formal methods in computer science.

There's even more examples of humanities contribution in HCI and AI safety.

What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.

If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.

Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.

Rigor is not enough to build durability and sustainability. You learn that when you learn to build structures. It's not even metaphorical.

Wordplay isn't an argument. You learn that when you actually do engineering.

Humanities are far, far more than "wordplay".

Hi, have you heard of philosophy?

One can graduate in philosophy without having heard a formal logic lecture. Philosophy only has rigor in some branches, most modern ones are less rigorous and more social, political or economical.

Hi, Phil major here. I did math. I did logic, which was required. My peers in other humanities generally did not. But Phil might be the only exception.

Further I ended up taking a class that actually read original Greek texts, which isn't all that common even within the department I was at.

My point still stands.

Rigor is only valuable because the nuance of our existence, captured in the humanities and beyond the dichotomy of true or false, has been erroded away by an entire society built on top of abstract economic concepts in place of true communal bonds that sustained humanity since our inception. This is why Europe and many countries other than the US have healthier humanities, they still have some vestiges of true community that is the heart of humanity, not merely the honor among thieves we see in the US that unites us.

Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.

Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.

So far the entire field of "AI safety" is one big grift that has never produced anything of value. The people who work in that field have vivid imaginations but lack the practical writing skills to become published sci-fi authors.

Humanities are why AI exist at all, talking about AI Safety musings as if that’s how humanities are relevant to AI is silly

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