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Comment by einszwei | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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.

Hi, have you heard of philosophy?

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.

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.

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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