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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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