People often complain about the humanities requirements for CS degrees, and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.
“Engineer’s disease” and all that.
That explains the Hawking example in this thread, too.
Proposed causal explanation from me: STEM interest and education gives you skill and tools for principled, consistent reasoning, expressing nontrivial concepts (that's what mathematics is largely about), as well as appreciation and deeper understanding for how things in our actual, physical universe work, from biology and physics to computation. Conversely, humanist base with no STEM experience collapses to rhetoric, completely detached from actual reality.
Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".
> The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)
Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.
I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.
I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.
(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)
>The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
You may edit your quote if you want
You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.
They're consistent experiences, which is not the same thing as being independent of our senses and reasoning ability - neither of which are infinite.
This is not the same as saying that science is a social process, although of course it is that too. There are very non-objective political and social processes deciding what gets researched, and how, with how much money, for what ends.
It's more fundamental - we're seeing the world through hard filters while telling ourselves those filters define the universe.
And we're not even great at it. We have economic beliefs that are predictably and catastrophically self-harming and also hold back fundamental research and progressive engineering.
So no - STEM does not have a solid basis for discussing ethics, reality or the nature of consciousness. If it did we'd be inventing more credible and exciting futures than the current likely-suicide run.
No, we are rejecting that premise entirely.
Now by "sufficient grounding" I don't mean formal education and title. The point I'm making is that STEM fields provide grounding that's necessary but not sufficient to do proper philosophy, and humanities provide information that, while valuable and useful, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If you accept that premise, then it's obvious from pure statistics that you'll find better philosophy in STEM circles than humanities, simply because it's more likely a philosophically inclined mind there had a chance to acquire the necessary grounding (whether due to formal schooling or personal interests).
Actual reality, as defined through a lens of science and math (see the sibling comment about filters).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a hard scientist (PhD in computational chemistry). Science is useful, necessary, and leads to amazing things. And there should be more dialog between hard scientists and philosophers, ethicists, etc.
But science has blind spots, and is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
Yes, but they should also understand why, and that it's not a license to believe in anything.
The answer is: because 1) it worked so far, and 2) if it fundamentally doesn't, then we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to caves we came from, because nothing makes sense and could ever make sense.
It's not like there is any alternative. If we can't talk about such "true reality", then not only science and mathematics doesn't make sense - humanities and philosophy don't make sense either, equally, and for the same reason!
This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.
The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.
The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.
edit: removed, probably not a very good example
They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.
Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Almost all the most important people in history, who built the world and defined the culture you were breed into, they were all wrong and you are right.
And God is unknowable. There is a reason why there are a bunch of different religions and spiritual practices. If we could know God perfectly we would be God.
Its not about what religion you are part of, but if you love God. So quit being a bigoted asshole.
And Allah Akbar literally means God is Good you jerk. How could I be mad at that? Such a perverted soul. How could this world be so rotten and tribalistic?
Allah Akbar means God is good. Muslims pray 5 times a day. You want me to hate Muslims? Who am I to hate any of God's children. I don't hate anyone not Muslims nor Jews, nor Hindus nor satanists nor atheists. God is bigger than hate. God is love. I am sorry you don't knowthat and I hope you find out becauae you are missing something wonderful friend. Sorry for previous commment I was angry, mostly misdirected from sadness not ur fault im just not having a good time rn.
B. You want to debate theodicy? Might as well debate nature vs nurture or male vs female or emacs vs vim.
> evil and chaos couldn't exist without a god
God created humans for reasons I wouldn't understand, but we have free will which means we can choose what we do.
Without Hitler's father he couldn't have existed. So is Hitler's father responsible for the evil of Hitler? It's not a rhetorical question btw, I have no clue, and you don't either. The issue is you think that you do, which is the typical ridiculousness of the educated dotards who think they can out reason life itself.
Anyway, I rather not argue, because nothing of my point can be proven by logic as neither can it be disproved. I would simply say you need to seek out mystery and spiritual experience, and you will find that there is much more to life than what you have thought.
Maybe you should take this criticism as an opportunity to research examples of people that don’t share your faith, but whose positions you respect. I’m sure you can find some.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.
The current PM has an English degree.
The last one to have a scientific background was Thatcher.
You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?
This applies to many of the UK governments since WWII.
I suspect most ministers have been humanities graduates. STEM is a very small minority.
China is said to be top heavy in actual STEM graduates at the party committee five year plan level.
A number of countries are top heavy in politico's with a formal Law degree, eg. Australia.
I think Law could be a example in favor of humanities, as eg many of the founders of the American government were from a background in law.