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Comment by abraininavat | Hacker News Reader

A Philistine is an anti-intellectual or a non-intellectual -- a person with a materialistic frame of mind, lacking the education, intelligence, or will to focus on ideas rather than things. To suggest that a Philistine is a person who is ignorant strictly of "philosophy, art, history, or discourse" is to ignore that, when the term came about, those subjects were a huge part of every curriculum. We've moved on since then and have expanded and re-categorized our domains of knowledge.

A technology-oriented education certainly doesn't imply any kind of Philistinism, despite the lack of nuance in your understanding of the term.

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My intent was not to persuade you on the meaning of "Philistine," but rather to support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels.

FWIW, I had a highly varied college experience, working and associating with students of engineering, music, CS, psychology, and English. The STEM tracks demanded a uniformly pretty high level of effort, whereas you get out of the humanities about what you choose to put in.

The classes are useless fluff. The topics themselves are interesting, but at least for me, academic rigor is so lacking that I'm bored to tears. It's been suggested to me by someone who knows me that it's not easy for everyone like it is for me, and that's it's just because I'm smart that I'm bored. While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

Interestingly, a lot of the people you'd revere and read and study in an English class are people who had no formal English training whatsoever, or maybe high school level at best. It's only in recent years that colleges have managed to spread the myth that you can't have really learned something if you didn't pay $100,000 to do it. To me, it's just silly.

> While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

This is true everywhere; there is nothing insightful about this. I found C.S. courses to be rather mundane, boring (and even sometimes uglier) than pure Math courses. There were people in C.S. who were there because they couldn't cut it in Math. There were also people who did C.S. because they were fascinated by it. People have different motivations why they do something.

*...support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels..."

Regarding the attitudes of STEM students, you seem to take for granted that they're wrong about the relative importance of those fields. That isn't at all obvious to me.

No, it doesn't just mean anti-intellectual. It's specifically about culture, and has always included the inability to appreciate (or hostility toward) the values conveyed by art and literature. You don't get to change what words mean, and as someone who just accused me of unduly criticizing others, you might want to avoid personal insults for a spell.

And you don't get to close your eyes to the fact that things have changed. "Philistine" was synonymous with "ignorant of art and literature" only because every formal education was full or art and literature. Furthermore, much of what we today consider science was once a large part of the "art" of "philosophy".

As I've said in another comment, you've completely blinded yourself to the spirit of the term and taken the most literal definition. If Computer Scientists existed in Jonathan Swift's day, he most certainly would not have lumped them in with the Philistines.

Oh, and what was it that you consider a personal insult? I'm not seeing it.

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