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Comment by joeclark77 | Hacker News Reader

If by "soft/social sciences" you mean real substantive disciplines like history, philosophy, civics, and the arts, I agree with you.

Currently "social studies" in school is a bit of a trash bucket into which gets thrown every personal ideology and pet project that some teacher got her feminism or social work or grievance-studies BA in. It's the worst subject in most curricula, even worse than English. The problem is there's plenty of those nonsense degree holders and far too few college graduates who have studied the humanities.

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I meant psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, communication, among others.

Those are, despite the "social studies" stigma they might carry, real substantive disciplines which should not only contribute but predominantly shape the technological products and services we build.

What kind of degree are you talking about when you say "social studies"?

I'm referring to "soft sciences" like social work, psychology, sociology, [grievance] studies, poli sci, etc, as opposed to the humanities: history, mathematics, philosophy, classics, fine arts, etc.

> I'm referring to "soft sciences" like social work, psychology, sociology, [grievance] studies, poli sci, etc, as opposed to the humanities

Race/ethnic/gender/subculture (what you seem to call "grievance") studies are humanities (academic disciplines that study human culture) not sciences (soft or otherwise.)

Not sure what you mean by grievance studies but most of those, besides being quite important, fit under the humanities label. Mathematics on the other hand, probably not.

Most of those would be classified as "social sciences", not humanities. It has to do with the methods and philosophies they use. Grievance studies is my nickname for "_____ studies" where the "_____" is the name of some census checkbox.

You're very right.

History, Philosophy and Civics are still in their pristine condition.

However, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and especially communication have been systematically taken over, and have demanded self-censorship of those fields. When a field self-censors it can no longer be considered to be doing intellectually honest work. So they are dismissed as not Science.

Just what I meant. The problem for public schools is that there are a million grads with degrees in social work, poli sci, pyschology, sociology, grievance studies (womens studies, etc), and other fake sciences, many of them ready and willing to be teachers. People with degrees in history or the classics, by contrast, are almost as hard to find as math and science majors willing to work for public school salaries. (Unions being what they are, you can't offer math and science teachers twice what you offer the "social studies" teachers, despite the fact that they're worth it.)

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