Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities • Hacker News Board

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#191

Post by xigma » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 10:46 AM UTC

benbreen wrote: post #101

InTheArena wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wise likewise told by my advisor that any sort of post-degree work in History would be futile. My chance of getting hired as "a white male" in a history department was not good, and frankly "there is not a lot of future in history" (which we laughed at).

Futile is much too strong of a word. I'm a white male, got a PhD in history, and ended up getting a good TT job in my first year on the market. Was I lucky? Undoubtedly. But some of the pessimism about history phds really is unwarranted in my view, for the reason the author mentions toward the end. I think the field has a strong future personally. It is just looking like the 80s through '00s was an enrollment high po…

What's your sample size? One?

Objectively speaking, if you spend five to six figures on a degree with a 10% chance of landing a job through it, that's not an attractive proposition.

"Futile" may be the wrong word, a better word would be "foolish".

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#192

Post by Moodles » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 10:58 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #161

Moodles wrote: post #50

80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Social "science" is even more terrifying in my view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a crisis. I nearly took history at undergrad…

Being a marxist social scientist does not mean that you support a communist political system. It means that you use class as a lens to analyze your data.

Hah, it's interesting to see my comment cause some controversy on HN :-)

I'm not saying social scientists are pro-Stalian or other suggested nonsense in some comments. I'm merely saying that, compared to every other subject, it is shocking to me that such a high proportion identity as Marxist as it is a relatively extreme political belief. It seems analogous to a high proportion of biologists being creationist. In fact, almost every single social scientist is left wing. That and 80% of humanities papers being sent into a vacuum never to be cited again, suggests to me that there is a crisis.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#193

Post by rhizome » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 10:58 AM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #18

seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

You probably can. I had a (public) high school teacher who was a Latin BA, and when he was hired at our school he taught English, then started a Latin club where he taught it to maybe 10 students the first year, several more the next. He also worked a lot of Latin into his English curriculum.

Now, if you want to be paid to teach only Latin, that's a harder sell.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#194

Post by igravious » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #174

igravious wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll notice the tag-line for the blog is “Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.” That's what I've been doing for the last half a decade, Digital Humanities (DH). DH is what you get when you ask yourself, “What happens when you add computational methods to the scholar's toolkit? What kind of questions can you ask? What does it imply for scholars…

Peterson is telling people what they want to hear, which is why he has an audience. He's not carrying out a sincere inquiry into philosophical truth. Same difference as why newspapers have an astrology column not an astronomy one.

That's off-topic so I'm not responding.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#195

Post by azeotropic » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

xigma wrote: post #191

benbreen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Futile is much too strong of a word. I'm a white male, got a PhD in history, and ended up getting a good TT job in my first year on the market. Was I lucky? Undoubtedly. But some of the pessimism about history phds really is unwarranted in my view, for the reason the author mentions toward the end. I think the field has a strong future personally. It is just looking like the 80s through '00s was an enrollment high po…

What's your sample size? One? Objectively speaking, if you spend five to six figures on a degree with a 10% chance of landing a job through it, that's not an attractive proposition. "Futile" may be the wrong word, a better word would be "foolish".

If you're paying tuition to do a PhD instead of receiving a stipend, you are being scammed.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#196

Post by Moodles » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 11:20 AM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #87

seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

I wise likewise told by my advisor that any sort of post-degree work in History would be futile. My chance of getting hired as "a white male" in a history department was not good, and frankly "there is not a lot of future in history" (which we laughed at).

Let's hold on a sec because the discussion glossed over this. Are we all just accepting that it's normal for it to be harder for you to get a job because of your skin and gender? That's pretty outrageous and sad.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#197

Post by distances » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 12:05 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #172

anoncoward111 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

In Germany they pay teachers way more than that and some high schools teach Latin.

Indeed. Teachers in Germany earn more than many, if not most, software engineers. Then again, IIRC Germany has the third-highest teacher salaries after South Korea and Luxembourg.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#198

Post by distances » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 12:09 PM UTC

foota wrote: post #22

anoncoward111 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

Part of me thinks it might be difficult for a well documented language to go extinct today.

I was going to disagree, but looks like language is considered extinct when it has no speakers left, including second-language speakers. [1] The total loss of native speakers is called "language death" instead. So yes, Latin will likely never be extinct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#199

Post by yontherubicon » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 12:09 PM UTC

AdamM12 wrote: post #108

InTheArena wrote: post #90

I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law. I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus. Not because you may need to do a differential or integral, but rather because it teaches you to think differen…

I'd say the anti-intellectual authoritarianism has emanated from campuses. That being said when I first went to college I also held the view that mandating some level of humanities was important to be "well-rounded", and on some level still think this is true, but I've since soured on the people who say we need more B-school & Engineering schools students taking these classes to promote so called "critical thinking"…

I haven't the slightest idea of what "Critical Thinking" is; the term seems more cant of the education decryer than anything else.

However, I will say that the apprehension of works of beauty and the development of abstract thinking patterns with regards to ethics, anthropology, and metaphysics are valuable, for reasons I'm not certain how to articulate. I might only say that I would not wish to live in a world without them, and would consider anyone who--having the means to appreciate them and the requisite intellectual ability--found them simply unnecesary or undesirable, to simply lack som essential form of humanity.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#200

Post by vinceguidry » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #155

vinceguidry wrote: post #144

This is a matter of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." In the long run, STEM is going to become increasingly niche, STEM is the industry that eats its young. Not too long ago, it was possible to make a lucrative career out of non-coding front-end, meaning a design focus with no javascript. Those days ended a few years ago. You can't expect your job to remain stable if you go into a…

Why would an employer pay you to contribute to Rails when so many others are willing to do it for free? In the end it's just another framework; it works well enough but not really superior to the numerous alternatives.

Rails gets lots of corporate sponsorship, not nearly as much as React, but it's there. So do all the big, useful open-source libraries. Some companies are even willing to pay you a full-time salary to work 20% of your time on their business interests and allowing you to spend your other 80% of your time on framework dev. Open source and the tech world would really, really suck without the generosity of business.