Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)
Humanities are the most effective method of teaching empathy that I am aware of.
Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
121–130 of 237 posts
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#122I would add to this list economics. Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations.…
I admit I haven't read or even heard of Kate Raeworth, but I am an academic economist. Most modern economic research is empirical, a paper poses a policy-relevant empirical question 'did policy X reduce unemployment' and then empirical evidence is presented (perhaps using data from a randomly controlled trial or using quasi-experimental variation). The statistics are calculated and the assumptions required for the va…
Thats great. What about reproduction of results? Are ppl doing this (so is there funding for this)?
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#123Can you create a hypothesis and then falsify it? Then it's science.
Polls are really useful + accurate and are one of my favorite examples of stuff that came from social science research.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#124Articles and generally ideas like this always seem too dismissive. CPUs are nothing like brains because: intricacies. Algorithms can't be applied to literature because: intricacies. It is almost an appeal to emotions to say that rather than saying "ok well we tried to apply these electric constructs and algorithms in order to understand ideas and literature better, we got nowhere and here's exactly why", they are like "it can't be applied oh no it can't our humanity is so distinct and precious there are some lines not to be crossed and here's a million contrived examples as to why".
And to this approach I say, ignorant and cowardly.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#125Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#126I would add to this list economics. Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations.…
Not all economics is macroeconomics...
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#127This is such a horrible article. Many have already mentioned the conflation of humanities and social sciences. Then by using the example of books (because most would agree books would loose their essence if we just describe them by numbers) it constructs a straw man that somehow we loose something (the beauty?) by using quantitative measures.
Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is the alternative that we simply use theories because of their "beauty" (whatever that means)? Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#128I would encourage those interested in the intersection of STEM and the Humanities to check out the Digital Humanities Minor/ Major being offered at a growing number of universities. I earned the minor at UCLA, and found the application of digital tools to historical and modern "humanities" focused types questions to be incredibly relevant.
Examples include: 3D modeling of the historic broadway district in Los Angeles, Natural Language Processing of ancient Roman texts, virtual reality's impact on human cognition, etc.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome. Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new busine…
The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect! A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framewor…
If you want a citation; that little theory is vaguely from Karl Marx. Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III according to Wikipedia [0]. Pretty good theory, and somewhat older than 40 years.
Notwithstanding that, what you say may be true.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#130Elegant conclusions can totally be arrived at in the humanities, it's just that statistical methods often aren't the best way to go about doing so. The traditional method of logical proof, which is valued just as much as data analysis in science, used to be the standard in the humanities. The human mind would compute the statistics more or less subconsciously, but would then use those empirical results to say something valuable through a process of logical induction. I think that's the key point that this article misses—it isn't that we don't want humanities to provide rational insight, it's that we want humanities to reduce its reliance on statistics and refocus on what it's historically been great at.
There's something important to be said here about the duality between logic and math, algebra and statistics, classical AI and modern DL, philosophy and science, rationalism and empiricism.