AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder • Hacker News Board

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#161

Post by Pet_Ant » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #151

bluGill wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

> those who know the basics and flexible can find something. I'm not so sure about that: I have a feeling that at least the current trend in quite some jobs is that they are looking for two kinds of people: 1. beginners who know the basics and are cheap 2. deep experts; these are paid well What is in-between gets more and more hollowed out. Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in the "cheap" pool -…

> Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be desirable.

Cheap... but employed. Expertise is only valuable if its valued. That means you not only need to be an expert in the thing, but also the market for the thing, and that's a lot to ask.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#162

Post by yupitsme123 » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

piltdownman wrote: post #119

Tycho wrote: post #107

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in…

What a wonderful bit of satire. To those that missed the joke - 'consuming' the classics is the antithesis of a liberal arts education. The value lies in the engagement, the debate, the Hegellian dialectic involved in arriving at a true grok level understanding of the text or topic. It would be akin to reading the Sparknotes of Ulysses and being able to reference how it draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey, or utilises s…

I ask this as someone with a lot of respect for education and the Humanities: do the majority of Humanities students actually get this type of education?

Any conversations I've had with students or graduates of Arts, Literature, etc. indicates that their education was very much about consuming and regurgitating. Maybe the top 5% approach their studies the way you're describing but I've never seen anyone like that in the wild.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#163

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #144

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

This is at odds with professional specialisms which take years to learn.

I don't think it's likely that AI will obliterate the job category of "lawyer", but that's what its boosters are claiming, and people need to make a car to house sized investment at age 18 depending on how true that is.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#164

Post by toyg » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #157

mtillman wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m convinced plumbing would pay better than programming in certain neighborhoods right now now.

Plumbers never realized that they should be selling service plans and leasing toilets to people. Software's golden goose is not letting people own things.

I'm pretty sure plumbers do sell service plans to businesses. It's just that households don't really need regular work.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#165

Post by cvwright » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #114

ivape wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Cannot be done with chat gpt” Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? How deep is this addiction? I’m scared to ask what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a 4 year degree, “hey write one paragraph describing a simple paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor”.

>Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? I mean with the force of law, yea. Businesses get away with a little bit more in places because they pay you to show up . But if you think anyone is going to university/college to have all their devices taken away all the time and pay for the privilege then you might be confused.

No but people do pay universities for (among other things) a meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge and abilities.

If taking away phones is what’s required to make that credential meaningful again, then the universities must do it.

I think of it like a personal trainer. Do you pay them to make you sweaty and sore? Not really, but sweat and soreness are consequences of doing what it takes to build muscle/endurance/etc.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#166

Post by UncleMeat » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #148

UncleMeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4/4 means that you teach four classes each semester. This is a pretty typical schedule for non tenure track or adjunct professors in the humanities or even tenure track faculty at slacs, though I've seen 5/5s before. It is a lot of work to update this many classes to adapt to AI.

That seems like a crazy amount of work. Four classes, or four sections of the same class?

Depends, but it is often four distinct classes. And yeah, it is a lot of work. This is why reusing preps is so valuable and why it is a bit ridiculous to see people demanding that professors suddenly figure out (on their own) how to rewrite their syllabi to mitigate cheating with AI.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#167

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

tsunamifury wrote: post #150

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?

Trades tend to do a good job of preventing people from switching in due to apprenticeship systems. Depends on your jurisdiction, but you probably can't just hang out a sign saying "plumber".

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#168

Post by physicsguy » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

shermantanktop wrote: post #158

gitfan86 wrote: post #147

For every Quinton Tarantino there are dozens of people who could make amazing films but never had the opportunity for a wide variety of reasons that now mostly go away.

And for each of those dozens, there are now millions of untalented people who can generate terrible films with a few clicks. How does a Tarantino, or even one of your new talents, ever get discovered? The friction is a feature, not a bug.

> The friction is a feature, not a bug.

The friction means only wealthy people can do anything in a sphere.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#169

Post by LurkandComment » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

1. PhD Defenses in the humanities have both a written thesis and an oral on the spot defense. You can't ChatGPT that easily because a professor will know how to curve ball to things that are seemingly unrelated but comparable to a human.

2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at technical things (and great writers), but when language problems come up, it was a challenge. You can be a great communicator but not understand language itself.

3. Most people in positions for AI are being evaluated by things AI is good at. So as a candidate with a very good understanding of language, the AI wouldn't know how to evaluate my ability. I would really have to outline a problem in language AI has to face and explain it to a human. Then get them to understand it's value.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#170

Post by stanford_labrat » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system.

Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is the single most important thing for every level from middle school to college where it will unironically determine your entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.