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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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

#51

Post by HexPhantom »

quanto wrote: post #4

> Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down. Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes…

The failures we see in AI systems usually come from neglecting real-world complexity

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

_elephant wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

It makes a good point by separating history as strategic analysis from history as cultural appreciation. Most teaching today leans toward the latter, which is also easier for AI to replicate. But the most valuable historical thinking often comes from uncomfortable questions failure, unintended consequences, and perspectives that usually get ignored.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by dr_dshiv »

What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do.

People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English.

One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, etc) into Latin. This had a massive impact on the renaissance and European enlightenment. But many of Ficino’s own texts have not been translated to English!

LLMs will, of course, have a massive impact on this… but so can students! Any student can make a meaningful contribution if they care to. There is so much to be discovered and unpacked. Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery. I judge my students now based on how much I learn from them. Why not?

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

#54

Post by surgical_fire »

Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

> But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards.

How are those things dissociated?

I always saw history as a waht to explain "why things are the way they are". Whatever we are now, this amalgamation of good or bad things, is a consequence of what came before.

Is "studying the classics" from a historical standpoint even done for "appreciation"? I always presumed that one should do so critically, and that's more or less what I found from actual historians.

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

#55

Post by ReptileMan »

mastazi wrote: post #19
ReptileMan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free. And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.

> which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids Maybe you haven't used AI coding tools in a while, the latest ones can run build tools, write and run unit tests, run linters, and will try and fix any errors that may arise during those steps. Of course it's possible that a library may have been been hallucinated, but this will…

You have one skill that no historian possess - the intuition what could go wrong and how and what to do if there is hiccup on this chain

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

#56

Post by verisimi »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #53

What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do. People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English. One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (P…

The history we have inevitably passes through bottlenecks. Much is left out, edited away, embellished.

We have no idea what happened over 500 years ago, but the idea of a brilliant scholar translating the Greek texts on behalf of the Medicis, shouldn't simply be accepted as stated. If you are running the world (like the Medicis did) history would be a lever of control. It seems inevitable that the stories should be directed (carefully) towards whatever ends.

History is actually a present day activity - it provides the backdrop to the present. Altering that backdrop has present value.

I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to get a better handle on what happened in the past. I do see how it would provide modern-day Medicis a way to change the backdrop more quickly.

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

#57

Post by shortrounddev2 »

wisty wrote: post #50

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math. A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead…

I think if you removed the economic incentive to cheat then humanities wouldn't have the problem it does with LLMs

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

#58

Post by phito »

HexPhantom wrote: post #48

When effort becomes optional, so does growth. And the quote from the student who sees college as networking with a side of AI-cheating? Painfully on the nose. There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game

> There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game

It's already been the case for a long time, it's just going to get worse.

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

#59

Post by dr_dshiv »

verisimi wrote: post #56
dr_dshiv wrote: post #53

What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do. People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English. One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (P…

The history we have inevitably passes through bottlenecks. Much is left out, edited away, embellished. We have no idea what happened over 500 years ago, but the idea of a brilliant scholar translating the Greek texts on behalf of the Medicis, shouldn't simply be accepted as stated. If you are running the world (like the Medicis did) history would be a lever of control. It seems inevitable that the stories should be d…

> I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to get a better handle on what happened in the past.

Well, AI democratizes the power of translation (and interrogating texts). Before only a few specialists could go directly to the source. Now anyone can try to make sense of it.

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

#60

Post by wizzwizz4 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #57
wisty wrote: post #50

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math. A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead…

I think if you removed the economic incentive to cheat then humanities wouldn't have the problem it does with LLMs

There's always an incentive to cheat: economic, reputational… people cheat in single-player video games. People cheat in sudoku puzzles. By removing all incentives, all you do is destroy the concept of "cheating", not prevent the behaviour.
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