A practical case on why we need the humanities • Hacker News Board

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#61

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:03 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #52

honksillet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example... https://reason.com/2020/06/10/ucla-business-school-lecturer-...

" On June 3, Klein was placed on involuntary administrative leave until June 24. The notice states that the leave is necessary to give UCLA the opportunity to consider "allegations regarding behavior made in the course and scope of your position … inconsistent with [UCLA's Faculty Code of Conduct]." " What exactly is the university to do while it pondering the issue?

They’re not supposed to ponder the issue. They’re supposed to tell the students that if they don’t like departmental policy the door is that way.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#62

Post by sinker » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

What about the opportunity cost of studying the humanities as opposed to science or engineering? This a question for the individual. As a boy I fell in love with Orwell which led me to strongly appreciate literature.

Now a little older I realize what is actually meant by "knowledge is power." Knowledge is a lever. When you're young there's absolutely nothing you can do of any consequence because you live inside someone else's bounds. In a modern economy it's not enough to produce a bushel of corn a day to feed one person. To operate in the economy as anything more than a consumer requires levers in the form of skills, experience, education, and knowledge. Otherwise, you live off the fat of our capitalistic system as some unimportant facilitator, or entirely as a consumer.

Knowledge in the sciences and engineering effectively makes the individual more than what he's worth in just labor. You can effectively leverage our modern day infrastructure of virtually infinite water, electricity, materials, connectivity, and information to do more than what a person in the past could only accomplish with their hands and feet.

What is worthwhile in the humanities preferable to understanding the power of technology and being able to create objective value in society?

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#63

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:35 AM UTC

mixedCase wrote: post #60

mcguire wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons why there are required humanities courses: to try to ensure that graduates are "well rounded". As for their emphasis in higher education, where else are you forced to face different and conflicting ideas? Certainly not in political debates.

Are students in higher education currently facing different and conflicting ideas? That goes to humanities students, specially. It seems like when it comes to worldviews universities are almost monocultural, or maybe it's just a regional thing here?

Students in American and European universities are definitely not facing different and conflicting ideas. More often than not, expressing different and conflicting ideas will make you a social pariah, or even get you fired if you’re the instructor trying to truly make your students well rounded. In fact it is often those very same students that file petitions and participate in protests to get professors fired when they face an idea that they don’t agree with.

There is only one set of ideas that truly experiences freedom of thought and inquiry in the humanities in Western universities, and that’s the progressive far left worldview. This cultural bias skews the humanities far more than it does STEM. You can see it institutionalized in the *-studies majors (e.g. ethnic studies), which have relatively little academic rigor. And because the humanities are so often skewed, I disagree with the notion that it makes students well rounded.

Without room for conflicting views, critical inquiry, and freedom of thought, the humanities seem to have devolved into a propaganda machine that teaches just this worldview. It is a ubiquitous enough problem that entire news outlets have been created to track the disturbing saga of college monoculture in America: https://www.thecollegefix.com/

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#64

Post by ianleeclark » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #50

ianleeclark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A culture of fear and loathing. Examples? > Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts. This is endemic to the US university system, in general. > Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush. Again, it's all fun and games to riff and instantly disregard a vast number of fields of study, but you're not doing yourself any favors by just throwing out a laundry list. You h…

Of course not. There are wonderful resources for getting a liberal education today. More than ever, in fact, and far less expensive than ever as well. They just have nothing to do with going into a humanities department.

A liberal education, by definition, includes the humanities.

What's the point of using a forum for discussion if you're just going to make vague assertions and never bother to back them up? You talk of fear and loathing, yet seemingly operate on visceral reaction given that you continually refuse/are unable to list your grievances.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#65

Post by currymj » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:42 AM UTC

haihaibye wrote: post #45

currymj wrote: post #10

apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well. for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.

Historians wanted to push the narrative that primitive people were less violent, that seeing the pots dug up during different eras was due to cultural transmission not people being wiped out and replaced, "Pots, not people" Genetics has revealed that no, it was people not pots: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6 You'd have had a more accurate picture of prehistory watching Conan the Barbarian than sit…

thanks for posting the article, which is fascinating and presents a complex and interesting picture of how archaeologists and anthropologists are reacting to advances in genetics -- much more interesting than your summary suggests.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#66

Post by onecommentman » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:05 AM UTC

maemre wrote: post #43

noch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields. Indeed, the mere proliferation of x-studies (where x is arbitrary) in universities is a ringing indictment. The classic/liberal humanities (e.g. history) should be taught but it shouldn't be the case that one must go to a university, and get into debt, to learn them, and within a university whe…

> Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science. Although it's a bit of a side-track and you're quoting, what are your thoughts on applying this logic to "computer _science_" or "material science"? I think it's more about the age of the field: 1. pretty old fields like physics (which just comes from the Greek word for nature), chemistry (comes from…

Well, for computer science, it is straightforward. Computer science is the science that lies somewhere between science of astrology and the science of numerology, without the popularity of the former or the formality of the latter. (Not my line, sadly.)

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#67

Post by libra1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

I watched an a documentary about early humans a couple weeks ago, and felt really grateful that we have people passionate enough to dedicate their lives to learning about our ancestors. On one hand, it would be really heartbreaking if the number of people deeply focused on the humanities starts to dwindle, and our culture gets more and more monotonous. On the other hand, maybe this shift could cause us to automate more of the boring parts of this research or discover new research tools that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

It'd be a lot easier to justify a humanities education if it resulted in a high-paying job. Just image a Udacity for the humanities where the end of the program resulted in a career coach helping you get a $300k job as a historian. To me, that is truly utopian.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#68

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #55

> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them. If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?

I also suspect that you get a lot more bang for your buck focusing on teaching kids how to reason, write, and persuade by teaching those skills specifically as opposed to hoping they pick it from transfer learning in an English or history class.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#69

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:17 AM UTC

ianleeclark wrote: post #33

kortilla wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agendas are expected. Don’t use an economics paper to back a policy decision under the guise of data/science-driven policy making though.

Economics is a social science, not under the umbrella of humanities. Maybe subfields within economics like economic history could be in the humanities, but most micro and macro would be outside of it. There are a lot of overlapping fields between the two, but economics isn't in the humanities.

Huge chunks of economics are just as much garbage as the the rest of humanities because of the lack of experimental capabilities. Any field that has conflicting “schools of thought” is not really founded in evidence and reproducible experiments.

MMT and inflation theories in general are constantly brought up by politicians and they are junk science.

Piketty’s work on inequality is a glorified regression built on an unfounded assumption about the return on capital always outpacing inflation. That work dominates politicians discussing the wealth gaps and is used as “evidence” to tax the wealthy.

Some economics is great (e.g. Nash equilibrium) and is consistently reproducible and observable. That’s not the kind dominating headlines though.

Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities

#70

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #55

> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them. If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?

> "If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?"

The answer is simple: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." Even here on HN, we have a large number of people saying that going to college is merely to get a credential and that they didn't learn (or, more accurately, didn't bother to learn) anything of importance there.