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

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

#61

Post by this15testingg » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:05 AM UTC

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…

equating chatgpt to "a better spell checker" is wild; how is writing not also a skill that should be taught?

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

#62

Post by UncleMeat » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:14 AM UTC

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 agree that professors can probably develop ai resistant evaluations.

But there is minimal institutional support for this. Everybody is going it on their own. And the ai tools are changing rapidly. Telling a ntt faculty member teaching a 4/4 that they just need to stop being lazy and redo their entire evaluation method is not really workable.

Iteration is also slow. You do a new syllabus to try to discourage cheating. You run the course for a semester. You see the results with now just a few weeks to turn around for your spring semester courses. At best you get one iteration cycle per six months. More likely it is one per year since it is basically impossible to meaningfully digest the outcome of what you tried and to meaningfully try something different mere weeks later.

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

#63

Post by amelius » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

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…

Basically a reformulation of Joel Spolsky's "commoditize your complement".

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

#64

Post by teaearlgraycold » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:16 AM UTC

this15testingg wrote: post #61

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…

equating chatgpt to "a better spell checker" is wild; how is writing not also a skill that should be taught?

It’s the thinking that precedes writing that should be the bulk of your grade. Possessing what looks like an artifact of organized thought isn’t enough these days to evaluate a student.

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

#65

Post by teaearlgraycold » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:17 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s definitionally not cheating if it’s a single player environment. That’s like saying skipping to the end of a movie is cheating.

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

#66

Post by oersted » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

quanto wrote: post #36

sdoering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument? I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest…

That's a good point, beyond prediction, history does have utility for surfacing "shared stories" that bring people together. Let's not underestimate the real-world impact of such stories. Most big societal movements, both very good and very bad, have been fueled by shared history, or the making of shared history.

What's tricky is that indeed such stories need not be factual to be powerful, just as long as they resonate well-enough with the current "common-sense" and have some kind authority behind it giving it credence.

Historians do have an important responsibility here in making sure that people are aware of the real story so that they are not easily manipulated, just like journalists have a similar responsibility in a democracy, fourth estate and all.

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

#67

Post by UncleMeat » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #54

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 "study…

The “explain how we got here” approach to history has some pretty big limitations. The historical actors had no idea where the future was going. When we examine their actions from the perspective of the single contingency that ended up happening we will almost necessarily miss meaningful understanding and make things seem inevitable when they really weren’t.

There’s interesting writing to be done in this mode but it is definitely not the primary mode.

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

#68

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

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 transformer architecture was originally developed for translation tasks, but massive, overfit generative models are awful at translation. (Seriously, part-of-speech classification + dictionary lookup + grammar mapping – an incredibly simplistic system with performance measurable in chapters per second – does a better job, and you even get confidence intervals.) If you want a translation tool, use something like Project Bergamot (https://browser.mt/), not generative AI.

> Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery.

I, too, find this exceptionally annoying.

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

#69

Post by Timwi » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you've listed several disparate incentives that should be looked at separately.

Economic incentives are what this thread is about. If those are removed, some instances of cheating will subside.

Reputational incentives are similar and harder to address, but they are also less strong because the cheating has a much higher chance to backfire. If you are found out, your economic benefits might continue, but your reputation is immediately damaged.

Singleplayer games are an entirely different situation. There's clearly no economic incentive here, and reputational incentive only applies if you are looking to share your singleplayer result with other people, in which case I could argue it's no longer singleplayer in the game theoretic sense. If it's not that, the only remaining motivation to cheat at something like Sudoku or a singleplayer videogame is to learn or at least satisfy an itch or curiosity, which I think is a perfectly legitimate motivation.

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

#70

Post by UncleMeat » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:28 AM UTC

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…

Paleography, transcription, and translation are hellishly difficult to learn and really make it difficult for interested people to explore the archive. LLMs have become pretty darn good at doing this out of the box. Prior to this you needed specially trained ML models and before that there was no automation whatsoever.