@juergen_hubert

👆🏼 Need more people like this good guy.
Not just for a mea culpa, because the change and maturation of a person matters. I had a similar progression in life.

Also, https://bijou.substack.com/p/nexus-of-neuronheads?r=3hsqj

@juergen_hubert You can relax. A major movement in the #Humanities argued for half a century that Truth and Facts were meaningless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy

#academia

@juergen_hubert this thread hits close to home for me. My Bachelor's is in Physics, but towards the end I developed a fascination for how things were discovered, and took a course in History of Physics, and then wrote my dissertation on it.

My fellow students were quite dismissive, thinking that I took an easy way out and "history of physics" was a cheap subject. "Almost humanities".

I am very happy about what I learned, and gave me better chances of survival in case of accidental time travel, and tools to make my historical rpg more accurate, but most of all it taught me the receiving point of view of this kind of dismissiveness.

(Not of pride: I got a prize from the Italian association for the history of physics and astronomy for my thesis)

@juergen_hubert

So wise words….
💯

@juergen_hubert I come from the computational linguistics community, so I saw the #LLMs being born. For me, the real split is not between STEM and Humanities but between Engineering and Science (I put the Humanities in the latter).

There was always a tension in my community between people who wanted to 'get things to work' (the engineers), and people who wanted to understand human language (the scientists). Money and influence were always on the engineers' side, sadly.

@juergen_hubert
i agree with you generally, but i think you're being a bit too kind to academic philosophy

a lot of it *is* bullshit, entire departments and subdisciplines are ruled by self-aggrandizing careerists with zero interest in "critical thinking"

this much has been incredibly obvious in the way that powerful and influential figures have flexed their muscles to defend "philosophical" transphobia and other reactionary hogwash against all analysis and critique

@juergen_hubert Honestly, as a former humanities student, I've come to believe that students of the humanities were pulled in two directions:

A) Pursuing genuine interest and concern with the complexities and contradictions in organized knowledge and the human experience;

B) Faced with impossibly long reading lists and requirements, learning to produce authoritative-sounding bullshit.

STEM students often failed to perceive A but were right to criticize B.

@juergen_hubert

As a science graduate and failed Postgrad
-I understood that many of the most important issues don't rely on *scientific questions* although they are sometimes illuminated by science
-science helps us understand why and how we are here, but not the why
-I never denigrated the humanities
-as a science communicator I realised there's false view of science as a priesthood of the arcana, which many scientists seek to dispel

@juergen_hubert Seriously. We have a lot to answer for. Biologist here, so not quite as hard a science as physics, but we too would sit around and joke that the most hopeless students should go into journalism.

We _thought_ we were being discreet and out of earshot but they obviously heard us. And since neither they nor we had a clue about the smarts needed for journalism, here we are.