ChadamsI hope all the STEM people who thought maybe we could simply do without all that pesky humanities education now understand how ridiculous that notion always has been.
Bakunin Boys@thecityinspeech as a former dumbarse, in my defense, a lot of humanities is full of crap.
@bakuninboys I wish to note that this is not about being dumb or smart! It's about seeing and being able to articulate the value of a holistic liberal arts approach to education.
As for "a lot" of humanities being "full of crap," I would invite you to say more? There are certainly stronger and weaker professional practitioners of the humanities, but I don't think I'd say the subjects themselves are nonsensical or unworthy of study.
@thecityinspeech for me, it's in-curiosity which makes someone an idiot, not intellect.
I am talking colloquially, so yeah it was the people, but it will sometimes affect the fields themselves. An early encounter with the humanities were folks talking about Einstein as the cause of nuclear weapons. I saw a lot of it as sophistry then.
The problem seems to stem from in-curiosity in both directions. There are big holes in science (GUT) and mathematics (Hilbert/Godel) and philosophy is spending its time navel gazing. I recently read "Philosophy is now less philosophy and more philosophy history", and that rings true for me.
There's also a lack of culpability. The "now I am become death", I mean, it's a bad place to be, but at least it's a scientist who said it. But the humanities will harbour religion gleefully without taking stock of the damage it has done. It does not own Qanon as downstream from religion. It does not own flat earthers and post-truth. It does not own religion as the powerful muddying force which allows fascism to come into being.
There's no quote of a pope saying "I led us to desolation. I salted the earth and now my crops will not grow".
Also TERFs -- the term exists for a reason. That's born of feminism. That's some big missteps in feminist theory right there.
But yeah, it's the people. You find the right crowd, and they do take action on this stuff. They're protesting, they're fighting, they understand and explain, and it's holistic. I must say, among them, the best appear to be those who have synthesised a technical background with a non-technical one.
In a way, it is a "99% of everything sucks". Find a random book and it won't be useful, but there are green pastures, and there are a lot of questions that only the humanities can answer. In computing, an increasing number of my real-world problems are philosophy.
So it's on me. I didn't find it, but I also didn't look. The haystack is pretty big though.
@bakuninboys Thank you for taking the time to say more! I'm enthusiastically on the same page with you in much of what you're saying here, especially about the role of in-curiosity. Perhaps my experience of formal humanities edu was more agnostic than yours. I don't view philosophy as divorced from the physicists and mathematicians you mentioned and the projects they pursued (misunderstandings of causality in the case of nuclear weaponry notwithstanding)!
@bakuninboys But I recognize that modern pedagogical practice has in many cases degraded the quality of philosophical discourse and turned academia inward when it should be reaching out.
@bakuninboys Academia can certainly harbor enclaves of people who share bad and inhumane and antidemocratic ideas. I wanted to understand what your experience of the humanities was such that it should be associated with this, but if it was the in-curious folks at work, then that makes a lot of sense.
@thecityinspeech While even in universities, academic practise (in both technical and non-technical fields) can often be grounded in obfuscation, there's enough tight discourse there that you can find (across domains) good arguments.
My initial contact with the humanities was in my schooling, and the big issue is that you have a huge mix of teachers, teaching styles, and personalities. Some don't like or respect technical fields. Others can use the flexible nature of humanities teaching to take points away from the students they don't like. Add to that the sometimes poor understanding of the material they're covering, and... well... I had to start digging myself to find what I was looking for.
I think a lot of folks suffer in similar and different ways for the sciences. It's an issue in schools where sometimes a bad teacher can just put you off a field.