8 ms·

Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that t

by jtr1 11y ago

Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it. Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?

davidw 11y ago
> jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases. To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.
- slewis 11y ago
  Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away. It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own. Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.
- jtr1 11y ago
  Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world. I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted? There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;) I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.
  - davidw 11y ago
    > language drives human interaction. Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while. That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.
    - jtr1 11y ago
      I see. That's why I partially blame the teacher in that situation. I think a critical part of teaching is to contextualize the material in the larger picture. I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.
      - davidw 11y ago
        The thing was; it was a pretty clear pattern. I had good and bad science and math teachers, but even with the benefit of time and perspective, I don't hold most of the English ones in a very high regard, at least in terms of their teaching - many of them seemed to be perfectly kind and agreeable people. One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!
      - hugh4 11y ago
        That's a good point. The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question. Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.
- dap 11y ago
  > To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.) Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".
  - wpietri 11y ago
    I agree entirely, but I think it would go a lot easier for everybody if literary interpretation were presented as personal, possibly-rewarding approaches to a text rather than authoritative assertion of fact. My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.
StavrosK 11y ago
What if there were really no signs of metaphor, and the boat trip was just a boat trip? How do you know you didn't just read a bunch of things into something the author didn't intend?
- arrrg 11y ago
  Maybe. But the cynical reflexivity with which such judgements are made immediately is … weird. Strikes me as laziness and a basic unwillingness to even engage with something, basically a defense mechanism. It would probably be better to just admit that it’s not for you and leave it at that instead of claiming it to be sucky always forever and for everyone.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    I think that's because the practice has many parallels with bad science. Ascribing a metaphor to the author without any evidence is pretty much an untestable, unfalsifiable hypothesis, and therefore has no value. If you tell me that author X said that the boat is meant to be a metaphor for the protagonist's life, I will be the first to be excited and read the text looking for all the little easter eggs that the author put in, but without any evidence at all it's just your opinion. This is also exacerbated by the lengths that people go to stretch their theory, which makes it even more obvious that they're grasping at straws in the face of evidence to the contrary.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    2 years in college leads me to believe that this allergy is acquired. A person can only "engage" with topics they find to be boring, pretentious, or otherwise time wasting, so many times before "once bitten, twice shy" kicks into gear. Also, don't forget, we inflict this process on people as part of basic education in the States. Ask 100 people what they think of classics like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and more likely than not the answers will be mostly negative. Literary analysis is a subjective affair and turns quite a few people off, moreso when you are being graded on things like having the same opinion as the instructor. You can read something into a piece that may or may not be there, and in any case is more likely than not to be the product of your own experiences and biases, not the content of the work itself.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
It isn't that I question the validity of the results because of how they were produced, but because I can produce many other quite different results with minimal effort that are no easier to dispute with sound reasoning than the 'official' message presented. It is like a theory that, while explaining the results we saw, would just as easily explain any other results. Such a theory wouldn't be worth any further consideration unless the supporters are able to give it more sound structure so that we can actually have a reasonable way of saying 'no, that is wrong' or 'yes, that is right'. As it stands, if there is a boat, I could say the boat is representing something feminine because boats are like sheathes and provide protection from the harshness of the sea like a mother or I could say the the boat is representing something masculine because it is piercing the water and representing historically masculine ideas of exploration and conquest. Any such analysis is largely useless as I can get what ever result I want.
- mavhc 11y ago
  Unless the point was to think about it, perhaps the travelling of the road is what's important, not the destination.
wfo 11y ago
I think that many, many scientists and engineers are not really interested in curiosity and exploration at all -- they are interested in solving well-specified problems using previously trained and learned techniques. They are interested in final answers and the satisfaction of completing a task successfully. I suspect people who whine about "what the author intended" or that "you can make it up as you go along" really lack the mental/creative flexibility to wrestle and dance with art and miss the point that the act of interpretation is a purpose in and of itself: you express art/ideas by interpreting another's work; your interpretation is art itself since art is a conversation. It's the job of artists to create a work that's deep and flexible and inspiring enough to generate many possible interpretations. Not everybody has to like it but don't just dismiss it out of hand, recognize that brilliant creative people find value in it and the value is there, it just takes work to get at it just like it takes work to find beauty in well-written code or a system of complex equations, and it's a wholly different kind of satisfaction and beauty you find in the humanities; if you took the time and effort to honestly try it you might like it and like it or not that kind of expansion of the mind is something everyone could use a little more of.
- Nadya 11y ago
  I've sat many a days and pondered over much of modern art. I can think of nothing but "its shit" when I see a carefully placed piece of dog shit on a plate being passed as art. So I asked a more artistic person than myself. They responded: Of course, this piece of shit on the plate symbolizes what people are fed throughout their lives - either literally eating unhealthy foods (shit) or more theoretically through the bullshit they encounter throughout their lives. The artist was trying to convey a message about life: everything can be, or is, shit being fed to you on a platter. Disclaimer: I made all of this up on the spot, but I have seen shit on a plate being passed as art before. So it was partially inspired, which I guess makes the dog shit on a plate art. By some standards.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Or maybe they're different from you, and writing off their perspective as "narrow and inflexible" is, itself, narrow and inflexible. Everyone has a perspective, and all perspectives are fundamentally interesting in their own right. Is that not the humanist idea? Is that not what a liberal education is supposed to teach?
wpietri 11y ago
I agree the engineer/scientist move of dismissing all softer things as "horse shit" is regrettable. The older I get, the more I appreciate the sorts of subtlety I would have previously called nonsense. Especially so as I become better at introspection. On the other hand, I think that an allergy to overextended metaphors and other woolly thinking is a handy bias in an engineer. And a lot of the flights of literary analysis would be much more palatable to we more literal-minded if it were framed as, "When I read X I enjoy thinking about it as Y" rather than "X is Y". Yet another case where a little E-Prime [1] would prevent a lot of argument. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- davidw 11y ago
  > dismissing all softer things Not something I did at all. I just don't like one specific kind of literature and how it's presented.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Sorry for the confusion; like jtr1, I was referring to a broader tendency, and not you in specific. I shouldn't have quoted you directly there.
Torgo 11y ago
At least do the hacker thing and explore the system for weaknesses. Some of my most memorable times from school were, when asked to interpret a work, intentionally crafting the most defensible interpretation I could find that would be offensive to the most people. Sometimes I was praised for my creativity, sometimes I was castigated for getting the "wrong" interpretation, and sometimes I would delightedly watch a professor squirm, knowing that they had painted themselves into a corner by previous disarming any attempts to refute interpretations to prop up their own.
marssaxman 11y ago
The teacher cares about the system composed of the poem and its cultural context; the student cares about the system composed of grades, tests, and credentials which will eventually allow them access to the work they want to do. The meaning of the poem may or may not be confusing and arbitrary, but our hypothetical engineering student is actually trying to play "guess which subset of all the possible meanings the teacher will accept", and is thus frustrated less with the actual poem than with the system which presents understanding of the poem as an obstacle toward the student's goals.
- davidw 11y ago
  If I'd cared about the grade, I wouldn't have disagreed so vehemently with the teacher; I would have played along, like you said.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Sure, but I bet the only reason you remember the disagreement well enough to comment on it is that it was a teacher you had to disagree with. People talk all kinds of bullshit and it generally doesn't mean anything, but when someone with some authority talks bullshit, that's frustrating because you have to deal with it anyway.

by jtr1 11y ago

davidw 11y ago

> jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases. To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.

slewis 11y ago
Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away. It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own. Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.
jtr1 11y ago
Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world. I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted? There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;) I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.
- davidw 11y ago
  > language drives human interaction. Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while. That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.
  - jtr1 11y ago
    I see. That's why I partially blame the teacher in that situation. I think a critical part of teaching is to contextualize the material in the larger picture. I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.
    - davidw 11y ago
      The thing was; it was a pretty clear pattern. I had good and bad science and math teachers, but even with the benefit of time and perspective, I don't hold most of the English ones in a very high regard, at least in terms of their teaching - many of them seemed to be perfectly kind and agreeable people. One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!
    - hugh4 11y ago
      That's a good point. The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question. Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.
dap 11y ago
> To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.) Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".
- wpietri 11y ago
  I agree entirely, but I think it would go a lot easier for everybody if literary interpretation were presented as personal, possibly-rewarding approaches to a text rather than authoritative assertion of fact. My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.

StavrosK 11y ago

What if there were really no signs of metaphor, and the boat trip was just a boat trip? How do you know you didn't just read a bunch of things into something the author didn't intend?

arrrg 11y ago
Maybe. But the cynical reflexivity with which such judgements are made immediately is … weird. Strikes me as laziness and a basic unwillingness to even engage with something, basically a defense mechanism. It would probably be better to just admit that it’s not for you and leave it at that instead of claiming it to be sucky always forever and for everyone.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I think that's because the practice has many parallels with bad science. Ascribing a metaphor to the author without any evidence is pretty much an untestable, unfalsifiable hypothesis, and therefore has no value. If you tell me that author X said that the boat is meant to be a metaphor for the protagonist's life, I will be the first to be excited and read the text looking for all the little easter eggs that the author put in, but without any evidence at all it's just your opinion. This is also exacerbated by the lengths that people go to stretch their theory, which makes it even more obvious that they're grasping at straws in the face of evidence to the contrary.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  2 years in college leads me to believe that this allergy is acquired. A person can only "engage" with topics they find to be boring, pretentious, or otherwise time wasting, so many times before "once bitten, twice shy" kicks into gear. Also, don't forget, we inflict this process on people as part of basic education in the States. Ask 100 people what they think of classics like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and more likely than not the answers will be mostly negative. Literary analysis is a subjective affair and turns quite a few people off, moreso when you are being graded on things like having the same opinion as the instructor. You can read something into a piece that may or may not be there, and in any case is more likely than not to be the product of your own experiences and biases, not the content of the work itself.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

It isn't that I question the validity of the results because of how they were produced, but because I can produce many other quite different results with minimal effort that are no easier to dispute with sound reasoning than the 'official' message presented. It is like a theory that, while explaining the results we saw, would just as easily explain any other results. Such a theory wouldn't be worth any further consideration unless the supporters are able to give it more sound structure so that we can actually have a reasonable way of saying 'no, that is wrong' or 'yes, that is right'. As it stands, if there is a boat, I could say the boat is representing something feminine because boats are like sheathes and provide protection from the harshness of the sea like a mother or I could say the the boat is representing something masculine because it is piercing the water and representing historically masculine ideas of exploration and conquest. Any such analysis is largely useless as I can get what ever result I want.

mavhc 11y ago
Unless the point was to think about it, perhaps the travelling of the road is what's important, not the destination.

wfo 11y ago

I think that many, many scientists and engineers are not really interested in curiosity and exploration at all -- they are interested in solving well-specified problems using previously trained and learned techniques. They are interested in final answers and the satisfaction of completing a task successfully. I suspect people who whine about "what the author intended" or that "you can make it up as you go along" really lack the mental/creative flexibility to wrestle and dance with art and miss the point that the act of interpretation is a purpose in and of itself: you express art/ideas by interpreting another's work; your interpretation is art itself since art is a conversation. It's the job of artists to create a work that's deep and flexible and inspiring enough to generate many possible interpretations. Not everybody has to like it but don't just dismiss it out of hand, recognize that brilliant creative people find value in it and the value is there, it just takes work to get at it just like it takes work to find beauty in well-written code or a system of complex equations, and it's a wholly different kind of satisfaction and beauty you find in the humanities; if you took the time and effort to honestly try it you might like it and like it or not that kind of expansion of the mind is something everyone could use a little more of.

Nadya 11y ago
I've sat many a days and pondered over much of modern art. I can think of nothing but "its shit" when I see a carefully placed piece of dog shit on a plate being passed as art. So I asked a more artistic person than myself. They responded: Of course, this piece of shit on the plate symbolizes what people are fed throughout their lives - either literally eating unhealthy foods (shit) or more theoretically through the bullshit they encounter throughout their lives. The artist was trying to convey a message about life: everything can be, or is, shit being fed to you on a platter. Disclaimer: I made all of this up on the spot, but I have seen shit on a plate being passed as art before. So it was partially inspired, which I guess makes the dog shit on a plate art. By some standards.
cbd1984 11y ago
Or maybe they're different from you, and writing off their perspective as "narrow and inflexible" is, itself, narrow and inflexible. Everyone has a perspective, and all perspectives are fundamentally interesting in their own right. Is that not the humanist idea? Is that not what a liberal education is supposed to teach?

wpietri 11y ago

I agree the engineer/scientist move of dismissing all softer things as "horse shit" is regrettable. The older I get, the more I appreciate the sorts of subtlety I would have previously called nonsense. Especially so as I become better at introspection. On the other hand, I think that an allergy to overextended metaphors and other woolly thinking is a handy bias in an engineer. And a lot of the flights of literary analysis would be much more palatable to we more literal-minded if it were framed as, "When I read X I enjoy thinking about it as Y" rather than "X is Y". Yet another case where a little E-Prime [1] would prevent a lot of argument. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

davidw 11y ago
> dismissing all softer things Not something I did at all. I just don't like one specific kind of literature and how it's presented.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Sorry for the confusion; like jtr1, I was referring to a broader tendency, and not you in specific. I shouldn't have quoted you directly there.

Torgo 11y ago

At least do the hacker thing and explore the system for weaknesses. Some of my most memorable times from school were, when asked to interpret a work, intentionally crafting the most defensible interpretation I could find that would be offensive to the most people. Sometimes I was praised for my creativity, sometimes I was castigated for getting the "wrong" interpretation, and sometimes I would delightedly watch a professor squirm, knowing that they had painted themselves into a corner by previous disarming any attempts to refute interpretations to prop up their own.

marssaxman 11y ago

The teacher cares about the system composed of the poem and its cultural context; the student cares about the system composed of grades, tests, and credentials which will eventually allow them access to the work they want to do. The meaning of the poem may or may not be confusing and arbitrary, but our hypothetical engineering student is actually trying to play "guess which subset of all the possible meanings the teacher will accept", and is thus frustrated less with the actual poem than with the system which presents understanding of the poem as an obstacle toward the student's goals.

davidw 11y ago
If I'd cared about the grade, I wouldn't have disagreed so vehemently with the teacher; I would have played along, like you said.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Sure, but I bet the only reason you remember the disagreement well enough to comment on it is that it was a teacher you had to disagree with. People talk all kinds of bullshit and it generally doesn't mean anything, but when someone with some authority talks bullshit, that's frustrating because you have to deal with it anyway.