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> Engineers are just as prone to misinformation as any other field. I would argue that this is exactly not the case because they know how to employ the scienti
by sprash 8y ago
> Engineers are just as prone to misinformation as any other field.
I would argue that this is exactly not the case because they know how to employ the scientific method. If humanities make all kinds of bold claims without providing logic and evidence engineers won't listen for very long. That is probably true.
The problem is that "tackle misinformation" and "ethics" get conflated here. If you want to know the truth you have to employ the scientific method.
Ethics on the other hand only contain very few "truths" and are mostly social convention. E.g. In some places of the world it is ethically perfectly correct to kill you daughter if she commits adultery. However there are some eternal truths that are correct for all different ethics out there, like the prisoner dilemma, contract/game theory and the fact that might is always right.
The latter eternal truth is the one that are interesting and worth discussing. However the former parts of ethics are the ones discussed by humanities. Hence from the viewpoint of an engineer useless.
- tarboreus 8y agoHow do you know if your boss is mad at you? Or if someone is interested in you romantically? Or if a landscape is beautiful or ugly? Not all knowledge is gained through empirical methods. We know that because people had knowledge, including sophisticated technology, before there was a scientific method, i.e. before the 16th century. Most of our knowledge is gain through interpretation of the world...basically, doing the various things our minds do to arrive at conclusions. In the humanities, we (I am a humanist though also a programmer) try to hone our interpretive ability. We have a bunch of fancy names for ways to do that, like hermeneutics and dialectic and rhetoric, but basically you do it through practice. There's bad interpretive work, just like there's bad scientific work. But thinking empiricism is the be-all of knowledge is kind of silly. Do you use the scientific method to decide if you should kick a dog or pet it? Whether you beleive a politician's statement? Wheter a newspaper is trustworthy? No, you go through a process of modelling that other consciousness. That's interpretation.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThose three are in fact all partially or fully learned behavior. Anyone on the autistic spectrum who learned coping skills is acutely aware that those are observational given their "driver failure" calls for doing it manually. Standards of taste are learned and beauty does have mathematical elements like phi.
- tarboreus 8y agoI knew someone was going to be like "That stuff is observational and therefore empirical!" If that's the case then the humanities is a science because we're doing empirical research on books. Often empirical research on individual sentences!
- 7952 8y agoSome of those eternal truths may not be as secure as you might think... https://psmag.com/social-justice/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135 https://psmag.com/social-justice/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum... Your interest in those "eternal truths" is amusingly subjective.