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I’ve been seeing more and more of a sort of “Two Cultures” Aggression among the tec crowd, and I’m somewhat baffled by it. I even share some of the misgivings (

I’ve been seeing more and more of a sort of “Two Cultures” Aggression among the tec crowd, and I’m somewhat baffled by it. I even share some of the misgivings (Hegel: ugh...). But all grievances about the shortcomings of individual sub-fields together still don’t feel like they would justify what to me often seems a very emotional antipathy against anything that isn’t “pure” science. Someone like Richard Feynman, who was arguably at the forefront of making fun of the humanities, never devolved into today’s unthinking “learn to code” sort of hatred: he heaped scorn on certain practices that deserved it (coining “cargo-cult science”), but remained open to fall in love with ideas he liked, and even succeeded in writing, painting, music, education, and cultural diplomacy. He would seem to be an excellent role model, showing how to constructively engage in other fields without compromising your principles. I also think we sometimes overlook the triumphs of the humanities because they look so different than those in the natural sciences. While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945. Only the latter connection is far more diffuse, with ideas percolating through layers of society, bouncing between academia/media/politics/literature/etc. Democracy, the rule of law, (international) cooperation, capitalism, and so on are similar: these ideas don’t just randomly appear, and are very much in the wheelhouse of “the humanities”. But from inception to general acceptance their trace gets lost, and they often become so common we don’t even notice them anymore, much like the proverbial fish who doesn’t know what water even is.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
Has our society reached a tipping point, where we're establishing a consensus, correctly or not, that there's a "scientific" way to do nearly everything? Adopting "data-driven approaches" to every industry; optimizing each decision; cargo cult science indeed. A social movement where hearts and minds and investors believe that data is more important than intuition, that design is more important than luck, and that talent is more important than guts.
- matt4077 7y ago
  It’s almost tautologically true that the scientific method is the gold standard. The problem is rather that not everything is easily studied in such fashion. In fact, physics is almost unique in being easily reducible to smaller and smaller problems that can be studied independently. That approach fails already for many problems of biology: our understanding of isolated cells and genetics has grown exponentially, yet we have made barely a dent when in comes to treatment of, for example, depression. As you zoom out to, say, sociology or political science, it gets even worse.
  - kurthr 7y ago
    Large parts of Physics and Astronomy are a bit more like looking for your keys under the street lamp. You study what you can measure and model as simply as possible the effects even if it's an approximation. The classic physicists response to a multi-body problem is 1,2, infinity...because those are the ones we have solutions/tools ffor. That's true for planets all the way to atoms. Now, at the edges there are those who look at more philosophical things like Bell's Theorem or study complicated things like chaos, but even there it's about simplifying to what you can model and measure... anything else is boiling the ocean and you never get done.
    - kurthr 7y ago
      To be more clear, the problems only look like mathematical solutions, because the questions are chosen very carefully... and that's what other physicists expect when they look at your results, but it means there are a lot of questions that you just won't answer other than as a gross approximation.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    >we have made barely a dent when in comes to treatment of, for example, depression When the cure finally is understood, it's virtually guaranteed to come in the form of breaking down the large systems into simpler systems. "Holistic understanding" is possible up to however smart you are, and any system more complicated than that has to be diced up to fit in your head. Wouldn't it be nice to be so smart that you could understand the whole workings of the human body all at once? However in reality there are only those who pretend to understand all of it, and those who actually understand some minuscule fraction of it. If any entity ever actually understands a system more complicated than a few particles in a way that is neither reductive nor abstract, it will not be human.
thrower123 7y ago
The "learn to code" thing is not making fun of the humanities - it is making fun of people who write overwrought think-pieces and listicles on advertising/billionaire-vanity supported publications, who are finding their markets sag. Many of them have been heaping scorn on the nerds for decades; it's hard not to chuckle with a little glee at their comeuppance.
malvosenior 7y ago
Part of the scorn for humanities in the tech crowd comes from the unrelenting attack by the humanities (journalists) on our field for the past decade. A day doesn't go by where the New York Times/Atlantic/WaPo doesn't attack developers, Facebook/Uber/AirBnB, the internet, "tech bros"... I don't think Feynman had to deal with anything like that.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Only a decade in the UK it has been going on since Brunel died
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    No doubt which is why being a developer isn't considered a very respectable position in the UK and the pay matches that sentiment. The Guardian is also one of the leaders of anti-tech commentary.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Not sure why you got voted down as your quite correct.
- matt4077 7y ago
  He literally built nuclear weapons, so he definitely got to read some criticism arguing for moral responsibility of those working on potentially dangerous technology. Besides that, I don’t quite understand why criticism of Facebook would legitimize heaping scorn on local journalists, few of whom would have ever written about tec. Or why such criticism, which seems quite common among tech folks themselves, would be negative. Or why you would reflexively join ranks with such divergent causes as ad tech and misogynists, assuming you are neither.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    I'm not talking about a few local journalists, these are global media empires. The New York Times is a massive organization. The last of the old media guard desperately trying to hold on to their status as the internet drives them into irrelevance. > Or why you would reflexively join ranks with such divergent causes as ad tech and misogynists, assuming you are neither. Ad tech is just a business like any other. "Misogynists" are a fabrication of the aforementioned media empires. Sure there are a couple bad actors but tech is far and away more egalitarian than any other high paying field, a fact completely absent in any discussion about mythical "tech bros".
thanatropism 7y ago
> I also think we sometimes overlook the triumphs of the humanities because they look so different than those in the natural sciences. While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945. Unless you want to claim a name for it, I'm going to start to cite it "as noted in an online forum...". It's a very good observation.
- matt4077 7y ago
  If it were forever possible to trace this idea back to me, or to whomever I got it from, that would sort of disprove my point :)
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945. I really like that quote as much as the other poster. But then I realized that the reason it hasn't been used may lie in game theory. That also brings us back to evolutionary biology. Still, philosophy is a nice abstract way to think about it. Oh, and never say never.
  - thanatropism 7y ago
    Wait. The link between evolutionary biology and game theory as an efficacious theory of how people ask is.. analogical at best. Game theory worked as a conceptual background for nuclear nonproliferation (and even then, not the only concept background) because of a particular philosophy of human existence leading to a particular theory of action. Theories, whether scientific in the deeper sense (hard genetics backed by lab data) or wider frameworks carrying the aura of sciencinesss, are not effective in the world on their own.
vajrabum 7y ago
Love the quote and the idea about the bomb and Stanley Kubrick too but you can make a good case that it was Herman Kahn's work at the RAND Corporation and the adoption by the US of 2nd strike capability on his recommendation that kept the world from a nuclear war. You can call that the Dr Strangelove saved the world theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn

i_am_proteus 7y ago

Has our society reached a tipping point, where we're establishing a consensus, correctly or not, that there's a "scientific" way to do nearly everything? Adopting "data-driven approaches" to every industry; optimizing each decision; cargo cult science indeed. A social movement where hearts and minds and investors believe that data is more important than intuition, that design is more important than luck, and that talent is more important than guts.

matt4077 7y ago
It’s almost tautologically true that the scientific method is the gold standard. The problem is rather that not everything is easily studied in such fashion. In fact, physics is almost unique in being easily reducible to smaller and smaller problems that can be studied independently. That approach fails already for many problems of biology: our understanding of isolated cells and genetics has grown exponentially, yet we have made barely a dent when in comes to treatment of, for example, depression. As you zoom out to, say, sociology or political science, it gets even worse.
- kurthr 7y ago
  Large parts of Physics and Astronomy are a bit more like looking for your keys under the street lamp. You study what you can measure and model as simply as possible the effects even if it's an approximation. The classic physicists response to a multi-body problem is 1,2, infinity...because those are the ones we have solutions/tools ffor. That's true for planets all the way to atoms. Now, at the edges there are those who look at more philosophical things like Bell's Theorem or study complicated things like chaos, but even there it's about simplifying to what you can model and measure... anything else is boiling the ocean and you never get done.
  - kurthr 7y ago
    To be more clear, the problems only look like mathematical solutions, because the questions are chosen very carefully... and that's what other physicists expect when they look at your results, but it means there are a lot of questions that you just won't answer other than as a gross approximation.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >we have made barely a dent when in comes to treatment of, for example, depression When the cure finally is understood, it's virtually guaranteed to come in the form of breaking down the large systems into simpler systems. "Holistic understanding" is possible up to however smart you are, and any system more complicated than that has to be diced up to fit in your head. Wouldn't it be nice to be so smart that you could understand the whole workings of the human body all at once? However in reality there are only those who pretend to understand all of it, and those who actually understand some minuscule fraction of it. If any entity ever actually understands a system more complicated than a few particles in a way that is neither reductive nor abstract, it will not be human.

thrower123 7y ago

The "learn to code" thing is not making fun of the humanities - it is making fun of people who write overwrought think-pieces and listicles on advertising/billionaire-vanity supported publications, who are finding their markets sag. Many of them have been heaping scorn on the nerds for decades; it's hard not to chuckle with a little glee at their comeuppance.

malvosenior 7y ago

Part of the scorn for humanities in the tech crowd comes from the unrelenting attack by the humanities (journalists) on our field for the past decade. A day doesn't go by where the New York Times/Atlantic/WaPo doesn't attack developers, Facebook/Uber/AirBnB, the internet, "tech bros"... I don't think Feynman had to deal with anything like that.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Only a decade in the UK it has been going on since Brunel died
- malvosenior 7y ago
  No doubt which is why being a developer isn't considered a very respectable position in the UK and the pay matches that sentiment. The Guardian is also one of the leaders of anti-tech commentary.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Not sure why you got voted down as your quite correct.
matt4077 7y ago
He literally built nuclear weapons, so he definitely got to read some criticism arguing for moral responsibility of those working on potentially dangerous technology. Besides that, I don’t quite understand why criticism of Facebook would legitimize heaping scorn on local journalists, few of whom would have ever written about tec. Or why such criticism, which seems quite common among tech folks themselves, would be negative. Or why you would reflexively join ranks with such divergent causes as ad tech and misogynists, assuming you are neither.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  I'm not talking about a few local journalists, these are global media empires. The New York Times is a massive organization. The last of the old media guard desperately trying to hold on to their status as the internet drives them into irrelevance. > Or why you would reflexively join ranks with such divergent causes as ad tech and misogynists, assuming you are neither. Ad tech is just a business like any other. "Misogynists" are a fabrication of the aforementioned media empires. Sure there are a couple bad actors but tech is far and away more egalitarian than any other high paying field, a fact completely absent in any discussion about mythical "tech bros".

thanatropism 7y ago

> I also think we sometimes overlook the triumphs of the humanities because they look so different than those in the natural sciences. While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945. Unless you want to claim a name for it, I'm going to start to cite it "as noted in an online forum...". It's a very good observation.

matt4077 7y ago
If it were forever possible to trace this idea back to me, or to whomever I got it from, that would sort of disprove my point :)
phkahler 7y ago
>> While physics has the nuclear bomb, philosophy may well lay a claim to that bomb never being used after 1945. I really like that quote as much as the other poster. But then I realized that the reason it hasn't been used may lie in game theory. That also brings us back to evolutionary biology. Still, philosophy is a nice abstract way to think about it. Oh, and never say never.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  Wait. The link between evolutionary biology and game theory as an efficacious theory of how people ask is.. analogical at best. Game theory worked as a conceptual background for nuclear nonproliferation (and even then, not the only concept background) because of a particular philosophy of human existence leading to a particular theory of action. Theories, whether scientific in the deeper sense (hard genetics backed by lab data) or wider frameworks carrying the aura of sciencinesss, are not effective in the world on their own.

vajrabum 7y ago

Love the quote and the idea about the bomb and Stanley Kubrick too but you can make a good case that it was Herman Kahn's work at the RAND Corporation and the adoption by the US of 2nd strike capability on his recommendation that kept the world from a nuclear war. You can call that the Dr Strangelove saved the world theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn