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Humanities departments emit some of the most cryptic texts around. They should be worrying about that before trying to help engineers.

• klodolph 7y ago
  Tu quouque doesn’t make an argument. Gutting humanities in favor of “practical” degrees is short-sighted in the extreme. The problem with humanities is not that it doesn’t provide value to the community, the problem is that it is difficult to monetize skills in the humanities. There is a pathology that larger organizations often develop where they start investing only in ideas that where they can measure the impact on the time scale of a performance review cycle. For example, any project where the results can’t be measured in one or two quarters might be dead on arrival, depending on what company you work for. The same kind of short-term, narrow-minded thinking is what makes people dismiss humanities.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    Or there is an oversupply of humanities graduates and that is what is causing monetization problems. Just think about how many poorly paid artists there are.
    • mattkrause 7y ago
      You're gonna be gutted when you look up how much non-CS scientists make.
• saagarjha 7y ago
  Perhaps if you took the time to learn the humanities, they’d become more accessible to you? It’s not like engineering texts are the paragon of clarity.
• noema 7y ago
  The opacity of contemporary humanities texts is overstated. Yes, the general academic style tends to be verbose and baroque. But it bespeaks a certain hubris when a layman to a given field claims an absence of meaning to its work. The topics being discussed are often technical and by virtue of their intended audience (peer scholars) presuppose vast amounts of preliminary knowledge.