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The problem is that everyone has opinions on social issues and humanities. Everyone can look at a public policy and say "That's a terrible policy" disregarding
by deanCommie 6y ago
The problem is that everyone has opinions on social issues and humanities. Everyone can look at a public policy and say "That's a terrible policy" disregarding the work of experts who worked to balance many different constraints in the pursuit of some societal goal. It's the same as how anyone can look at a piece of art and say "That's terrible. My kindergarten son could have drawn that." and think their opinion is as valid as art critics.
As opposed to STEM where people generally keep to opinions only in their domains.
Now, you could say that this means proves that humanities are less rigorous and less worthy of respect, and that might take you so far. But ultimately the world is full of humans, and dealing with their habits, emotions, and motivations is not the work of biologists or chemists or physicists or mathematicians.
The challenge is that when a software engineer encounters a hardware engineer and they try to reach an understanding, there is an implicit baseline of respect, and if some terminology or phrasing doesn't fit one side, they default to assuming the term must mean something different in the other domain, and they ask for clarification.
When technologists on HackerNews encounter terms like privilege, justice, or exploitation from those in the humanities, they offer none of the same respect, and react to their own personal unstudied interpretation of the term.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI think the difference is that hardware and software people usually know when the other side is using a technical term, even if they don't know the full definition of it. They know when they don't know. Whereas with the humanities, they're using words that are regular words, and non-humanities people don't recognize them as being technical terms.
- deanCommie 6y agoAs Claudia called out - scale, memory, and information are all technical terms in our context but have layman meanings in the language too. Is that not the same as justice, racism, and privilege in humanities?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoIt is, except that a hardware and a software person both expect them to have technical meanings. That is, hardware and software people have enough in common that they can (usually, perhaps not always) tell when a term is being used in a technical way. And the same may be true in the humanities. A philosophy person and a sociologist, say, may have enough in common to be able to detect when the other is using a term technically, even if they don't know the exact definition. The problem comes when talking to laypeople, both for the humanities and the technical people. (And the technical people are laypeople to those in the humanities, and vice versa.)