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I honestly believe these sorts of blindspots of morality and critical thinking are due to under-exposure to the humanities. A lot of guys in tech could do with

• exolymph 6y ago
  I don't think this would go quite how you expect. Consider that Peter Thiel is a popularizer of Rene Girard.
• kortilla 6y ago
  Humanities don’t teach critical thinking anymore than a standard engineering degree. Standard engineering degrees include courses on ethics, basic logic, etc. If you don’t pick up the ability to think critically from that, you’re certainly not going to get it researching humanities.
  • danielheath 6y ago
    Engineering degrees include one, perhaps two courses on those topics. You can scrape a bare pass on the second try without taking in the material and graduate in 3.5 years instead of 3. In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
    • Grimm1 6y ago
      I have a B.S. CS from NYU and I think I had 6 humanities, two specifically dealing with critically engaging with different and difficult ideas, 1 ethics, an additional writing course and two electives from what I recall. I imagine there are many more engineering degrees with requirements like mine. As an aside I also minored in philosophy and I know of multiple engineers who have done similar. I think painting with broad generalities does your point a disservice. I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      > able to critically engage with difficult ideas Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on. Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
      • gmadsen 6y ago
        I think you are making general assumptions that are not universally true. I know its the hot take to consider any humanities program to be brain washing kids into SJWs. Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
        • kortilla 6y ago
          > Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. And humanities students no longer do this. If they did, the notion of suppressing the communication of ideas rather than refuting them would be repugnant. However, this instead the first tool reached for by students who find something uncomfortable. Title 9 inquisitions, etc. It’s not necessarily brainwashing, but it’s awfully coincidental they have nearly uniform political opinions coming out of university and can’t defend them when critically challenged.
      • krageon 6y ago
        > teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society Having taken the time to pursue some amount of humanities education next to an engineering degree, this isn't even close to true. If anything, humanities education is a celebration of all the things that it can mean to be human. That certain ideas are currently broadly in vogue in society (in this case I guess for the vocal minority you could say it is "nice at all costs" and "being nice should be criminal" with very little in between) is immaterial to what's happening in such a classroom.
  • spoonjim 6y ago
    I mean you need to read Marcus Aurelius and Kierkegaard and stuff to learn from the best thinkers on developing a purpose in life. You can do that in a class labeled ENG or LIT or PHL, the designation is hardly relevant, but lots of engineering degrees simply don’t assign this kind of reading.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      Reading about the “best thinkers” developing “a purpose in life” is not critical thinking. It’s just reading. Reading about great thinkers makes you a great thinker in the same way that reading about astronauts makes you an astronaut.
      • gmadsen 6y ago
        It doesn't make you a great thinker, but it is certainly a requirement. it is necessary but not sufficient. Did Einstein make relativity or Nietzsche "Thus Spake Zarathustra " in a vacuum?
        • krageon 6y ago
          > it is certainly a requirement It can't be a requirement, because at some point there was a first great thinker. That one appeared in a nominal vacuum because otherwise they wouldn't be the first.
          • gmadsen 6y ago
            That is categorically untrue. Evolutionary, humans are a social species. My comment is it doesn't happen in a vacuum, which is obvious to the extent that it is impossible to live in a vacuum. A man that somehow survived being raised by wolves would be tremendously irrevocably mentally stunted. We have evolved to learn language from the people around us as children.
            • deleted 6y ago
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  • ecpottinger 6y ago
    I went to college for computer programming. Included was a course on business ethics. Later on a job near the end of the programming I saw a possible major problem that would put the company in a bad ethical position (possible legal proceeding to under payment, ANY UNDER payment). When I bought this up with the CEO of the company all he wanted to know was the costs of the extra programming and instead insisted they would manually avoid the problem despite the fact that legal costs would far out weight the programming costs if things went wrong. He refused the extra programming. Guess what? That company does not exist today.
    • KMag 6y ago
      Did the CEO have more ore fewer humanities courses than you in his undergraduate program?
    • imtringued 6y ago
      I feel like this is a case for a lawyer though. The problem is, how do you convince your boss to seek out a lawyer?
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• EVdotIO 6y ago
  If the biggest names in the game are ads and finance, you'll find a justification to climb your way into that job. What else are you supposed to do? A comfy middle class life is not a guarantee, and any ambiguous notions of moral duty are quickly discarded to secure some semblance of security.
  • taurath 6y ago
    So you take your money and then leave. But most don’t, they see the next income level coming up all the time. Are they at the “housing security in the Bay Area” leave or “retire at 40 or before/own a large boat/small plane”?
• cat199 6y ago
  Much of humanities these days is indoctrination into 'official' critical thinking blindspots, so I'm not sure if I'd agree.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Yeah, I really doubt that reading any given book has an impact morality other than inducing a sort of selection effect (i.e. people who are not interested in the environment won't read The Silent Spring unless compelled to do so in high school). I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    Any given book? The comment wasn't talking about particular books. Or even necessarily books at all.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      "reading" and "the humanities" basically implies books or plays. Sorry if you don't see it what way, but I do.
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        "anything that isn't 538 or a tech blog" implies more than that to me, but I'd rather you focus on the other part of what I said. They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
          My presumption is the notion is that if people would read the correct things, their minds would be expanded in the correct direction and suddenly they too would see that advertising is wrong (or any other preferred moral position). But let's say you're right and the person's idea was that if people would just read enough they'd come to the correct conclusion. Either way, it is not correct. That's now how reading works. You can find someone with any moral perspective who is widely read. Being widely read unlikely implies any moral perspective besides as a proxy for affluence and education.
• roca 6y ago
  The humanities aren't especially good at promoting critical thinking. A very large amount of (I do not use this term lightly) bullshit flourishes in the humanities. The Sokal hoax was 25 years ago and the conditions that provoked it have not improved.
  • jonahx 6y ago
    It was reproduced to even more dramatic effect just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
  • lasagnaphil 6y ago
    The Sokal hoax (and the sequel linked by the commenter below) exposes the negligence of mostly America-centric journals centered in sexuality/race/identity. But that really doesn’t represent the entirety of continental philosophy, and that shouldn’t be an excuse to ditch your education on humanities as a whole. There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
  • AlexCoventry 6y ago
    Not to mention the unbelievably exploitative humanities academia job market. Anyone doing a humanities PhD at this point needs either independent wealth or pathological ignorance of how callously the academy is treating the careers of new scholars. You'd think training in critical thinking would protect you against faith in a blatantly callous institution.
• fergie 6y ago
  Philosophy and Sociology undergrad here. Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
  • krageon 6y ago
    > morally dubious [...] ethically bankrupt People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
• cafard 6y ago
  A lot of people with a solid grounding in the humanities have done really nasty things.