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This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you i

• DubiousPusher 5y ago
  I am very troubled by this. Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Local history, news and art you won't find on the internet. You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. As we squeeze these people down we lose our own selves. We need a generous public commitment to these things because they will probably never pay for themselves.
  • mnouquet 5y ago
    > Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. > These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. These days, they are more the people re-writing history to fit a narrative, against any hard evidence.
    • AlexandrB 5y ago
      > Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you.
      • mnouquet 5y ago
        > I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you. Of course, that's why I'm constantly getting downvoted, and got disowned. I witnessed my shitfaced +$150,000 salary co-worker in Santa Monica "educates" a hobo (with certainly his own fair share of mental health & drug issues) about how he claimed he had been rude to another co-worker. The same way some of my world travelling c-level execs family members tried to "educate" my gf about her carbon emission daily 30 miles commute. ALL these pricks have never known hunger, not having a roof over their head or not knowing what tomorrow will be made of. I cherish what I have now, and they will only pry it from my cold dead hands... and I won't go without a fight. All my guns are locked and loaded.
        • dang 5y ago
          Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're looking for thoughtful, curious conversation here, not denunciatory rhetoric. I'm sure there are many interesting things you could share about your experiences. Please do that, rather than fulminating, when posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
          • mnouquet 5y ago
            Thanks to prove my point, literally.
    • DubiousPusher 5y ago
      Yeah, the lone lady that works at my local town's historical society: mapping death certificates to grave stones, reading old articles from our town paper and studying census records is a real revisionist. If anything, the kind of people I'm talking about are the least political information workers you'll find. And honestly, there's a chance that the decimation of paying positions in their fields is contributing to the problem of badly research clickbait books. When you have to making yourself into an internet phenomena to sell your self published book rather than take a salary job at a local institution, your incentives are all aligned to do something sensational. Edit: Just out of curiosity because I so often bump into complaints of this variety, what in your opinion is good history? Which historians or academic periods have produced "good history"? What techniques set those periods apart from today's historians?
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    No they aren't. They hold worthless knowledge that literally anybody capable of reading and writing can do. They aren't some sort of priestly class that are only allowed to read and edit Wikipedia pages. They just wasted time getting a degree in something that people only do for fun to satisfy they're curiosity. There is absolutely no skill in being able to read and write about something if everyone else is capable of reading and writing.
    • durge 5y ago
      It’s ‘their’, not ‘they’re’.
      • Der_Einzige 5y ago
        People who correct others grammar on the internet "found to be less agreeable" https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-people-who-point-out-grammar-mistakes-are-less-agreeable-study-says-20210410 https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-people-who-point-out-gram...
    • DubiousPusher 5y ago
      You should visit a local historical society or museum and have them walk you through how they do some of their work.
      • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
        Even in a pre internet era those people are few and far between compared to the general population. On top of that, societies still go on without them. We don't need "seers" anymore for society. This isn't a primitive form of society.
  • bloaf 5y ago
    You don't need a humanities degree to document your local coal mine's history or contribute to your local art culture. You do need a STEM degree if you are going to serve your local community as e.g. a doctor or an engineer. I'm not commenting on the relative value of the endeavors, just pointing out that there are opportunity costs associated with choosing a humanities degree over a STEM degree in our current environment.
    • catgary 5y ago
      > You don't need a humanities degree to document your local coal mine's history or contribute to your local art culture. Well you don’t need a CS degree to contribute to your town’s tech sector, but it sure helps.
    • DubiousPusher 5y ago
      I think you significantly underestimate the skills required when constructing history from primary sources. Unleashing someone on an archive without some library science education is very likely to result in a disorganized mess of documents. You need formal organization skills, some knowledge of document forensics and an understanding of standard document practices from the time you are studying. Also, in order to write clearly you need a lot of years reading and writing practice. You can get that on your own but a humanities degree is going to get most people there faster. Amateur historians are good to have around but you don't want to run the entire front line of primary source history gathering off them.
  • thethethethe 5y ago
    > You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. Why don't they put it on Wikipedia so us unwashed rubes can consume it? Seems like your local historian is slacking or...stuck in the past
    • DubiousPusher 5y ago
      I'm not sure if you know this but as vast as wikipedia is, its content probably accounts for far less than 1% of the historical content that is out there. A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources. In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff. As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource. My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information. Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.
• ghaff 5y ago
  I do have an engineering degree, have worked as an engineer, and am still in at least a quasi-technical role. I also only semi-joke that the time I spent on student newspapers and the like undergrad has probably been more useful to me than a lot of the engineering courses I took for much of my career.
  • MagnumOpus 5y ago
    So 4,500 hours of college spent on stem and 500 hour spent on humanities makes you more prepared for the world than a 5,000:0 ratio. That is plausible. But extrapolating that a 0:5,000 ratio of a humanities degree (or even 500:4,500) is equally helpful or even better is very problematic. (You do need writing skills to be a good engineer, but the "engineer" bit is hard to do without.)
• stale2002 5y ago
  People shouldn't be shamed for their choices, sure. But there is a real mismatch in college, in that what most people want is an education that helps them get a good job, but colleges are unfortunately not optimized for that. If there were another institution, that was as prestigious as college, but focused much more on providing students what they actually want (IE education for the purpose of getting a job), then I think that most people would choose that instead. Unfortunately, modern day attempts to focus on job train, such as bootcamps and trade schools, are generally less rigorous, even if they are focused more on providing students what they want.