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STEM thinking is the only kind of thinking that works at all, for anything, on anything, at all. Humanities thinking is just combining words together in compli

STEM thinking is the only kind of thinking that works at all, for anything, on anything, at all. Humanities thinking is just combining words together in complicated and memetically convincing ways and declaring victory without even having a way to check if anything works. The humanities is and always will be isomorphic to the Catholic Church in 1250, just dressed up in today's clothes. Hayek wasn't advocating some way of thinking that is better than scientific quantification or another kind of Positivist analysis involving mathematics and some form of the scientific method, he was saying that the complexity made such a quantification hopeless. He wasn't saying the English Department could centrally plan an economy, he was saying nobody could do it!

dgb23 5y ago
It’s baffling that this response is unchallenged. Maybe because it is self-defeating, since it is in of itself a philosophical assertion?
- ltbarcly3 5y ago
  It's not a philosophical assertion, it is very much a falsifiable claim. We can find problems where there was a scientific solution and a non science based solution and see which was more effective. The problem is, without statistics most solutions cannot even be evaluated in anything but the most ludicrous, angels dancing on pins ways.
- jccalhoun 5y ago
  agreed. It is a strawman argument.
HPsquared 5y ago
It depends on what you mean by "works". Humanities thinking is very effective at convincing other people of some claim, or otherwise exercising power and influence. If that's the goal, it works well.
- dooglius 5y ago
  Is it actually more effective at that? Are people who employ humanities thinking any better at say social engineering than are people with equivalent verbal skills who don't employ humanities thinking?
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Psychology and politics (which is just mass psychology) are more art than science. STEM on the other hand is built on repeatable experiments, controlled conditions and reliable rules. These foundations are much less reliable in the world of politics, philosophy and economics.
henpecker5000 5y ago
I don't agree. For one thing, a lot of "humanities" thinking preceded the Catholic church by centuries. More importantly, though, the humanities try to work on a particular class of problems for which I believe scientific thinking is not (totally) useful. In my mind the important characteristics are: 1. Analyzing one-time events of extreme complexity occurring on a human scale. Science isn't really useful for examining the Punic Wars or the American Civil War or World War 2. We could throw our hands up and say that it's impossible to have knowledge about these things, that whatever we say about them is just memetically compelling drivel, but I don't think that's true. 2. Questions involving human values. Hume summarized this nicely in his analysis of the "is-ought" problem. Science is unmatched on the "is" side of the equation, but for the "ought" side it's pretty useless. Of course psychology and neurobiology can examine human motivations, but I think there is something more subtle and complex about the human notion of "value" that doesn't get addressed there and is probably not reducible below the level of human consciousness and experience. Even if you accept the idea that "human beings are just biological machines compelled by their neurochemistry which drives them to behaviors x y and z," you still have to decide what to do with that information, so it becomes a circular problem and you cannot reduce your own experience below the level of a consciously deciding being. 3. Examinations of the human experience. This is where literature really thrives, in my opinion. Sure, I could try to reduce "Anna Karenina" to a set of scientific explanations, but I think AK is actually a much more semantically compact structure for explaining the experience of human families and marriage than a "more precise" scientific explanation would be. All of these have the common property that the experience of being human cannot be extracted from the knowledge equation. That of course makes their statements less likely to be capital-T "True" and more prone to imprecision, because human life occurs on a big complex messy scale that is extraordinarily hard to analyze and that may vary across groups and individuals. But when I read a great novel or work of history, I don't agree that I'm just falling into some memetic trap. Oftentimes I think the author has pinned down some aspect of reality that would be impossible to capture in any other way. EDIT: I think it's worth pointing out as a bit of evidence for my worldview here the Francis Bacon's "Novum Organum," which could be said to be the foundation of scientific thinking, is itself a work of philosophy.

dgb23 5y ago

It’s baffling that this response is unchallenged. Maybe because it is self-defeating, since it is in of itself a philosophical assertion?

ltbarcly3 5y ago
It's not a philosophical assertion, it is very much a falsifiable claim. We can find problems where there was a scientific solution and a non science based solution and see which was more effective. The problem is, without statistics most solutions cannot even be evaluated in anything but the most ludicrous, angels dancing on pins ways.
jccalhoun 5y ago
agreed. It is a strawman argument.

HPsquared 5y ago

It depends on what you mean by "works". Humanities thinking is very effective at convincing other people of some claim, or otherwise exercising power and influence. If that's the goal, it works well.

dooglius 5y ago
Is it actually more effective at that? Are people who employ humanities thinking any better at say social engineering than are people with equivalent verbal skills who don't employ humanities thinking?
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Psychology and politics (which is just mass psychology) are more art than science. STEM on the other hand is built on repeatable experiments, controlled conditions and reliable rules. These foundations are much less reliable in the world of politics, philosophy and economics.

henpecker5000 5y ago

I don't agree. For one thing, a lot of "humanities" thinking preceded the Catholic church by centuries. More importantly, though, the humanities try to work on a particular class of problems for which I believe scientific thinking is not (totally) useful. In my mind the important characteristics are: 1. Analyzing one-time events of extreme complexity occurring on a human scale. Science isn't really useful for examining the Punic Wars or the American Civil War or World War 2. We could throw our hands up and say that it's impossible to have knowledge about these things, that whatever we say about them is just memetically compelling drivel, but I don't think that's true. 2. Questions involving human values. Hume summarized this nicely in his analysis of the "is-ought" problem. Science is unmatched on the "is" side of the equation, but for the "ought" side it's pretty useless. Of course psychology and neurobiology can examine human motivations, but I think there is something more subtle and complex about the human notion of "value" that doesn't get addressed there and is probably not reducible below the level of human consciousness and experience. Even if you accept the idea that "human beings are just biological machines compelled by their neurochemistry which drives them to behaviors x y and z," you still have to decide what to do with that information, so it becomes a circular problem and you cannot reduce your own experience below the level of a consciously deciding being. 3. Examinations of the human experience. This is where literature really thrives, in my opinion. Sure, I could try to reduce "Anna Karenina" to a set of scientific explanations, but I think AK is actually a much more semantically compact structure for explaining the experience of human families and marriage than a "more precise" scientific explanation would be. All of these have the common property that the experience of being human cannot be extracted from the knowledge equation. That of course makes their statements less likely to be capital-T "True" and more prone to imprecision, because human life occurs on a big complex messy scale that is extraordinarily hard to analyze and that may vary across groups and individuals. But when I read a great novel or work of history, I don't agree that I'm just falling into some memetic trap. Oftentimes I think the author has pinned down some aspect of reality that would be impossible to capture in any other way. EDIT: I think it's worth pointing out as a bit of evidence for my worldview here the Francis Bacon's "Novum Organum," which could be said to be the foundation of scientific thinking, is itself a work of philosophy.