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Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended
by Levitz 1y ago
Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.
- behringer 1y agoWouldn't there very definition of independant thought be understanding an idiology but not limiting yourself to it?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lapcat 1y agoIt's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks. The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
- ForHackernews 1y agoAnecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors. The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
- manco 1y agoHow much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-taught?
- pklausler 1y ago+1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly good at programming.
- terminalshort 1y agoThat just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact from my experience in school the humanities classes were much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.
- ForHackernews 1y agoThere's a correlation that smart people study things they find interesting. As soon as it became clear that computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of students taking doing CS majors who weren't really interested in anything except making money. Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.
- Jensson 1y agoBut that doesn't put any value on those degrees, just the smart people.
- abhiyerra 1y agoAs a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.