7 ms·

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and lett

by gruseom 13y ago

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has lasting value and none of it touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they've also been becoming less valuable. They're not going to disappear, and maybe it's a good thing if they become de-institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it, though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to get what I would call a real education. Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.

abraininavat 13y ago
Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.
- newbie12 13y ago
  From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
- jmduke 13y ago
  If we define 'purely technical training' as that which eschews any education that doesn't specifically further one's career or technical abilities, I think an accusation of anti-intellectualism is apt. That being said, 'Philistine' is a pretty broad term that means like fifty different things, and its one of the words where saying it or writing it out loud always provokes the same response as pronouncing 'mature' with a hard t. (For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Does it mean fifty different things, though? I'd say its definition is pretty precise. I didn't realize that anyone still used the word, let alone that there was a category, "the kind of person who says 'philistine'". It reminds me of Louis CK's thing about people who say "People from Phoenix are called 'Phoenicians'". Not a category one would knowingly step into!
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      Such a category does indeed exist. It happens to intersect with the category of people who purposefully use words they think no one else uses.
      - gruseom 13y ago
        I do like old words, especially when they fit a particular concept in just the right way. But wow, your comments are really insinuating. "There's just something telling". "People who purposefully". "The lack of nuance in your understanding". I was interested in your point of view, but I'm finding this unpleasant and am going to stop now.
        abraininavat 13y ago
        You seem to have a thin skin. The only of those phrases which is "insinuating" anything is the first. You've mentioned something about personal insults but have failed to point one out. Unless you're suggesting I shouldn't point out that you don't fully understand the old word you're using? That's not an insult so shake it off and don't take it as one. You've got the term wrong. I agree that maybe we could have a great conversation about it, if only you'd address it instead of whining about the phrase "lack of nuance in your understanding." It's not exactly Don Rickles material.
- gruseom 13y ago
  There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines Others? I'm talking about an attitude. (I even checked http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine to make sure I had the word right.) If you don't think that attitude dominates our age, we must move in different circles. In the world I live in, "education" and "job training" are synonyms. It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. Oh dear. That's not good. Well, it's hard to see oneself accurately. I will say that my comment comes from long and hard experience ending in failure.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    The idea that people were more culturally aware, more intellectual, or less materialistic at any time in our past compared to now is naive. If you don't think there were economic or social/political ambitions in the hearts of the young, wealthy men reciting Homer at Oxford a few hundred years ago, or even in those of young, wealthy Athenian boys lucky enough to attend secondary school, then I think you've succumbed to the Golden Age Fallacy (not to imply any sort of deductive or formal fallacy). Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.
- sk5t 13y ago
  I'd say the parent comment is right on target, given the understanding that "Philistine" is not a synonym for "ignorant." There is no essential smugness in observing that students who know little philosophy, art, history, or discourse tend to consider them so much hogwash.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    A Philistine is an anti-intellectual or a non-intellectual -- a person with a materialistic frame of mind, lacking the education, intelligence, or will to focus on ideas rather than things. To suggest that a Philistine is a person who is ignorant strictly of "philosophy, art, history, or discourse" is to ignore that, when the term came about, those subjects were a huge part of every curriculum. We've moved on since then and have expanded and re-categorized our domains of knowledge. A technology-oriented education certainly doesn't imply any kind of Philistinism, despite the lack of nuance in your understanding of the term.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      No, it doesn't just mean anti-intellectual. It's specifically about culture, and has always included the inability to appreciate (or hostility toward) the values conveyed by art and literature. You don't get to change what words mean, and as someone who just accused me of unduly criticizing others, you might want to avoid personal insults for a spell.
      - abraininavat 13y ago
        And you don't get to close your eyes to the fact that things have changed. "Philistine" was synonymous with "ignorant of art and literature" only because every formal education was full or art and literature. Furthermore, much of what we today consider science was once a large part of the "art" of "philosophy". As I've said in another comment, you've completely blinded yourself to the spirit of the term and taken the most literal definition. If Computer Scientists existed in Jonathan Swift's day, he most certainly would not have lumped them in with the Philistines.
      - 13y ago
bane 13y ago
> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within This really resonated with me. I find the concept of a classical education immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and "round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc. I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus; sculpture and painting turned into talent and effort-free indecipherable and pointless enigmas that all talked about the same inconsequential nonsense; and architecture turned into collisional visages made of unlivable spaces and leaky roofs. There seems frighteningly little of import, things that have honestly progressed and lifted up the species, that has come out of the humanities in recent decades -- at least as compared to everything post-Renaissance till the Industrial Revolution. There's highlights of course, but oh so much garbage. It's no wonder the general population is more interested in Pop Music than in what should be the modern equivalent of Bach. There's an interesting experiment that's easy to conduct. Go to a classical art gallery and sit and watch the people, how they react to the art. Then do the same at a modern art gallery. I find that more people resonate and connect with work that's a millenia and a continent removed from them than they do with with the indecipherable "art" that was produced a month ago in the same city. I remember touring the Vatican museum, which is setup basically as a long and winding path through Western History. There are works there dating back thousands of years and into modernity, many are the finest examples of their type. Being the Vatican there is of course a tremendous amount of devotional art through the ages. If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders. Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all. Somehow high art lost its audience. I try and visit modern galleries, hoping that something will speak to me the way other classical fine art speaks to me. On occasion I find something interesting or witty, something I can appreciate. But most of the time I end up in very tired "special showings" of 2 steel plates welded together, or an exploration of albedo, black square on black #47 or some similar nonsense. I guess somebody gets this stuff, I don't, I find most of it vacuous and the work of borderline scam artists and flim-flam "artists". And I think most of the general public also feel that way. Sitting in a modern art installation and watching people as they view the work, there's an inevitable sadness. They've come to be enriched and to grow, to be moved and touched to the bottom of their soul, and instead they're met with the artistic equivalent of insults. I know that there's a number of historical reasons for this, largely a reaction to the World Wars and a desire to detach from the normal vernacular of power that often gave voice to art. And I'm starting to see some new art in the last decade or so that's really interesting. But I can't help but feel that the pendulum swung too far and too fast away from relevancy for too long and we've lost generations of would be art supporters. And it'll be generations before our civilization learns a new "language" of expression that can reflect and resonate with people's spirits and capture and enrapture people en masse again. I leave you with this: It's very hard to see something like this http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/068/cache/st-peters-basilica_6809_600x450.jpg http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0... (and it really looks like that in person) and then this http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChristScientist2.jpg http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChrist... and not feel like we've lost something in our art.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely. I'm gonna risk it and sound very smug here, but I hear this a lot from non-technical folks and I completely disagree. First of all, I'm yet to meet a STEM-educated person, who thinks that this "way is the only valuable way". Moreover, I'm convinced that this whole dichotomy is wrong. There are no different ways. It would be like saying that there is a way of writing on clay tablets using wooden picks vs. using paper and ballpen, and the paper-and-pen people are philistines. There's a reason we're doing the latter instead of the former - this is objectively better tech. Ditto for thinking. Maths is essentially distilled, formalized rational thinking. Sure art and literature are valuable, we can learn a lot from them about humanity and we can experience a great deal of emotion (which is an important part of our lives). But don't for a second think you can feel the matter into subjection or dream your way to the Moon. I know a few people who say things like "programmers think in binary code, and they fail because world is not black and white". But it is them who think black and white. The math you (are supposed to) learn on a technical training track actually gives you necessary framework to reason about uncertainty and fuzziness; I'd say programmers and engineers are better equipped to reason about the world correctly - because getting the right answers is the part of their training and jobs. The point is, technical training gives you (or is supposed to give) the precision of thinking, lack of which is - in my opinion - one of the reasons mainstream philosophy is so mostly useless pandering nowdays. One does not have to choose either-or between arts and sciences. Just don't pretend you can reason about the world correctly without the latter, because the sciences is what humanity created to understand the world.
BoredAstronaut 13y ago
I have a degree in English literature and criticism. I later followed it with a degree in applied computer science. I'm glad for both, and was disappointed in both, for multiple different reasons. I think I understand why you would accuse the humanities of being "rotten", but I'm not sure it captures my own experience of the malaise affecting college humanities departments (at least what I witnessed, with a somewhat jaundiced eye). I would say that the humanities is deeply conflicted about its purpose and relevance, and maybe even its approach and techniques. That there is little, if any, consensus on these questions. That there isn't even any agreement on whether consensus is desirable, even a surface consensus for the benefit of students. That cynicism, confusion, uncertainty and fear are rife and toxic in the minds of faculty and administration. That this is in many ways a reflection of the mind of society at large, especially our leadership, actual or effective. On the other hand, the purpose of technical training is less contentious, and it's focus is generally not challenged much. There are questions about technique and content, and there is wide variance in teaching talent, but overall, most scientific disciplines have done a good job of building a reasonable syllabus based on foundational theory and mixed practise. We can feel confident after taking a scientific that we have acquired some amount of true knowledge and useful understanding. But the exact opposite seems to be true of humanities, whether studied institutionally or privately. The same questions which have haunted us since the beginning of human history still haunt us today. These questions are all philosophical; the best, most honest answer to virtually all of them is, still, "We don't know." Throughout history, numerous people, including many undoubted geniuses, have suggested answers and made tremendous arguments. Today, many of those answers are still compelling, but, over time, their justifications have eroded under scrutiny. The more we look at human nature, and the more anecdotal evidence we collect, the more we fail to understand it. That is the nature of art and letters: it is a vast and ever-growing accumulation of mostly anecdotal evidence which intelligent, talented and persuasive people throughout history have tried to use to validate their own opinions of the nature of human nature, life and existence. And most of it, no matter how beautifully presented, is all so much empty rhetoric, and completely unproven. A programme in humanities, therefor, amounts to a lot of time and energy spent studying well-spoken (or otherwise well-illustrated), but failed attempts to provide insight into the core questions of philosophy. Many have embraced this uncertainty, but not answering a question is still a kind of answer. It never definitively proves that the question is invalid. And yet few seem willing to accept, and virtually none are satisfied with the truth: "We don't know." As a result, the programme has degenerated into a cacophony. And yet, for the purposes of administrative coherence and the need to fulfill some sort of comprehensible structure, in order to reliably function in a standardized institutional setting, we still offer "courses" with focused areas of subject, and degrees made of such courses. Faculty members must continue to publish papers and/or creative works of their own. In all ways, schools must continue to behave as though they had some kind of coherent sense of their purpose and significance, despite a complete lack of any such belief in anyone's mind. We continue to allow these so-called specialists to decide, on society's (or at least education's) behalf what it means to study, find value, and finally "understand" these questions, or at least the techniques of, and approaches to, attempting to answer them. So what we have is a sort of free-for-all disguised as a serious occupation, and a large body of highly paid specialists essentially run amok. No one knows what they are trying to accomplish, or what their level of success is or has been, so we just take them on their word that they are doing it, or that at least they are trying. With each passing year, the map of the territory continues to grow, but we are no better equipped to navigate through it. At least, it seems that the tools that educators and researchers might be using, from the social sciences, are not being used in ways which might help them, at least with any real scientific rigour. On the contrary, science continues to be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by humanities faculty, to the detriment of everyone (themselves, their students, and society and culture at large). One of the most important features of the scientific programme is that of prioritizing knowledge based on our confidence in its truth and reliability. While historians of science may continue to study the failed efforts and discredited theories of the past, we do not, as a rule, teach these to practising scientists and engineers. They represent curiosities, or negative lessons in how to study science. The humanities either cannot, or will not, follow suit. The most important fight in the history of humanities was that over the "canon", and it was a decisive loss for everyone. There is no accepted way to prioritize works. The yardstick of truth is not applicable. Beauty, subject matter, technique, form: all are matters of taste. And the simple and undeniable fact is that you cannot study taste. You can study matter and technique, and to some extent you can judge the difference between the attempt and the result, but even that has its detractors. When truth cannot be known, every opinion is valid, and no arguments are final. Attempting to endure this nightmare of existential uncertainty is attractive to very few people. For those who enjoy art, and would like to spend their days discussing it, and especially those who like having an audience for their own opinions, for which they have a rather high regard, academia is an attractive option. No one can prove you wrong, but popularity can prove your right, at least for a time. Interestingly, this isn't that different from software start-ups, which are, more and more, about popularity and fashion than they are about inventing new things and the transforming the world.

by gruseom 13y ago

abraininavat 13y ago

Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.

newbie12 13y ago
From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
jmduke 13y ago
If we define 'purely technical training' as that which eschews any education that doesn't specifically further one's career or technical abilities, I think an accusation of anti-intellectualism is apt. That being said, 'Philistine' is a pretty broad term that means like fifty different things, and its one of the words where saying it or writing it out loud always provokes the same response as pronouncing 'mature' with a hard t. (For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)
- gruseom 13y ago
  Does it mean fifty different things, though? I'd say its definition is pretty precise. I didn't realize that anyone still used the word, let alone that there was a category, "the kind of person who says 'philistine'". It reminds me of Louis CK's thing about people who say "People from Phoenix are called 'Phoenicians'". Not a category one would knowingly step into!
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    Such a category does indeed exist. It happens to intersect with the category of people who purposefully use words they think no one else uses.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      I do like old words, especially when they fit a particular concept in just the right way. But wow, your comments are really insinuating. "There's just something telling". "People who purposefully". "The lack of nuance in your understanding". I was interested in your point of view, but I'm finding this unpleasant and am going to stop now.
      - abraininavat 13y ago
        You seem to have a thin skin. The only of those phrases which is "insinuating" anything is the first. You've mentioned something about personal insults but have failed to point one out. Unless you're suggesting I shouldn't point out that you don't fully understand the old word you're using? That's not an insult so shake it off and don't take it as one. You've got the term wrong. I agree that maybe we could have a great conversation about it, if only you'd address it instead of whining about the phrase "lack of nuance in your understanding." It's not exactly Don Rickles material.
gruseom 13y ago
There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines Others? I'm talking about an attitude. (I even checked http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine to make sure I had the word right.) If you don't think that attitude dominates our age, we must move in different circles. In the world I live in, "education" and "job training" are synonyms. It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. Oh dear. That's not good. Well, it's hard to see oneself accurately. I will say that my comment comes from long and hard experience ending in failure.
- abraininavat 13y ago
  The idea that people were more culturally aware, more intellectual, or less materialistic at any time in our past compared to now is naive. If you don't think there were economic or social/political ambitions in the hearts of the young, wealthy men reciting Homer at Oxford a few hundred years ago, or even in those of young, wealthy Athenian boys lucky enough to attend secondary school, then I think you've succumbed to the Golden Age Fallacy (not to imply any sort of deductive or formal fallacy). Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.
sk5t 13y ago
I'd say the parent comment is right on target, given the understanding that "Philistine" is not a synonym for "ignorant." There is no essential smugness in observing that students who know little philosophy, art, history, or discourse tend to consider them so much hogwash.
- abraininavat 13y ago
  A Philistine is an anti-intellectual or a non-intellectual -- a person with a materialistic frame of mind, lacking the education, intelligence, or will to focus on ideas rather than things. To suggest that a Philistine is a person who is ignorant strictly of "philosophy, art, history, or discourse" is to ignore that, when the term came about, those subjects were a huge part of every curriculum. We've moved on since then and have expanded and re-categorized our domains of knowledge. A technology-oriented education certainly doesn't imply any kind of Philistinism, despite the lack of nuance in your understanding of the term.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    No, it doesn't just mean anti-intellectual. It's specifically about culture, and has always included the inability to appreciate (or hostility toward) the values conveyed by art and literature. You don't get to change what words mean, and as someone who just accused me of unduly criticizing others, you might want to avoid personal insults for a spell.
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      And you don't get to close your eyes to the fact that things have changed. "Philistine" was synonymous with "ignorant of art and literature" only because every formal education was full or art and literature. Furthermore, much of what we today consider science was once a large part of the "art" of "philosophy". As I've said in another comment, you've completely blinded yourself to the spirit of the term and taken the most literal definition. If Computer Scientists existed in Jonathan Swift's day, he most certainly would not have lumped them in with the Philistines.
    - 13y ago

bane 13y ago

> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within This really resonated with me. I find the concept of a classical education immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and "round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc. I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus; sculpture and painting turned into talent and effort-free indecipherable and pointless enigmas that all talked about the same inconsequential nonsense; and architecture turned into collisional visages made of unlivable spaces and leaky roofs. There seems frighteningly little of import, things that have honestly progressed and lifted up the species, that has come out of the humanities in recent decades -- at least as compared to everything post-Renaissance till the Industrial Revolution. There's highlights of course, but oh so much garbage. It's no wonder the general population is more interested in Pop Music than in what should be the modern equivalent of Bach. There's an interesting experiment that's easy to conduct. Go to a classical art gallery and sit and watch the people, how they react to the art. Then do the same at a modern art gallery. I find that more people resonate and connect with work that's a millenia and a continent removed from them than they do with with the indecipherable "art" that was produced a month ago in the same city. I remember touring the Vatican museum, which is setup basically as a long and winding path through Western History. There are works there dating back thousands of years and into modernity, many are the finest examples of their type. Being the Vatican there is of course a tremendous amount of devotional art through the ages. If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders. Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all. Somehow high art lost its audience. I try and visit modern galleries, hoping that something will speak to me the way other classical fine art speaks to me. On occasion I find something interesting or witty, something I can appreciate. But most of the time I end up in very tired "special showings" of 2 steel plates welded together, or an exploration of albedo, black square on black #47 or some similar nonsense. I guess somebody gets this stuff, I don't, I find most of it vacuous and the work of borderline scam artists and flim-flam "artists". And I think most of the general public also feel that way. Sitting in a modern art installation and watching people as they view the work, there's an inevitable sadness. They've come to be enriched and to grow, to be moved and touched to the bottom of their soul, and instead they're met with the artistic equivalent of insults. I know that there's a number of historical reasons for this, largely a reaction to the World Wars and a desire to detach from the normal vernacular of power that often gave voice to art. And I'm starting to see some new art in the last decade or so that's really interesting. But I can't help but feel that the pendulum swung too far and too fast away from relevancy for too long and we've lost generations of would be art supporters. And it'll be generations before our civilization learns a new "language" of expression that can reflect and resonate with people's spirits and capture and enrapture people en masse again. I leave you with this: It's very hard to see something like this http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/068/cache/st-peters-basilica_6809_600x450.jpg http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0... (and it really looks like that in person) and then this http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChristScientist2.jpg http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChrist... and not feel like we've lost something in our art.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely. I'm gonna risk it and sound very smug here, but I hear this a lot from non-technical folks and I completely disagree. First of all, I'm yet to meet a STEM-educated person, who thinks that this "way is the only valuable way". Moreover, I'm convinced that this whole dichotomy is wrong. There are no different ways. It would be like saying that there is a way of writing on clay tablets using wooden picks vs. using paper and ballpen, and the paper-and-pen people are philistines. There's a reason we're doing the latter instead of the former - this is objectively better tech. Ditto for thinking. Maths is essentially distilled, formalized rational thinking. Sure art and literature are valuable, we can learn a lot from them about humanity and we can experience a great deal of emotion (which is an important part of our lives). But don't for a second think you can feel the matter into subjection or dream your way to the Moon. I know a few people who say things like "programmers think in binary code, and they fail because world is not black and white". But it is them who think black and white. The math you (are supposed to) learn on a technical training track actually gives you necessary framework to reason about uncertainty and fuzziness; I'd say programmers and engineers are better equipped to reason about the world correctly - because getting the right answers is the part of their training and jobs. The point is, technical training gives you (or is supposed to give) the precision of thinking, lack of which is - in my opinion - one of the reasons mainstream philosophy is so mostly useless pandering nowdays. One does not have to choose either-or between arts and sciences. Just don't pretend you can reason about the world correctly without the latter, because the sciences is what humanity created to understand the world.

BoredAstronaut 13y ago

I have a degree in English literature and criticism. I later followed it with a degree in applied computer science. I'm glad for both, and was disappointed in both, for multiple different reasons. I think I understand why you would accuse the humanities of being "rotten", but I'm not sure it captures my own experience of the malaise affecting college humanities departments (at least what I witnessed, with a somewhat jaundiced eye). I would say that the humanities is deeply conflicted about its purpose and relevance, and maybe even its approach and techniques. That there is little, if any, consensus on these questions. That there isn't even any agreement on whether consensus is desirable, even a surface consensus for the benefit of students. That cynicism, confusion, uncertainty and fear are rife and toxic in the minds of faculty and administration. That this is in many ways a reflection of the mind of society at large, especially our leadership, actual or effective. On the other hand, the purpose of technical training is less contentious, and it's focus is generally not challenged much. There are questions about technique and content, and there is wide variance in teaching talent, but overall, most scientific disciplines have done a good job of building a reasonable syllabus based on foundational theory and mixed practise. We can feel confident after taking a scientific that we have acquired some amount of true knowledge and useful understanding. But the exact opposite seems to be true of humanities, whether studied institutionally or privately. The same questions which have haunted us since the beginning of human history still haunt us today. These questions are all philosophical; the best, most honest answer to virtually all of them is, still, "We don't know." Throughout history, numerous people, including many undoubted geniuses, have suggested answers and made tremendous arguments. Today, many of those answers are still compelling, but, over time, their justifications have eroded under scrutiny. The more we look at human nature, and the more anecdotal evidence we collect, the more we fail to understand it. That is the nature of art and letters: it is a vast and ever-growing accumulation of mostly anecdotal evidence which intelligent, talented and persuasive people throughout history have tried to use to validate their own opinions of the nature of human nature, life and existence. And most of it, no matter how beautifully presented, is all so much empty rhetoric, and completely unproven. A programme in humanities, therefor, amounts to a lot of time and energy spent studying well-spoken (or otherwise well-illustrated), but failed attempts to provide insight into the core questions of philosophy. Many have embraced this uncertainty, but not answering a question is still a kind of answer. It never definitively proves that the question is invalid. And yet few seem willing to accept, and virtually none are satisfied with the truth: "We don't know." As a result, the programme has degenerated into a cacophony. And yet, for the purposes of administrative coherence and the need to fulfill some sort of comprehensible structure, in order to reliably function in a standardized institutional setting, we still offer "courses" with focused areas of subject, and degrees made of such courses. Faculty members must continue to publish papers and/or creative works of their own. In all ways, schools must continue to behave as though they had some kind of coherent sense of their purpose and significance, despite a complete lack of any such belief in anyone's mind. We continue to allow these so-called specialists to decide, on society's (or at least education's) behalf what it means to study, find value, and finally "understand" these questions, or at least the techniques of, and approaches to, attempting to answer them. So what we have is a sort of free-for-all disguised as a serious occupation, and a large body of highly paid specialists essentially run amok. No one knows what they are trying to accomplish, or what their level of success is or has been, so we just take them on their word that they are doing it, or that at least they are trying. With each passing year, the map of the territory continues to grow, but we are no better equipped to navigate through it. At least, it seems that the tools that educators and researchers might be using, from the social sciences, are not being used in ways which might help them, at least with any real scientific rigour. On the contrary, science continues to be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by humanities faculty, to the detriment of everyone (themselves, their students, and society and culture at large). One of the most important features of the scientific programme is that of prioritizing knowledge based on our confidence in its truth and reliability. While historians of science may continue to study the failed efforts and discredited theories of the past, we do not, as a rule, teach these to practising scientists and engineers. They represent curiosities, or negative lessons in how to study science. The humanities either cannot, or will not, follow suit. The most important fight in the history of humanities was that over the "canon", and it was a decisive loss for everyone. There is no accepted way to prioritize works. The yardstick of truth is not applicable. Beauty, subject matter, technique, form: all are matters of taste. And the simple and undeniable fact is that you cannot study taste. You can study matter and technique, and to some extent you can judge the difference between the attempt and the result, but even that has its detractors. When truth cannot be known, every opinion is valid, and no arguments are final. Attempting to endure this nightmare of existential uncertainty is attractive to very few people. For those who enjoy art, and would like to spend their days discussing it, and especially those who like having an audience for their own opinions, for which they have a rather high regard, academia is an attractive option. No one can prove you wrong, but popularity can prove your right, at least for a time. Interestingly, this isn't that different from software start-ups, which are, more and more, about popularity and fashion than they are about inventing new things and the transforming the world.