Your objection to the humanities as it is taught today is that it has veered toward what is useful. That is true, but that is not what is shifting people from the humanities. What is useful to society is not necessarily useful to the individual, so people veer to engineering to get their paycheck. Sticking to what is beautiful without regard to any application to society would not have saved the humanities either.
> But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed.
This is actually pretty insightful for an NYT piece.
I'll withhold comment about the religious aspects, but I think I would like to see more academic interest in what it means to "live the good life" in a developing era of high technology, with an anxiety-inducing attention economy, lower-cost material needs but increasingly tempting highly marketed material wants and positional goods (an economy in the style of Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over"). Teach people enough to critically understand whether progress is a treadmill, and whether the treadmill is worth getting off.
There is evidence (higher suicide rates, and depression rates, although depression rates may be influenced by underlying trends in clinical technique) that all this progress doesn't make us any happier. Keeping up with the Joneses to compete for status results in a pretty shitty nash equilibrium when there are a billion people in the world.
It feels like any and all effort that the humanities put into making an actual impact on modern day life is just lashing out at power structures. This can help achieve equality in the long run, but for student's who are studying these topics, it does not provide anything actionable to their own lives. Academic Philosophy is applicable to a student's current and future life, but the way that it is studied only rarely provides a grounding foundation for a personal lifestyle philosophy.
"I think I would like to see more academic interest in what it means to "live the good life" in a developing era of high technology,"
That would be very good. I've seen more work on that topic here on HN, indeed, I've contributed more work on that topic here in HN than I personally have seen come out of academia. This is not a statement of pride in HN or myself, it is a condemnation of academia. I see a lot of judgmental discussions about whether things are good or bad or pathological or qualifying for DSM diagnoses, but very little on how to navigate the morass.
This used to be a core topic for philosophy; it's certainly a huge component of Stoicism, if not the main focus, for instance.
I will however give academia one bit of the benefit of the doubt, which is that it's been awfully hard to keep up lately. Writing about how to have the good life in 1990 would have only marginal utility in dealing with the civilizational neurotic hysteria that social media is creating, for instance.
But it would still be nice to see some more effort put in this direction. I can only imagine going to my advisor and telling them I want to focus on this. They may individually and intellectually support me, but the system will utterly reject it.
Douthat's probably the best opinion writer at the NYT. Although I disagree with him on many fronts, particularly religious ones, his writing is by far the most reasoned.
However I think this piece reflects a bit of ignorance with regards to the value one gains from a science degree versus a humanities degree. I'm speaking from the position of one who took a lot of English course work (particularly creative writing and critical theory) but dropped the second English major while keeping on with geology through a postdoc. I don't know how much this applies to an engineering degree as science shares more with the humanities than engineering does, and my experience with the engineering curriculum is limited to math/physics courses and having civil engineering students who took geology electives.
When learning a science, one generally learns about the history of the science and the process of societal knowledge-building through this lens. Though Douthat may decry a reduction of history to a 'litany of crimes and wrongthink', here we learn it as a kind of human Markov process with accumulating insight and wisdom, eureka moments and wrong turns, and how internal forces, hidden agendas and external shocks can promote and impede progress. The 'history and tradition' that Douthat feels are no longer valued in technocratic society is actually embodied in science's theory and practice--with the constraint that it is constantly tested, refined and improved (though not monotonically).
There is also a good amount of philosophy involved with working at the ragged edge of knowledge (though this may not really sink in until you get involved with research). It's tough to sift through and braid loose threads of truth, some of which may be based in logic and mathematics, observations, and insights from instrumentation and modeling that may be not yet be fully tested.
Additionally, there is a humility that accompanies the struggle to find knowledge and truth that may be unattainable, forever or at least in a lifetime. Anything that has happened on Earth over the past 4.6 billion years is within the purview of geology, but only events that have left a mark may be investigated. Given the finiteness of the Earth's surface and near surface, the vast majority of events have had all of their records erased and that bit of physical memory has been overwritten. Some questions are as unanswerable as the timeless questions of religion, though perhaps for different reasons. However it is probably less clear from the outset which scientific questions may be answered than which humanistic questions--as a practitioner you have to make the call whether to proceed and when to turn back (cue Kenny Rogers).
And furthermore, a lot of this occurs in an arena that has quite a bit less of the sort of moralistic/nationalistic/etc. status ranking that plagues the humanities currently. Jake Seliger is spot-on in his diagnosis of this in the humanities in the blog post he linked to in another thread. While there are certainly turf battles, issues with illogical attachments to discredited theories due to sunk costs and so forth, different theories of earthquake nucleation don't have the immediate implications for the status of different social groups (beyond researchers themselves) and it's not straightforward to moralize any of it. The different lenses that are applied to knowledge through different techniques (instrumentalists vs. theoreticians) are not so different than the different lenses of critical theory and modern identitarianism: What does this problem look like to a geophysicist who does seismic imaging, and what does it look like to a fault geologist, and what does it look like to a statistical seismologist? And while one group may have the upper hand in investigating a specific issue, almost everyone is working towards the same positive-sum goal (though the short-term scrabble for funding an influence is absolutely not positive-sum).
Where are your disagreements with him on religious grounds? The most productive period in the history of science was when it was mainly people trying to look for evidence to support the bible. You mention geology, and that entire field came from people looking for evidence of the great flood.
And a lot of the most interest research in the last ten years has come about as a result of people disregarding the stigma of looking into religious phenomena and going back to that model, e.g. the research into psychedelics and meditation.
I would have loved to major in a "humanist" major -- probably history or anthropology. Unfortunately education and living are expensive and life in an ivory tower doesn't pay.
While reading, I just kept thinking the old Clinton campaign quote “It’s the economy, stupid!”. In other words, we sold a generation on college being the way to middle class or better jobs, and there aren’t many middle class or better jobs that require humanities degrees. There are no apollonites leading the charge, it’s each person individually looking at what it will take to pay down their debt everyone told them to take on, and realizing poetry and French literature won’t help the majority of the time.
The post briefly adresses this but then goes off on how we need more inquiry into religious truths and less of the “Very Online”. Maybe I am possessed by Apollo and that has left me unable to understand how that would ever work. Any change that doesn’t directly adress the economic incentives will work only on those who have hereditary wealth and don’t need to care about those incentives at 18.
This really seems to be one of the important problems (not the only one and I certainly wouldn't want to write a thesis here)
Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places.
Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
It's really the result of a shift in mindset about education from primarily being about the benefit to society to one where the primary benefit is to the educated individual. I unfortunately can't find it anywhere, but I remember reading an interesting Rolling Stone article that traced the shift in thinking to Ronald Reagan, first during his governorship of California and eventually during his presidency. What happens when you start viewing education that way is that you start subjecting it to the laws of supply and demand. If you view an education as having hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for a graduate, you start to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of getting that education. When it was viewed primarily as a public service that people did to become better citizens, there was more emphasis on cost controls since the state was shouldering more of the burden cost.
Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.
The particular truths sought matter less for most jobs than the amount of research and critical thinking along the way.
Sadly, as has been pointed out, the humanities have become a monoculture of thought and encourage rote initiation into the groupthink, rather than independent research and analysis.
Of course, that won't get you most STEM jobs, but it would have a lot more practical application, and therefore economic value, for most other white collar jobs- at least compared to the current degrees.
Having approximately zero math skills is a huge detriment across a wide range of jobs. The specific STEM program may not be that useful after collage, but the overlap is going to help when crunching numbers in Excel.
By comparison while most jobs need basic proficiency reading and understanding a written language, that's also part of a STEM degree.
I've found that In my career as a software developer, I rarely have a need for any math beyond what I learned in high school (set theory being the one exception).
Well, T is Technology and E is engineering. I will leave it up to any person in either category to decide where they go. My rough estimate was Sysadmin, IT support, etc is T. Electrical, Mechanical and Civil engineering are E, but I'll let software squeak in too I suppose.
STEM is a categorization of academic disciplines in K-12 and university education. Sysadmin and IT support are not academic disciplines. If software doesn’t fall under the (T)echnogy category in STEM then I don’t know what does.
Aircraft mechanics go to technical school. If you're maintaining something it's technical. Developing something it's engineering even if it's the same basic highway bridge and their are 10,000 that look the same you need to figure out what works for this area.
Programming software is a pretty substantial difference from computer science, and (at least when I went to school) there was in fact very little in the way of courses that would prepare you for a job doing either web or mobile development.
Instead, you would learn all of the things that went into compilers, databases, and then optionally pick a specialized path such as AI, fluid dynamics modelling or what have you. The strongest direct use of maths was probably algebra until you focused on some of the more specialized fields.
This is among the reasons, I think, why such a huge percentage of software programmers I met didn't even have a 4 year degree; it simply wasn't a practical requirement for baseline skill like you would expect from other careers.
>By comparison while most jobs need basic proficiency reading and understanding a written language, that's also part of a STEM degree.
Only barely at some schools. I think I only had to take two writing and rhetoric classes in my EE program. My writing skills became worse than they were in highschool.
I haven't done a full survey, but my overwhelming impression is that most universities do require very substantial humanities coursework for all students, including STEM student. I went to UC San Diego - check out the requirements at Revelle college:
This isn't unusual, many state or private university systems require this - and the humanities requirements for an engineering major are considerably more substantial than the math and science requirements for a humanities major.
I like this emphasis on breadth, though I do think it may put graduates of US based programs at a disadvantage in PhD programs, as many of the international students focus more intensely on a specialty at the undergraduate level. Breadth is helpful, but it can put you at a disadvantage for the first couple of years of graduate coursework (in programs that have 33-50% attrition rates).
I agree with you completely about the economics, but I think this is part of the problem, that everyone thinks it's either/or, that we have to decide when we're 18 whether we're going to be "technologists" or "humanists".
There's a plausible world where everyone possessed enough "useful knowledge" to make a living and was also familiar enough with the humanities that people didn't feel the need to write articles lamenting the state of the humanities.
I agree that the author's solutions don't seem like they would fundamentally change the economics of the situation.
I think the biggest improvement could be had by convincing people that the humanities are important enough to spend time reading instead of watching TV all night every night.
Committing 4 years of your life to study various artistic works and social studies is a luxury, and it does have value. Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition.
I wonder how much better-informed current rising freshmen are about career prospects after seeing the fallout of the great recession. I wonder where they get their research for choosing their college majors.
> Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition
This is a relatively new situation. It wasn't long ago that having a degree humanities was sufficient to get an entry level position for a good middle-class job. Now college/university is seen as a necessity, that is no longer sufficient to stand-out career-wise.
A decline in students majoring in humanist subjects doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in humanism itself. The real issue is that if you're going to go into crazy debt for an education you better pick something that will get you out of debt. You can still study these things in an unofficial way.
Assimilating a meaningful part of the canon requires a considerable time investment. For many people, university is the only time in their lives they will have that time for reading. Sadly, you just cannot expect the average working person (especially after they become parents to child) to maintain time and motivation for such a program of study.
I was lucky enough to go an engineering school that required us to take a lot of humanities. In retrospect, I wish I had taken more than the minimum.
I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. I have plenty of friends in humanities who took the bare minimum which was only one class (physics for poets or something similar) and a lab (which could be psych or some other soft science).
Exactly. Both fields have so much they can learn from each other. I'm really glad that I ended up doing a STEM major with a humanities minor (almost double major, but class fell through final semester). It taught me a lot and I'd say I definitely learned more useful skills in my humanities courses, working as a teacher now (of a STEM subject). There's just so much STEM fields can't teach, like how to interact with and understand other people; it's just not something that can be boiled down to a science.
I think that a populace educated in the humanities is an immense societal good. Of course, this view is informed by my own personal interest in these subjects and has little to do with the economic incentives college students must consider. I was able to balance these interests by attending a school with a “liberal arts” slant and choosing to major in a science. I think I got some quality exposure to the humanities in my gen ed courses but was still able to obtain an (economically) valuable degree.
I completely agree. I'm a teacher in a STEM field who graduated with a STEM degree and a humanities minor. I've honestly found my humanities minor to be much more beneficial when dealing with students, and I wish we could convince them to interact with the humanities more in secondary school, as I think it would do them a load of good. Just like I think it would do everyone good.
Though, of course, that's not to say we can't incorporate STEM aspects into humanities courses as well. I'm certain there's new ways to analyze things that opens up with computers, and everyone should be scientifically literate (and mathematically literate, but that might be the math teacher coming out in me)
If the singularity comes to pass the humanities subjects and the very concept of the human condition will become as intelligible as the Voynich manuscript.
I really disagree with the thesis of this article, namely, that the decreasing number of humanities majors at elite schools is reflective of overall cultural decline.
It's not because of cultural decline, it's because there's been a leveling of the playing field wherein competition has gotten a lot fiercer on two fronts: it's generally harder to get into elite colleges, and top-tier employers look at a broader range of schools than they used to. Put another way, being born into a wealthy family, attending Suburb Country Day and then spending a few years at boarding school is less of a tailwind for getting into Harvard than it used to be; and also, going to Harvard is less of a tailwind for getting a top-tier job than it used to be. So, the applicant pool to Harvard is less wealthy and more scrappy and pragmatic; and also, students once at Harvard make more practical decisions with regard to what they choose to study.
To give an example of an industry I know firsthand, as a (relatively) recent Goldman IBD alum I can tell you that there's been a profound shift in analyst recruiting over the last couple decades. 20 years ago, NESCAC alumni with humanities degrees were like half the analyst class and state school grads (other than Wharton) were an endangered species. Today the senior partner in your group might have a history degree from Williams, but few if any of the analysts do.
This is reflective of increased competition, not disenlightenment. And it's a good thing. The state school finance majors are better investment bankers and deserve the opportunity more.
This is a really excellent point. My brother works at {JPM/MS/GS}. Whereas analyst classes in the whole days might have had a lot of Harvard humanities majors who did crew, recent classes are full of STEM majors. That, along with the changing demographics--there are a lot more asians and immigrants at HYPS today--are driving a shift away from the humanities. These trends are not bad things.
Your reply is symptomatic. In what forsaken world is a society's cultural vitality to be measured by the quality of its investment bankers? That is decadence itself.
Finance is one of the pillars of modern society. You need finance to bankroll everything from scientific research to wars to infrastructure development. The dominance of the British Empire, for example, was intertwined with that of its banks: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/can-place-built-on-gl.... The quality of a country's investment bankers is incredibly important, and America has benefited tremendously from having a very strong banking sector. (You should watch Hamilton.)
If you think that my point is that a society's cultural vitality can be measured by the quality of its investment bankers then I invite you to read the comment again. I'm not making the point you were hoping to rail against. To explicate it a bit more, I'm saying that college major decisions are mostly a result of market forces, and a higher degree of social mobility (ie, competition for who gets to be rich in the next generation) forces college students to make more pragmatic choices.
Fewer philosophy majors doesn't mean that people don't care about philosophy as much anymore, it means that it's no longer reasonable for 18-year-olds to expect that they can spend four years contemplating Kierkegaard and then have a skills-heavy job waiting for them once college is over (in which they'll be taught the necessary skills via OJT), so long as they start the process from a highly-enough-ranked school.
Unfortunately, modern American capitalism has stripped from 99% of college students the ability to worry about "society's cultural vitality". It's easy to talk a big game about the choices you make and 'a forsaken world', but when you're an 18 or 19 year old trying to pick a career path that won't leave in you in debt the rest of your life the considerations become a lot more immediate and pragmatic.
I worry less about the broad cultural implications and more about the narrowing of experiences for students. I doubt there's any way to convince people to choose majors that will leave them saddled with crushing debt and poor prospects, but it would be an improvement to loosen up requirements and electives to encourage more academic 'shopping around', if we don't want an army of clones.
Another point relevant here is that the technology division at GS is by many measures the best compensated. I believe IBD technically makes more, but tech gets all sorts of perks like casual every day and regular 40 hour work weeks.
This is a Ross Douthat piece; the man never met a concept he couldn't tie in to the supposed cultural decline of the West, however tenuously. I wish I had realized it was him before I read the article and saved myself a click.
If we don't "free market dogma" applying to college major decisions, then we've got to figure out how to make it so choosing humanities is not signing up for a near-lifetime of debt with no practical way of discharging it.
If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc.
Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc.
Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings?
Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy.
For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses.
Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.
That problem is fairly limited to one large chunk of one continent. Other countries have this figured out, there is no reason why working solutions could not be copied from elsewhere. NIH is a thing outside of IT.
Supply and demand analysis works on both free and non-free markets, and it works as an explanation for why humanities degrees are in decline.
"Free market dogma" is the religious claim that the point where the supply and demand curve meet is always better (in some typically convoluted ideological sense) when the market in question is unregulated. I don't see that claim in the GP post.
Makes sense- it used to be that college was a place where the ruling class sent their children to be educated in how to be gentlemen/managers. The humanities were considered what such a person needed to know; an understanding of people and society, but not specific work skills since it would be the underclass doing the work.
Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.
Maybe you're picturing "management" on the wrong level. Think "Limited Partners in VC firms", not CEOs. Being in management—even being a CEO!—is still a trade-skill (it is, in fact, the quintessential haute-bourgeoisie trade-skill) and not the sort of thing you'd historically learn in college. Most historical "captains of industry"—think e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller—never went to college.
College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.)
Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.
> Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.
Is there data showing that humanities degree-holders have lower career earnings (controlling for other factors, of course)? IIRC, engineers start faster, but generally hit a ceiling (on income and age) while humanities degree holders keep going.
Humanities deals with much more difficult and realistic problems than STEM - the problems that cannot be quantified and have no easy answers, which includes most of what we experience in reality and are the real challenges in life and in business. Algorithms are great, but most of life cannot be addressed that way. And to say only the 'ruling class' are worthy of learning such things is, I think, the true elitism.
Also, life is much more than career. We have to be family members, spouses, citizens, community members, individuals, etc. etc. STEM doesn't help much with those things.
The problems of Facebook aren't interface and back end, but what to write. The current problems of society (and Facebook) are not technical - we have wave after wave of technical innovation and look where we are - but political and social. We haven't come close to solving them all, but we've come a long way in the last few hundred years, and I hope we do more for the next generation than give them more algorithms.
The humanities (and liberal arts in general) are important for a functioning society because they endeavor to teach people what it means to be a person in a world full of people.
>Increasingly viewed as "useless" by politicians, humanities and arts programming is being replaced by technical training courses in sciences, engineering and technology in the name of economic gain. While technical skills are important for the future health of nations, Nussbaum said that they alone do not make for a fully educated student. Without people with a liberal arts background, she said, the world would be filled with "narrow, technically trained workers, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and authority, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements."
>These so-called soft-skills are essential for developing a "decent world culture" and maintaining healthy democracies, she said. Study of history and culture imparts the ability to approach global issues as a citizen of the world. Study of philosophy teaches the critical thinking skills that help us reason about our choices. Participation in the creative arts fosters an empathetic capacity and, Nussbaum said, "allows us to imagine the challenges facing someone unlike ourselves."
>In closing, Nussbaum reiterated that the arts and humanities not only "shape people who are able to see other human beings as full people with thoughts and feelings" but also build "nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and well-reasoned debate."
I keep on seeing this unsupported assertion everywhere when the humanities are called upon to justify themselves or feel envious - that humanities are the best for critical thinking.
Why does it mean that they can think for themselves when in many cases the humanities slavishly follow what came before even in face of evidence that says no it really doesn't work that way (people who look at Marx for economics for instance)? Why are social skills assumed to stem from them only? Why is the ability to divine objective truths about reality and literally prove something indisputably impossible or true not count as critical thinking? There is nothing more critical than seeing and stating "and yet it moves" despite what everybody thinks. The utility of humanities is done a great disservice by these arguments
The author's very thesis is incoherent- complaining both about death of tradition and people not thinking for themselves. Complaining about advertisers while praising soft skills is a similar contradiction.
Is it a little early to begin the lament when the average University requires 2 years of humanities before technical classes and not the other way round?
You don't need college to learn the humanities. A library is free and most schools post class curricula online.
I went to a very expensive private liberal arts school and they preached endlessly about the institution's power to create good citizens, engage in debate etc but to be honest the classes themselves were lackluster. It was the conversations after class on the lawn or over coffee or outside the library that really mattered and are the insights I remember after all these years.
I think many colleges like to attract a lot of international students these days (who are paying with hard cash). I doubt that many international students would ever go into humanities/social studies. Could that be a reason for relative shrinking of those majors? In general more hard statistics would be useful here.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadSTEM won out from sheer practicality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm surprised the reckoning has taken this long to arrive, or be noticed.
This is actually pretty insightful for an NYT piece.
I hadn't thought of it like that, but upon reading this, suddenly it seems so clearly true.
There is evidence (higher suicide rates, and depression rates, although depression rates may be influenced by underlying trends in clinical technique) that all this progress doesn't make us any happier. Keeping up with the Joneses to compete for status results in a pretty shitty nash equilibrium when there are a billion people in the world.
It feels like any and all effort that the humanities put into making an actual impact on modern day life is just lashing out at power structures. This can help achieve equality in the long run, but for student's who are studying these topics, it does not provide anything actionable to their own lives. Academic Philosophy is applicable to a student's current and future life, but the way that it is studied only rarely provides a grounding foundation for a personal lifestyle philosophy.
That would be very good. I've seen more work on that topic here on HN, indeed, I've contributed more work on that topic here in HN than I personally have seen come out of academia. This is not a statement of pride in HN or myself, it is a condemnation of academia. I see a lot of judgmental discussions about whether things are good or bad or pathological or qualifying for DSM diagnoses, but very little on how to navigate the morass.
This used to be a core topic for philosophy; it's certainly a huge component of Stoicism, if not the main focus, for instance.
I will however give academia one bit of the benefit of the doubt, which is that it's been awfully hard to keep up lately. Writing about how to have the good life in 1990 would have only marginal utility in dealing with the civilizational neurotic hysteria that social media is creating, for instance.
But it would still be nice to see some more effort put in this direction. I can only imagine going to my advisor and telling them I want to focus on this. They may individually and intellectually support me, but the system will utterly reject it.
However I think this piece reflects a bit of ignorance with regards to the value one gains from a science degree versus a humanities degree. I'm speaking from the position of one who took a lot of English course work (particularly creative writing and critical theory) but dropped the second English major while keeping on with geology through a postdoc. I don't know how much this applies to an engineering degree as science shares more with the humanities than engineering does, and my experience with the engineering curriculum is limited to math/physics courses and having civil engineering students who took geology electives.
When learning a science, one generally learns about the history of the science and the process of societal knowledge-building through this lens. Though Douthat may decry a reduction of history to a 'litany of crimes and wrongthink', here we learn it as a kind of human Markov process with accumulating insight and wisdom, eureka moments and wrong turns, and how internal forces, hidden agendas and external shocks can promote and impede progress. The 'history and tradition' that Douthat feels are no longer valued in technocratic society is actually embodied in science's theory and practice--with the constraint that it is constantly tested, refined and improved (though not monotonically).
There is also a good amount of philosophy involved with working at the ragged edge of knowledge (though this may not really sink in until you get involved with research). It's tough to sift through and braid loose threads of truth, some of which may be based in logic and mathematics, observations, and insights from instrumentation and modeling that may be not yet be fully tested.
Additionally, there is a humility that accompanies the struggle to find knowledge and truth that may be unattainable, forever or at least in a lifetime. Anything that has happened on Earth over the past 4.6 billion years is within the purview of geology, but only events that have left a mark may be investigated. Given the finiteness of the Earth's surface and near surface, the vast majority of events have had all of their records erased and that bit of physical memory has been overwritten. Some questions are as unanswerable as the timeless questions of religion, though perhaps for different reasons. However it is probably less clear from the outset which scientific questions may be answered than which humanistic questions--as a practitioner you have to make the call whether to proceed and when to turn back (cue Kenny Rogers).
And furthermore, a lot of this occurs in an arena that has quite a bit less of the sort of moralistic/nationalistic/etc. status ranking that plagues the humanities currently. Jake Seliger is spot-on in his diagnosis of this in the humanities in the blog post he linked to in another thread. While there are certainly turf battles, issues with illogical attachments to discredited theories due to sunk costs and so forth, different theories of earthquake nucleation don't have the immediate implications for the status of different social groups (beyond researchers themselves) and it's not straightforward to moralize any of it. The different lenses that are applied to knowledge through different techniques (instrumentalists vs. theoreticians) are not so different than the different lenses of critical theory and modern identitarianism: What does this problem look like to a geophysicist who does seismic imaging, and what does it look like to a fault geologist, and what does it look like to a statistical seismologist? And while one group may have the upper hand in investigating a specific issue, almost everyone is working towards the same positive-sum goal (though the short-term scrabble for funding an influence is absolutely not positive-sum).
I think the society that Douthat f...
And a lot of the most interest research in the last ten years has come about as a result of people disregarding the stigma of looking into religious phenomena and going back to that model, e.g. the research into psychedelics and meditation.
The post briefly adresses this but then goes off on how we need more inquiry into religious truths and less of the “Very Online”. Maybe I am possessed by Apollo and that has left me unable to understand how that would ever work. Any change that doesn’t directly adress the economic incentives will work only on those who have hereditary wealth and don’t need to care about those incentives at 18.
Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places.
Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.
Sadly, as has been pointed out, the humanities have become a monoculture of thought and encourage rote initiation into the groupthink, rather than independent research and analysis.
Of course, that won't get you most STEM jobs, but it would have a lot more practical application, and therefore economic value, for most other white collar jobs- at least compared to the current degrees.
By comparison while most jobs need basic proficiency reading and understanding a written language, that's also part of a STEM degree.
Instead, you would learn all of the things that went into compilers, databases, and then optionally pick a specialized path such as AI, fluid dynamics modelling or what have you. The strongest direct use of maths was probably algebra until you focused on some of the more specialized fields.
This is among the reasons, I think, why such a huge percentage of software programmers I met didn't even have a 4 year degree; it simply wasn't a practical requirement for baseline skill like you would expect from other careers.
Only barely at some schools. I think I only had to take two writing and rhetoric classes in my EE program. My writing skills became worse than they were in highschool.
https://revelle.ucsd.edu/academics/general-education/index.h...
This isn't unusual, many state or private university systems require this - and the humanities requirements for an engineering major are considerably more substantial than the math and science requirements for a humanities major.
I like this emphasis on breadth, though I do think it may put graduates of US based programs at a disadvantage in PhD programs, as many of the international students focus more intensely on a specialty at the undergraduate level. Breadth is helpful, but it can put you at a disadvantage for the first couple of years of graduate coursework (in programs that have 33-50% attrition rates).
There's a plausible world where everyone possessed enough "useful knowledge" to make a living and was also familiar enough with the humanities that people didn't feel the need to write articles lamenting the state of the humanities.
I agree that the author's solutions don't seem like they would fundamentally change the economics of the situation.
I think the biggest improvement could be had by convincing people that the humanities are important enough to spend time reading instead of watching TV all night every night.
I wonder how much better-informed current rising freshmen are about career prospects after seeing the fallout of the great recession. I wonder where they get their research for choosing their college majors.
This is a relatively new situation. It wasn't long ago that having a degree humanities was sufficient to get an entry level position for a good middle-class job. Now college/university is seen as a necessity, that is no longer sufficient to stand-out career-wise.
People want a roadmap to secure job. Or at least a secure field.
Without proper guidance on how to achieve this modest goal young adults lose valuable productive years of their life.
I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. I have plenty of friends in humanities who took the bare minimum which was only one class (physics for poets or something similar) and a lab (which could be psych or some other soft science).
This. And incorporating more technology/computing into the humanities themselves.
Though, of course, that's not to say we can't incorporate STEM aspects into humanities courses as well. I'm certain there's new ways to analyze things that opens up with computers, and everyone should be scientifically literate (and mathematically literate, but that might be the math teacher coming out in me)
It's not because of cultural decline, it's because there's been a leveling of the playing field wherein competition has gotten a lot fiercer on two fronts: it's generally harder to get into elite colleges, and top-tier employers look at a broader range of schools than they used to. Put another way, being born into a wealthy family, attending Suburb Country Day and then spending a few years at boarding school is less of a tailwind for getting into Harvard than it used to be; and also, going to Harvard is less of a tailwind for getting a top-tier job than it used to be. So, the applicant pool to Harvard is less wealthy and more scrappy and pragmatic; and also, students once at Harvard make more practical decisions with regard to what they choose to study.
To give an example of an industry I know firsthand, as a (relatively) recent Goldman IBD alum I can tell you that there's been a profound shift in analyst recruiting over the last couple decades. 20 years ago, NESCAC alumni with humanities degrees were like half the analyst class and state school grads (other than Wharton) were an endangered species. Today the senior partner in your group might have a history degree from Williams, but few if any of the analysts do.
This is reflective of increased competition, not disenlightenment. And it's a good thing. The state school finance majors are better investment bankers and deserve the opportunity more.
Can't tell if ignorance or top-tier trolling.
U Penn is private. Penn State is public.
Fewer philosophy majors doesn't mean that people don't care about philosophy as much anymore, it means that it's no longer reasonable for 18-year-olds to expect that they can spend four years contemplating Kierkegaard and then have a skills-heavy job waiting for them once college is over (in which they'll be taught the necessary skills via OJT), so long as they start the process from a highly-enough-ranked school.
If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc.
Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc.
Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings?
Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy.
For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses.
Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.
"Free market dogma" is the religious claim that the point where the supply and demand curve meet is always better (in some typically convoluted ideological sense) when the market in question is unregulated. I don't see that claim in the GP post.
Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.
College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.)
Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.
Is there data showing that humanities degree-holders have lower career earnings (controlling for other factors, of course)? IIRC, engineers start faster, but generally hit a ceiling (on income and age) while humanities degree holders keep going.
Humanities deals with much more difficult and realistic problems than STEM - the problems that cannot be quantified and have no easy answers, which includes most of what we experience in reality and are the real challenges in life and in business. Algorithms are great, but most of life cannot be addressed that way. And to say only the 'ruling class' are worthy of learning such things is, I think, the true elitism.
Also, life is much more than career. We have to be family members, spouses, citizens, community members, individuals, etc. etc. STEM doesn't help much with those things.
The problems of Facebook aren't interface and back end, but what to write. The current problems of society (and Facebook) are not technical - we have wave after wave of technical innovation and look where we are - but political and social. We haven't come close to solving them all, but we've come a long way in the last few hundred years, and I hope we do more for the next generation than give them more algorithms.
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democr...
>Increasingly viewed as "useless" by politicians, humanities and arts programming is being replaced by technical training courses in sciences, engineering and technology in the name of economic gain. While technical skills are important for the future health of nations, Nussbaum said that they alone do not make for a fully educated student. Without people with a liberal arts background, she said, the world would be filled with "narrow, technically trained workers, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and authority, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements."
>These so-called soft-skills are essential for developing a "decent world culture" and maintaining healthy democracies, she said. Study of history and culture imparts the ability to approach global issues as a citizen of the world. Study of philosophy teaches the critical thinking skills that help us reason about our choices. Participation in the creative arts fosters an empathetic capacity and, Nussbaum said, "allows us to imagine the challenges facing someone unlike ourselves."
>In closing, Nussbaum reiterated that the arts and humanities not only "shape people who are able to see other human beings as full people with thoughts and feelings" but also build "nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and well-reasoned debate."
Why does it mean that they can think for themselves when in many cases the humanities slavishly follow what came before even in face of evidence that says no it really doesn't work that way (people who look at Marx for economics for instance)? Why are social skills assumed to stem from them only? Why is the ability to divine objective truths about reality and literally prove something indisputably impossible or true not count as critical thinking? There is nothing more critical than seeing and stating "and yet it moves" despite what everybody thinks. The utility of humanities is done a great disservice by these arguments
The author's very thesis is incoherent- complaining both about death of tradition and people not thinking for themselves. Complaining about advertisers while praising soft skills is a similar contradiction.
I went to a very expensive private liberal arts school and they preached endlessly about the institution's power to create good citizens, engage in debate etc but to be honest the classes themselves were lackluster. It was the conversations after class on the lawn or over coffee or outside the library that really mattered and are the insights I remember after all these years.