[rayiner]

The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect.

Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows you to write accounts explaining and putting in context historical events in a way that is pursuasive to other people. But they are not falsifiable.

I agree with holding the former in higher esteem. Being able to communicate with people is important, but it’s an impoverished basis for an education. It’s terrifying that many students manage to graduate without much exposure to the world of objective reality and truth that exists around them (and which makes their lifestyles possible).

[mabub24]

I think you're mischaracterizing humanities as not falsifiable as if it should be like mathematics.

The content is not wrong in the same way a math question is, but many humanities classes are explicitly about taking arguments presented in essays, books, journals, by the government, by public interest groups, by private industry, and testing them against "objective reality and truth that exists around them." No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny.

At least from my takeaway, just saying someone or an argument is "wrong" is not really what the humanities are about anyway. The humanities focus on the reasons people have and give for their claims. Often reasons are complex and are tied into complex human contexts. Reasons are not just evidence, they are the entire baggage of argument, logic, context, culture, and history. The humanities focus on understanding those reasons. Whether deciding whether those reasons and claims are wrong is important, but not the entire purpose of the humanities, and never was.

To be sure, there are people who come out of humanities programs with distorted views of the world. I have met many, and it worries me in some ways what more and more do to the humanities.

But there are also those that come out of STEM fields with wildly distorted views of the world as well. And I think that is because they lack a solid humanities education.

[WalterBright]

> Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny.

The reason we have a "left" and "right" in politics is it is impossible to prove one true and the other false. No matter how intense the scrutiny or clever the arguments.

[jacalata]

No, it's because people have fundamentally different end goals.

[wallace_f]

>No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny

Here is Orwell on the matter:

>"When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all."[1]

Feynman:

>"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

People lived for a very long time without a proper appreciation of controlled, repeatable experiments, and progress was very slow.

1 - www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_saw

[oblio]

Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got.

Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

[jfoutz]

I have an unpopular view, that physics is probably the easiest science. Chemistry is harder, biology is even harder. Heading up the chain into social sciences is just unbelievably hard to get good answers.

With physics, you can build a machine an test to your hearts content to determine what the underlying rules are. That's real tough to do when you're studying, say, an economy.

So, i don't mean this as a slight to physicists. It would never occur to me to use oil drops to measure the mass of an electron. It was a brilliant insight. But, with modern tools, I kinda think i could replicate that experiment in my apartment. Evolution? I mean, golly, that's a really subtle insight. I might be able to do something with petri dishes and poisons, but that seems like a pretty tough thing to detect. I'd like to compare Darwin to Newton, but Darwin is probably closer to Aristotle. We haven't begun to get to the really good stuff yet.

I'm skeptical of phycology, there are issues with replication all the time. But clearly they're on to something. The whole advertising industry is built on psychological insights.

I've dealt with crazy race conditions that make me want to pull my hair out. They're not consistently reproducible. Eventually i work out the logic and things fall into place. But i have access to the source :) I can't imagine how hard it is to get anything out of random interactions of black boxes. Social sciences just aren't for me.

Anyway, yeah, i believe it's possible to model human interactions. We do it all the time. As with all things, some models are just more useful than others.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I think your unpopular view is very true. Worse, it's the key to finance and politics.

I used to know someone who had nothing but contempt for developers and the IT team, because while he was busy playing the corporate ambition game, they just wanted to do a good job.

As far as he was concerned, this made them easy prey.

Guess which kind of person runs the world?

Engineering and science won't teach you this. You can finish your PhD with a completely unrealistic view about how politics works, and how political outcomes are generated.

Neither science nor engineering are immune to this. Popular beliefs and high-status areas of research are decided politically, not dispassionately.

It's tempting to say that things would be better if we had dispassionate objective AIs deciding policy, instead of individual and tribal ambition - but of course one of the challenges of AI is that instead of simply automating math, AI has the potential to automate and amplify influence and persuasion.

When you don't really understand influence and persuasion - but others do, in practice if not in theory - that's not necessarily a good place to be.

[wallace_f]

Yea, and even if it were possible, it would still only be the realm of theory until it could be experimentally proven

[dredmorbius]

Look up Peter Turchin.

http://peterturchin.com

[watwut]

That is argument for experimentation against theorizing. Math people have awful habit of theorizing and even rejecting experiment that is right there in front of their eyes. They will argue for hours based on what systems/people/departments are assumed to do in simplistic model they did in their head, ignoring what is actually happening. They are also masters in cherry picking when it comes to history and it is especially bad when they talk about history.

They also have tendency to take conflict like the above, completely ignore politics and motivations that drives the arguments (meaning involved money), pretend it was all technical question people magically could not figure out until someone did something simple.

[musage]

How is that Orwell "on the matter" of humanities vs. hard science?

> People lived for a very long time without a proper appreciation of controlled, repeatable experiments, and progress was very slow.

And now that we strive to only see what we can count and repeat, and worship our own creations as objective reality, progress seems to shift into the pathological. Even just the concept of "progress" as some kind of thing you can get more and more of, rather than a journey on an tree with infinite branches every moment, is in lockstep with that and betrays an incredible impoverishment of thought. Every single great scientist who also loved wisdom seems to have pointed out something along those lines which mediocre scientists seem to ignore.

Hannah Arendt in Vita Activa has a bunch of relevant parts, here is one:

> The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.

> [The German physicist Werner Heisenberg has expressed this thought in a number of recent publications. For instance: "Wenn man versucht, von der Situation in der modernen Naturwissenschaft ausgehend, sich zu den in Bewegung geratenen Fundamenten vorzutasten, so hat man den Eindruck, ... dass zum erstenmal im Laufe der Geschichte der Mensch auf dieser Erde nur noch sich selbst gegenübersteht ... , daß wir gewissermassen immer nur uns selbst begegnen" (Das Naturbild der heutigen Pkysik [1955], pp. 17-18). Heisenberg's point is that the observed object has no existence independent of the observing subject: "Durch die Art der Beobachtung wird entschieden, welche Züge der Natur bestimmt werden und welche wir durch unsere Beobachtungen verwischen" (Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft [1949], p. 67).]

------------

My sloppy/literal translation of Heisenberg:

"When one attempts, beginning with the situation of modern science, to feel towards the fundaments that have been set in motion, one gets the impression [..] that for the first time in history man on this Earth is only facing himself [..] that we kind of only meet ourselves"

and

"the type of observation determines which traits of nature are defined and which traits we muddle with our observations"

[kingkawn]

This would be true if the only listeners you’d encounter were computers.

But we live in the world of people, and demonstrating proficiency in only one insistent cultural mode because it is the most dedicated to rationalism is an impoverished worldview.

[mnglkhn2]

And "the world of people" needs to be driven by a coherent set of principles. So far the western world subscribed to rational thought and the socratic method.

The question is, to what extent the current shape of humanities is aligned to those principles?!

[kingkawn]

I think one quick glance around yourself these days and you can see that these principles have failed completely to account for the society that they would produce. In fact the insistence on Correctness implying superiority and the Right to undermine all other approaches is itself the first best example of how bankrupt this approach has become in the face of the problem of unifying a society around common beliefs and goals.

[allenz]

To the extent that the humanities are not "rational", whatever that means, they are a valuable and useful complement, and the world need not be driven by rationalism alone.

The humanities teach how to look from multiple perspectives, our values, what we believe and why, our self and our relation to society. It teaches critical thinking and analysis of complex, nonquantifiable factors, such as: should we declare war on North Korea? What does it mean to be Chinese American? Should I trust this person, website, or TV station? The humanities are about life, and virtually all the themes are immediately applicable in daily life.

[benbreen]

As a history professor, it's good to see such a civil and thoughtful discussion of the value of the humanities on HN. Thanks :)

For what it's worth, I enjoyed Prof. Rota's piece and didn't particularly object to his "what"/"how" distinction. I agree with commenters above that it's a misrepresentation of historical research, which can be deeply empirical. Unfortunately a huge amount of history education, especially k-12, does boil down to a rote memorization of past events, so I can't really fault him for the generalization.

[mnglkhn2]

Postmodernism revealed what happens when you look (intently) at ALL possibilities before you properly define YOUR identity and set of values.

Surprisingly, even Macron articulated that maybe Western world needs "great story arcs", which is code word for SHARED IDEALS.

War is always an attribute of survival and the problem is that US population is pretty insulated from acute strife on the survival front. But the risks are there and can only be appreciated once you train in geopolitics.

[skybrian]

If you look at business, there is certainly winning and losing but not necessarily falsification. If one business fails, this doesn't prove that nobody else could succeed. Maybe things have changed?

Court cases are won or lost, but sometimes overturned on appeal. Even Supreme Court rulings can be overturned by later rulings.

Artists create art that can win or lose in the marketplace. Art can also gain or lose status based on how it appears to critics. Artists can be popular, notorious, or obscure.

Similarly for writers. Politicians win or lose elections. Nations win or lose wars.

Winning and losing in competitive situations seems more fundamental than falsification. (Take evolution for example.)

[SolaceQuantum]

Defining rational thought and Socratic principles is pretty much exclusively within the wheelhouse of the humanities, I would think. Philosophy is a humanities subject.

[rhizome]

Ironically, the very concept of "objective reality" is not falsifiable.

[internetman55]

Quite a few folks these days seem to make very non-trivial philosophical claims, then claim that philosophy is not worthy of attention in the same breath. It's very odd to see.

[_delirium]

> and which makes their lifestyles possible

Arguably computing as a discipline is an important part of what makes contemporary lifestyles possible, and most of it, especially the practical parts, resembles the liberal arts more than it resembles mathematics. Especially areas like programming languages overall operate more through argumentation and analogy than through proofs. Sure, there are subsidiary proofs involved that can tell you something useful about the building blocks, but the type-related theorems you find in appendices of POPL papers are just low-level machinery, not the real goal, which is a usable programming language that people can do real work with. That requires constructing an overall language and ecosystem through a pretty liberal-arts style methodology: looking at what worked previously, reasoning what went well and badly about that, critically considering illustrative examples (often carefully constructed examples designed to illustrate a point, similar to the thought experiments in philosophy), and attempting to improve things on the basis of all that. If you look at a Rich Hickey talk, for example, that's pretty much entirely how he proceeds. And even in POPL papers, that's what you find in the meat of most influential papers (as opposed to the appendices): the real result of an influential paper is typically a qualitative argument about programming constructs, where the argument is convincing and well supported by examples, by not "proven" in any mathematical sense.

[wallace_f]

>Especially areas like programming languages, in their applied parts, operate more through argumentation and analogy than through proofs.

I think the virtue is not in the value of the arguments, but whether the argumenrs are falsifiable.

Programming has the virtue that it has to work for it to have value. Social sciences and humanities have to convince someone that it would work.

[_delirium]

PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, difficult to falsify. There is a small area of empirical software engineering that does try to measure things like whether certain constructs can measurably reduce bugs in real-world usage, which would be a testable hypothesis. But they've been able to establish very, very few solid things about PLs, and the vast majority of PLs doesn't look at all like that. It's more design argumentation.

To pick a concrete example: Rich Hickey introduced transducers into Clojure a while ago, using an argument, illustrated by a number of examples, for why they're useful. Is this argument falsifiable? In principle some version of it might be, if you made "useful" more precise (useful to whom? in which contexts? how would you know?). But the kind of empirical work it would take to measure it in a non-toy setting is quite difficult, so afaik nobody's tested it, or even really formulated the question precisely enough to test it. In practice, you accept or reject the construct based on what you think of the argument, or you try to find a counterargument that makes them look like an inelegant/awkward construct, but in either case you probably aren't attempting to rigorously validate or falsify a scientific hypothesis relating to them. Basically all of PL design and evolution looks more like that than like Popperian science...

[wallace_f]

I basically agree with you, but we're arguing to different ends.

What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with these arguments or with using them usefully. What is wrong is when nothing is falsifible or able to proven, either. So in other words, arguments are useful, but it does matter if it has to agree with scientific experiment.

Programming does, at the end of the day, agree with fundmantal truths for it to work. Its foundations are on the metal, and everything is reducible experimentability.

Perhaps everything except the human element: most aspects of modern product development involve programming language improvements that have to do with improving human interaction with a computer. But even here, we have a sort of market for ideas in that developers who adopt better ideas will be more successful.

[skybrian]

It seems fundamental that you're building artifacts for users. In user interface design there's no hard science, no falsification. An application that wins now might lose later when things have changed, and this can be based on fashion.

Of course, it has to work. But a sculpture has to "work" too in the sense that it shouldn't collapse. Structural integrity is only part of the goal. Similarly for programs.

[chrisseaton]

> PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable

You mean PL design, don't you? Performance work is very empirical. If my new type of inline cache is better then I need to prove that and it's falsifiable (using benchmarks, which I admit aren't ideal).

[chrisseaton]

In fact! I can falsify your claim that PL research isn't falsifiable by using some PL research!

http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/producing-wrong-data.pdf

> Of the 133 papers published in the surveyed conference pro- ceedings, 88 had at least one section dedicated to experimental methodology and evaluation

[fjsolwmv]

That puts it on par with psychology or sociology which has a poor reputation in the falsifiability department

[fjsolwmv]

Still, the benchmarks are usually toys and it's pretty easy to find contradictory benchmarking reports. Very few projects do online benchmarking comparisons of different design choices on real workloads

[falcolas]

> But they are not falsifiable.

I disagree. Historians are constantly making predictions of events happening today, based on their knowledge of history. Some are accurate, some are not. They can then take this output, and use it to refine the views of history.

This doesn't even cover how history is written by very unreliable narrators, and historians have to do more than learn the "what" to uncover the "how".

Your argument is also somewhat limited to History, when Philosophy, Psycology, and other liberal arts degrees do not have the same limitations.

[rayiner]

“Falsifiability” is a word with meaning. If you identify a single counter example to a mathematical conjecture, the conjecture is wrong. That is not true for history, philosophy, psychology, or the other liberal arts.

[frankling_]

Your statement is obviously false (counter example: analytic philosophy produces conjectures that are black-or-white-falsifiable on the exact same basis as mathematical conjectures). Since you are engaging in epistemology, you may appreciate that the above is also an example of what falsification looks like when it is not formal. I'd suggest reading some Popper.

[brownbat]

Seconded. I'd add Wittgenstein and Quine to the list.

Two Dogmas would be a good place to end up.

[foldr]

You can certainly counterexemplify philosophical arguments.

It's also weird to suggest that no historical claims are falsifiable. That seems to put real history on a par with nutty conspiracy theories.

[wolfgke]

> It's also weird to suggest that no historical claims are falsifiable. That seems to put real history on a par with nutty conspiracy theories.

In my humble opinion the scarceness of falsifiability in history is the reason why it is so easy to create nutty conspiracy theories about history vs, say, mathematics or physics.

[mcguire]

There are plenty of nutty mathematical or physics theories around.

History is roughly as falsifiable as astronomy or biology.

[wolfgke]

> There are plenty of nutty mathematical or physics theories around.

At least for mathematics I have hardly seen any "nutty mathematical theories" (I am a PhD student in mathematics, but not a physicist, so I cannot say anything about physics here). The reason that I see is that for a math text to be considered as solid, it has to contain good, understandable proofs - which are hard to write by "crackpots". To be more precise: On sceptic's blogs I have of course seen links to papers containing "mathematical crackpottery", but I have hardly ever seen those "in the open countryside".

[foldr]

But then why do you judge the conspiracy theories to be nutty, if they are on just as firm an epistemological footing as actual history?

[wolfgke]

First: I used your "nutty conspiracy theories" wording.

> But then why do you judge the conspiracy theories to be nutty, if they are on just as firm an epistemological footing as actual history?

But to elaborate on your argument: Because of the dubious epistemological footing indeed "actual history" has not the highest reputation to me. The reason I disregard lots of "nutty conspiracy theories" rather lies in the fact that many "conspiracists" have a tendency to find conspiracies in other topics, too, where falsification is much better possible. Thus I tend to judge by looking at the track record of the respective person.

[fjsolwmv]

That is not true for psychology, biology, chemistry ,or physics either. They all choose some p-value as a boundary for deciding what is real.

Falsifiable means subject to test. It doesn't mean provabe on the sense of math. Only math is provable like math.

[azangru]

> Historians are constantly making predictions of events happening today, based on their knowledge of history

Could you provide some examples?

[andrepd]

But it is falsifiable. A new document or artifact may contradict an account and thus falsify it.

[throw2016]

People are exposed to objective reality in their everyday life. You can't just get into humanities. There is a whole education before that.

How does this perspective that people are stupid gain ground? It seems to be a self serving, self important and extremely judgemental perspective held by some insular techies.

The world is as much about politics, people and culture as it is about science. A failure to understand how the world works not just scientifically but politically, culturally and economically, the history of societies and accompanying philosophies gives individuals no context or understanding of their world. A one dimensional perspective both ways impoverishes rather than enlightens.

[wsy]

Your argument would be more convincing if brought as falsifiable science-style theory.

In its current humanities-style argumentative form, you somewhat contradict yourself: either your argument holds power, then why do you dismiss this family of arguments as inferior? Or your argument doesn't hold power, then why would you expect us (or even yourself) to be convinced?

[yeukhon]

From time to time “history” has shown us history in textbook can be deliberatly false because the regime/authors/publishers do not approve the “accurate” version.

In the end, I think education is also the veichel and a platform for students to have the intellect to question and to challenge established facts.

[ThomPete]

But falsifiability is not the purpose of liberal arts creation is. This is one of the reasons I don't believe that it belongs in an academic discipline were critical thinking seems to be of higher value than constructive thinking.

[rhizome]

Funnily enough, critical theory is a liberal arts discipline!

[ThomPete]

I know thats the irony.

[mcguire]

Keep in mind that mathematics is only falsifiable in that sense because it is built entirely on assumptions.

Mathematics isn't really a science.

[rhizome]

I think you've taken Gödel too far.

[mcguire]

Point me to an experiment that could falsify a mathematical theory. :-)

[escherplex]

Exactly. Next thing you know people will be claiming that it's possible to generate ambiguities in any formal system.