[throwawaysea]

The article suggests that many of the current fields of humanities are markers of wealth and status symbols, and that we need to move away from this. That may be true but a bigger problem to me is that the modern humanities have fragmented into many narrowly focused sub fields, which seem to be based on presuppositions about how the world works. These fields seem less like a legitimate area of study and more like pseudoscientific political tools, often working to legitimize perspectives that aren’t grounded in reality, and radicalizing students and our culture as a result. The grievance studies have drastically undermined the legitimacy of the humanities as a whole even though “core humanities” may not deserve the same critique. Unfortunately even though much has been written on this issue (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.

[sinker]

There appears to be little to no self-reflection. There are no objective markers of quality compared to science or engineering. I suppose that's a duh. But experience and strong intuition should guide you and one's own consciousness and rationality should hold you to a standard of intellectual honesty. That's a lot of "shoulds" though. In the end, intellectual honest is always going to require voluntary participation.

If you weave a sophisticated enough tale with enough novelty to draw attention, you can convince people of anything. If enough people buy into it, you can create a framework from it, no matter how far off course it is from basic intuition about human behavior.