[currymj]

apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well.

for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.

[papeda]

It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.

[currymj]

i don't know, I think the new criticism didn't deny that books were written by specific authors, the authors had intentions in their minds, wrote in a historical context, and so on -- they just felt it was not interesting or fruitful to consider those things when trying to make sense of how a text worked.

at the same time, it's not like they just thought you could make up whatever bizarre misreading you wanted about the text -- you had to present some kind of convincing internal evidence for your reading. even the standards of new criticism rule out a lot of interpretations.

as an outsider it seems like there's a lot of debates in humanities fields that are like that -- what perspective gives the best view of things? what is worth talking about? what kind of evidence and argument is acceptable and convincing?

but it's almost always the case that there are standards, even if people within disagree on them and even if there's no hope of getting to one objective truth.

(there's a lot of very dubious and poorly-done literary criticism, but the same is true of every STEM field.)

[haihaibye]

Historians wanted to push the narrative that primitive people were less violent, that seeing the pots dug up during different eras was due to cultural transmission not people being wiped out and replaced, "Pots, not people"

Genetics has revealed that no, it was people not pots:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6

You'd have had a more accurate picture of prehistory watching Conan the Barbarian than sitting in anthropology lectures.

[dragonwriter]

Your description of history and anthropology is about at the level of accuracy that one would expect of someone who conflates the two.

[haihaibye]

I point out that far from preventing it, academia has caused "bizarre, erroneous historical narratives ... gaining traction"

Then you point out that I'm conflating history and anthropology... how academic!

When looking at what happened to people in the past, does reality cleave neatly down history/anthropology lines? Or is that an artifact of bureaucracy?

[currymj]

thanks for posting the article, which is fascinating and presents a complex and interesting picture of how archaeologists and anthropologists are reacting to advances in genetics -- much more interesting than your summary suggests.