[Frippy]

This article has some good points but is a bit meandering. The best point is right there at the beginning: the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying. This sort of begs the question, why is anything worth studying?

I think Francis Bacon made the best point about this: knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. With something like the material characteristics of a metal, we can use the rigor of experiment to figure out how to create metals with desired characteristics. We subject the metal to varying levels of heat, pressure, etc. and see what happens.

With governments this is basically impossible. You can't run controlled experiments against governments that are similar in all aspects but one. But it is still useful to study governments if we want to design good ones. You can make a good argument that much of America's success is the result of the Founding Fathers studying the many forms of government that preceded them.

I would argue all other humanities are essentially the same. Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives. English composition is about how humans can effectively communicate in that language. Etc, etc. Are the various stories, rules of thumb, and bits of wisdom in these disciplines scientifically rigorous? Of course not. They can't be. But they can still improve our odds of reproducing some desirable effect, and that makes them knowledge worth having.

[mc32]

>” the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying.”

An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields. It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies, but what you get is agenda driven decision making (on all sides, this isn’t the province of one ideology).

[Frippy]

Agreed, I think the points others have made about the humanities being used as political weapons are valid. As a rule of thumb, any time knowledge is being used in the drunk-with-a-lamppost fashion (for support rather than illumination), it should be subject to scrutiny. And because of the lack of rigor, the humanities are more open to abuse than some other fields. But we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend that scientific knowledge and mathematics aren't also weaponized to push agendas. That's a risk to a greater or lesser degree with any subject.

[noch]

> An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields.

Indeed, the mere proliferation of x-studies (where x is arbitrary) in universities is a ringing indictment. The classic/liberal humanities (e.g. history) should be taught but it shouldn't be the case that one must go to a university, and get into debt, to learn them, and within a university where they are taught, they shouldn't be degree courses unto themselves.

Music is taught excellently in conservatoires and art taught in ateliers imho produces better artists than are produced by universities. Both are often an order of magnitude cheaper than a 4-year university education and encourage/reward the repetition necessary to achieve excellence in those who aren't naturally gifted.

Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science.[0]

[0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel/

[maemre]

> Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science.

Although it's a bit of a side-track and you're quoting, what are your thoughts on applying this logic to "computer _science_" or "material science"?

I think it's more about the age of the field:

1. pretty old fields like physics (which just comes from the Greek word for nature), chemistry (comes from the art of making alloys) just have names describing what is studied without adding something that says "study of".

2. a lot of newer sciences (e.g. biology, geology, psychology, sociology) we use -logy as a suffix meaning "field of study", again from ancient Greek. Some of these are natural sciences, some others are social sciences.

3. in newer fields of study, rather than deriving new Latin/Greek names we just use "X science", which is not that different from what's being done in (2) A major exception to this is the medical fields (like oncology) where we still use -logy because Latin/Greek roots are still in common use in medicine.

[onecommentman]

Well, for computer science, it is straightforward. Computer science is the science that lies somewhere between science of astrology and the science of numerology, without the popularity of the former or the formality of the latter. (Not my line, sadly.)

[remexre]

RIP computer science, materials science

[mc32]

I think it’s more about subjects that yesteryear were “studies”. Social studies, etc.

[ianleeclark]

> An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions ... what you get is agenda driven decision making

What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda.

> It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies

Politicians already do this. Whenever there's a decision being made, it's being processed through a host of ideological positions.

[mc32]

I’m fine with these if they have some data that’s withstood scrutiny —but I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.

[ianleeclark]

I still would like to know what your conception of politics is.

> I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.

Do you have an example of this for a humanities specific field? I could see maybe philosophy, but I really don't think most humanities fields have the political power a lot of people attribute to them.

[unishark]

> What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda.

Agendas combined with half-truths which is where the bad faith and other problems come in.

[mcguire]

"What do you think politics is?"

How human beings make collective decisions. Why, what do you think it is?

[barry-cotter]

There’s no contradiction between politics being how people make collective decisions and people having an agenda. The differing agendas are part of what make coordination difficult and conflict likely.

Even when goals are the same you can have disagreement over how to achieve them. When goals and values are in conflict, i.e. people have different agendas, we need a mechanism for deciding how to end these conflicts. That mechanism is politics, expressed as some combination of persuasion and violence, how we form, sustain and define communities.

[kortilla]

Agendas are expected. Don’t use an economics paper to back a policy decision under the guise of data/science-driven policy making though.

[ianleeclark]

Economics is a social science, not under the umbrella of humanities. Maybe subfields within economics like economic history could be in the humanities, but most micro and macro would be outside of it.

There are a lot of overlapping fields between the two, but economics isn't in the humanities.

[kortilla]

Huge chunks of economics are just as much garbage as the the rest of humanities because of the lack of experimental capabilities. Any field that has conflicting “schools of thought” is not really founded in evidence and reproducible experiments.

MMT and inflation theories in general are constantly brought up by politicians and they are junk science.

Piketty’s work on inequality is a glorified regression built on an unfounded assumption about the return on capital always outpacing inflation. That work dominates politicians discussing the wealth gaps and is used as “evidence” to tax the wealthy.

Some economics is great (e.g. Nash equilibrium) and is consistently reproducible and observable. That’s not the kind dominating headlines though.

[aliante]

> humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor

That is putting it mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

[Frippy]

Yeah I agree, there are some particularly egregious examples. If you want a good laugh about this stuff, "Fashionable Nonsense" is a great book.

[unishark]

If you can't control the experiment and identify causation or limit the number of changed variables, you really shouldn't even use the word "experiment".

Sure there's an upside in letting smart people try to figure things out. But there's a downside in legitimizing the practice. Especially since academia isn't so just about intelligence but as much or more about self-agency. The people who push hardest for agendas get the funding, write the books, etc.

[Frippy]

I'm not sure what a better word would be. We use the same word informally to describe how babies learn—they poke and prod at their environment and see what happens. Just because they aren't rigorous doesn't mean the process doesn't give them some idea (with an implicit confidence level, of course) of how things work.

[jseliger]

One big issue is how the humanities are widely practiced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642

[Frippy]

Yep I agree, I had some horrible professors as a history postgrad that embodied this exact approach.

[pmoriarty]

"knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. ... Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives"

Completely and strongly disagree with both of these.

Even in the sciences, there are many who value gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, for the joy of discovery, and for a better understanding of the world -- quite apart from its utilitarian value in "reliably recreating some effects".

Now on to the humanities... just a couple of examples:

Do you feel that you know your children, your siblings, your lover, or your parents? Is the point of that knowledge to recreate some effect? Or is that not "real knowledge"?

Historians write about what happened, and would probably consider themselves to be imparting knowledge, but they are not necessarily after giving people the power to recreate some effect.

Now on to your claim that literature and philosophy are about how to live good lives. This sounds like a view influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is about a couple of thousand years out of date. Both literature and philosophy have grown in many different directions since then (though even then this was hardly the only aim of literature or philosophy), and plenty of people who work in both fields don't concern themselves with the aim of how to live a good life.

Plenty of literature in the last century, for instance, is about pointing out the futility of trying to live a good life, or the absurdity of life, about humans constantly and inevitably being frustrated in their striving to live any kind of life, about going mad, about going in circles, about failure. The Existentialists were some of the most well known of such authors, but there are thousands of others.

Representatives of analytic philosophy have often sneered at the aims of ancient philosophy, such as trying to find what it means to live a good life, and have (in an echo of scholastic philosophy) instead often focused on endless technical minutia such as analyzing sentence structure or logical forms of argument.

Some other forms of philosophy are more about pointing out underlying assumptions. Yet others point out problems with these assumptions, such as Hume's critique of causality. And others still, such as some phenomenologists or the cognitively-oriented analytics, are more interested in describing how perception works or what phenomena appear. Yet others are interested in what we can know, what reality is, or what science is, etc.

Sure, some philosophers are still interested in how to live a good life, or what makes for a good life.. but that is a rather specialized and narrow concern of a relatively small number of philosophers, and there's a lot more to philosophy in general than that.

Incidentally, Francis Bacon had a highly scientistic view, and believed that every field should be more like the hard sciences, and that science was the only legitimate or best way of understanding the world (a view you seem to be echoing). Many people in the humanities do not agree with this view.

[hunipol]

I think you took OP the wrong way. Bacon doesn't say knowledge has to have utilitarian value. He says that something only IS KNOWLEDGE if it can predict an effect. He was arguing against the many theories of people before him like Aristotle who said a bunch of things that sounded reasonable but were actually purely speculative nonsense, no matter how reasonable they sounded. In so doing, Bacon was establishing the foundations of induction and criticizing the long history of deductive reasoning.