[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.