[jmye]

Did I miss something in OP’s comment? It doesn’t read as if it’s about ethics, so much as qualitative decision making. It seems as though you’re responding to an argument that I don’t think was made.

I’m also unclear what tax money has to do with anything - why does the funding method matter, with regards to educating students? What, specifically, makes a physics major “better” or more worthy of your tax dollars, than an English major?

[robocat]

Fair call. I'm probably creating a strawman by deconstruction. I should have been more careful.

I do believe in the value of the academic humanities.

I'm not sure I agree that the linked article is well reasoned (although I have liked some of their other articles). It finishes:

  We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.
  We would do well to go back to the humanities.

That probably shows the bias I stereotypically see: only humanities gives us wisdom?

[stevenbedrick]

I think at this point in the discussion we are getting to a very interesting question: about the meaning of the word "wisdom". To my eye, Devereaux is using the word in a way that sounds a lot like how it is conceptualized in Ackoff's Data/Information/Knowledge/Insight/Wisdom model (sometimes instead of "insight" people use "understanding" as the penultimate level). Its Wikipedia page is a little bit rambling (which is actually quite fitting given how many different ways it's been formalized), but is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid

"Wisdom" is probably the hardest part of the framework to define clearly, but across formulations it's about being able to integrate different kinds of knowledge from difference sources, and then using that to be able to know when and why to take a certain action, or to know what the right thing to do might be. Obviously this is something that is frequently informed by knowledge derived from science and scientific reasoning, but usually also relies on some of the ways of thinking and understanding that the humanities can help provide. So that's how I'd understand what Devereaux was saying (allowing for some rhetorical flourish on his part)- it's a "both-and" kind of situation rather than an "either-or"; in other words, science and humanities on their own are both necessary and insufficient.

And of course for a humorous take on the matter, SMBC is always a reliable source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-10-18