[carbonguy]

For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities, consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical; there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! - ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're there to be understood all the same.

If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.

[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

[terminalshort]

What is the relation of this to studying humanities? It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.

[carbonguy]

> What is the relation of this to studying humanities?

A fair question! Put briefly, I would say that studying the humanities would make one more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations (which is... most of them), with the example I gave being one situation that I figured would be more familiar to the crowd here at Hackernews.

> It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.

It seems like that because it is like that :) In other words, I DO consider it good to have a broader view of situations that otherwise might be considered narrowly "technical" because I believe that understanding the human element as part of the situation helps me understand the situation (whatever it may be) way better. I relate it to "the humanities" because it IS related to the humanities.

[terminalshort]

This argument, which I find very typical of arguments in favor of humanities education, kind of drives me nuts. It's very nebulous in terms of how these benefits are actually related to humanities classes. I place very little value on degrees in general, but at least I can sometimes see very clearly how other engineers I work with sometimes know useful things that I don't know from CS classes because they are directly related to the subject matter at hand. But nothing you are mentioning here is at all like that.

Yes, of course it is beneficial to be "more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations," but there isn't a class on that and I see no relation between social skills and education (at any level or field of study). I would take a HS dropout sales guy over a phd in humanities any day in terms of this particular skill.

[api]

I place some blame on the humanities themselves.

Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.

A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it.

P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.

[UncleMeat]

> Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.

A real question for you. How have you attempted to interact with modern humanities research? I'm married to a historian. A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership. Presses ask "how will this be of interest to the general public" when engaging with scholars to decide what books to publish.

I have a CS PhD. In comparison to my experience doing CS research, history research is vastly more likely to consider a non-expert audience. I cannot speak to other fields within the humanities, but this data point makes me rather skeptical of your claim.

[mschuster91]

> A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership.

There's a ton of interest in history. Always has been in pop culture (with WW2 producing a looooooot of material based off of it, ranging from truly authentic such as Schindler's List to loosely affiliated such as the MCU), to be honest. And it's not just pop culture. No matter what, history tends to be a staple subject in schools, every town worth its name has some sort of local museum telling the story of said town. It's a self-reinforcing loop.

In contrast, there isn't much money to be made discussing gender identities so no one cares about it outside of the humanities and non-cisgender people, so where's the incentive for researchers to write "in layman's terms"?

[Cornelius267]

I do not understand what you would expect from research work. Do you expect that research work in mathematics be written in such a way that any lay person could understand it? Or computer science? Physics? Biology? I would assume that the answer is no. Why then do you place this expectation on research in the humanities?

I am now going to speculate, though if this isn't your reason, I apologize. Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?

You also say: "It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public." Is any research? In any field? Looking at the remaining unsolved Millennium Problems in mathematics, do you think that the general public has any interest in the "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture?" Whatever that is? I don't. I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's quite interesting if you do.

I do not believe that your point is correct.

[Paracompact]

> Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?

I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer), but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.

It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because, if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions, statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.

I could compare this to my average experience attempting to approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's concept of différance. Here I find myself reading explanations that seem to recursively invoke other neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.

[bonoboTP]

> but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard.

Yes, I think humanities people are having STEM-envy and it's bad. They should not frame it in terms of rigor and complexity. The humanities are much closer to art, and that's fine. We need art and culture. As commonly said, politics is downstream of culture. Storytelling and myths and fables and parables form a bedrock and a platform for living together. In its ideal form it is more like holistic wisdom, not a narrow rigorous specialization like designing more efficient internal combustion engines or something.

And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it.

Also, essentially fake fields exist in abundance. A lot of business management stuff is like that. Basically someone makes up cute acronyms and bullet lists (what are the 5 characteristics of XY, what are the 7 criteria for Z), and definitions and the actual content behind it is super thin. I had classes like that in college and all STEM students learned the whole thing on the day before the exam. Also, the more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.

There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces. I like them, if they are written well. But it's not rigor.

It would be great to hear the opinion on this from someone who thinks the humanities research (eg. literary criticism journals) are rigorous AND have also passed a college-level serious STEM course like Electromagnetic Fields or Graph Theory or Linear Algebra with a good grade. I think most humanities people just don't really understand what rigor actually means. It's not just about using words that have special definitions for more efficient communication or something.

-----

> If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.

Yes, it's on purpose. It's the statement itself. The content of the message is reflected in the form it is presented. It's in the same lineage as Dadaism, or the empty-canvas-as-painting etc. His philosophy is literally called "deconstruction". And if you ask "but what is the result?", well it's the influence on other academics and thinkers. Surely you heard a lot in recent years that X or Y thing is just a construct and should be deconstructed or dismantled etc. That's the result.

[Paracompact]

> And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it ... The more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.

Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)

But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...

[bonoboTP]

> I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...

This is a good point. Gödel was interested in theology for example. Or look at Warren McCulloch (of McCulloch & Pitts, 1943 fame, the paper that first modeled neurons mathematically and built logic networks with it), who had a theological early education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw These thinkers had a much broader view of humanity and science and knowledge than common today, where academics follow an extremely narrow specialty and PhD students often proudly admit they never read any paper older than 5 years, but mostly just from the last 2 (in AI), since the work is always anyways extremely incremental and will be anyway irrelevant in a few years. And vice versa, the humanities people closed up among themselves and cooked up an unrecognizable thing to an educated person from 100 years ago.

[api]

Every field can be esoteric, but math eventually gets applied. People might not care about conjectures or proofs but they like being able to cook up a pic of a capybara playing piano on Midjourney or have their chats protected by unbreakable cryptography. All that is a product of esoteric math.

With some of the humanities I feel like the lightning never strikes the ground.

A huge chunk of the humanities have been neck deep in esoteric discourse about social justice for decades. Meanwhile down here on the ground things are going backward. More and more people are rediscovering things like “race science” and “traditional” ideas about the roles of women, etc. This is happening all over the world.

When is some dude in a toga going to descend from the ivory tower with a powerful rebuttal and a new way of framing these issues that renews the flame of liberalism and free society?

I’m not holding my breath.

If I were post-economic I’d consider taking a crack at it, but what do I know?

[nextaccountic]

> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.

You just described a lot of research in mathematics

[fn-mote]

> You just described a lot of research in mathematics

You mean every research article in any subject that I have ever read.

But that’s the audience for research.

Read the survey articles if you’re looking for a more palatable exposition. Research is written for researchers.

[murderfs]

> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.

The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.

[api]

That too, but I was being generous. Honestly it kind of doesn't matter if it's meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit or if it's meaningful but impenetrable jargon-laden discourse aimed only at other members of the field. In either case, it has no effect on the world outside the field.

Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for escapist fun, like a fandom).

You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because same disease, different patient.

[coderatlarge]

except for the example of math from which after about a thousand years of number theory you get cryptography and computers.

[api]

I suppose that’s a counter argument? Maybe in a thousand years something will come of this stuff.

[bonoboTP]

Peterson was firmly within academia and he got famous by putting his academic lectures filmed at university online. It's not some other thing. He taught in prestigious institutions like Harvard and U of Toronto.

To me it seems like you're trying to paint the picture of misguided goodguy academics VS outsider grifter meddlers. But JP is just not a good example of that.

[yupitsme123]

I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world history and the history of thought, and that applies some kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what Humanities is supposed to be.

Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?

[Gabriel54]

At a pre-protest meeting of a cause I wanted to support, I noticed that the organizer had on their desktop background a kind of propagandistic poster of Mao leading the cultural revolution. Keep in mind, this is in the USA. I'm no expert in world history by any means, but the level of ignorance is astounding.

[Gabriel54]

I wonder, have you personally been in a university environment recently? Within the past ten or fifteen years? I ask because, as someone who attended a supposedly "good" university in the USA, before going I had an interest in the humanities but was quickly discouraged by the number of individuals who seemed to be possessed by propaganda. I mentioned in another comment, for example, that I saw another student have as their desktop background a photo of Mao and the cultural revolution. So this is the backdrop against which Jordan Peterson is saying, you know, there actually are Western intellectuals worth reading and listening to and thinking about. And yes, on a personal level, I did get to read some of those writers you mentioned. It did not surprise me that they turn out to be much deeper than Jordon Peterson himself, but I don't think he ever claimed to be a revolutionary thinker? I consider him more of an evangelist than anything else. How many intellectuals can we say have truly had an impact with their ideas? The number is small. I think the reason Jordan Peterson suddenly became a phenomenon is because he was at least brave enough to call out ridiculousness when he saw it (at least at the very beginning of his celebrity, I cannot speak for his recent comments because I stopped paying attention once he started going into politics).

[api]

The stuff Jordan says about there being some value in the classics is good. Some of his stuff about meaning is good. Little to none of it is original.

He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit. I mean it would bother me if I didn’t have two daughters, but that makes it more personal.

Peterson is one of those people who sounds reasonable and even compelling at first, but as you keep listening eventually you get to the part where he starts clucking like a chicken. Unfortunately that is his original stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZOkxuNbsXU

People who start reasonable then lead into nonsense always make me think of the Monty Python lumberjack song skit. They had several skits with that premise. The woman who does Philomena Cunk is a modern comedian who riffs on this.

[hollerith]

His wife and his daughter are public personas. Both have Youtube channels. I like his wife's channel quite a bit, and I spent a few hours years ago listening to his daughter. Both have talked about him at length while I was listening, and neither has said anything that would suggest they are unhappy with him or his influence on their lives.

His daughter has a husband and her own income stream, i.e., is no longer economically dependent on him.

I've also listened to the man himself for at least a hundred hours. I would be interested to read an explanation in support of your statement "he’s also a raving misogynist" because I've heard nothing that would lead me to conclude it or even to suspect it.

He probably believes that marriage and motherhood are best for most women. Is that contributing to your belief that he is a misogynist?

[api]

> He probably believes that marriage and motherhood are best for most women.

I don’t want to go on a quote hunt. I’ve seen some. But this is the crux of it.

My wife is a stay at home mom. It’s something she’s wanted to do since we were dating. I’m supportive of it, and she’s become kind of the pillar of the whole extended family.

That was her choice. It’s what she wanted. Get it?

It wasn’t my choice. I’d have supported her if she wanted a career. I supported her giving it a try but it wasn’t for her.

It’s definitely not some windbag public intellectual’s choice, or the government’s. The thing you quoted sounds innocuous until a politician gets ahold of it. Then we find out what it really means.

I guess the most damning thing to me is that so many incel and Tate types like him. By its fruit shall it be known. Marxism sounds liberating but if that’s true then why does every Marxist nation turn into a dictatorship or a mafia state?

A lot of things Marx said sound innocuous until politicians and men with guns get hold of them. Then you find out what they really mean.

Any time someone says they know what other people should do with their lives and they have some grand theory of history full of great meaning and purpose all ready to slot people into their appropriate roles, run away.

[hollerith]

I've never heard Peterson (or his wife, who also holds the opinion that most women are better off if they choose motherhood) say that any of the societal changes, e.g., access to contraception and abortion, e.g., broad acceptance of women in the workplace, should be rolled back.

I never heard him or his wife say anything that might suggest that the opinion is anything other advice to women. (And when has Marx or Lenin ever said anything that can be interpreted as nothing more than advice to any individual -- other than the advice to join the collective effort to overthrow the capitalist class?)

Peterson is not shy about criticizing some of the pronouncement of feminists, e.g., "believe all women". He will point out that 1 or 2% of women are sociopaths just like 1 or 2% of men are sociopaths and that if you give sociopaths the opportunity to profit from lying, they will take the opportunity (and a depressingly large fraction of them will take the opportunity even if the only "profit" to be had is the pleasure of ruining someone's life or reputation).

[Gabriel54]

> The stuff Jordan says about there being some value in the classics is good. Some of his stuff about meaning is good. Little to none of it is original.

I don't think he ever claimed that these ideas were original?

> He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit.

I feel like this is quite an extraordinary accusation. The tone of your comment reminds me of his interview with Kathy Newman. Everything he said that had even the smallest nuance was twisted into something else. What specifically did he say that makes you thing he is a misogynist?