[WalterBright]

I took and engineering and science program in college. The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction. It's served me well.

To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.

[Brian_K_White]

When I was an infant first couple years of college, us engineers knew we were the useful smarties. Art is nice and all but it doesn't grow crops or cure cancer. So the arts are just this luxury that we can only afford thanks to us non-luxury necessary engineers & scientists.

Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.

Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.

[WalterBright]

I haven't noticed that liberal arts majors are better at deciding whether to build a bomb or a bridge. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions by government.

[Brian_K_White]

A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep.

"You need flour to make a cake." "I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake."

You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise.

Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything.

But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate.

It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant.

Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.

[WalterBright]

> Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.

Being educated in things that are not true is worse than being ignorant. For example, advocacy of things like socialism that do not work.

[Brian_K_White]

It's just as important to know untrue things as true things. Believing untrue things is something else entirely, and the only way to know the difference...is to be fucking educated instead of ignorant.

Simply being experienced is also being educated. I didn't say any particular method of becoming educated. Being eductaed does not mean "someone else tells you something and you adopt it end program".

[BuyMyBitcoins]

>“The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.”

This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.

[Brian_K_White]

Agreed that stem is a tool.

Tools help accomplish goals. Tools do not set goals.

[wannabe44]

> The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.

That's just the justification they give for their existence. You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.

The only reason humanities departments are this big today is because of the biological waste who can't make it to STEM or any other useful profession. If we limit humanities to classicists, linguists etc... whose work is actually rigorous and not just peddling political nonsense, humanities would not have such a bad rap.

[vineyardmike]

> You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance'

I like how we just make up fake arguments in incoherent grammar as a reason to criticize the humanities. There'd be irony there if people still were taught what that meant.

> just peddling political nonsense

Is this because the word liberal is in the name? Because that's not what that word means in this context.

[ThrowawayR2]

Liberalism and leftism have parted ways in the United States. Liberalism is good but the progressive left that seem to be in charge of liberal arts in academia have rejected liberalism and its values.

Perhaps we should rename the liberal arts programs in American institutions of higher learning to the progressive arts to remind people of where the problem really lies, dohohoho.

[wannabe44]

Everyone knows the humanities departments are bastions of certain types of propaganda. Either you're naive or engaging in bad faith rhetoric.

[beej71]

Or calligraphy class. What a waste! What has that ever brought us except the entire Macintosh line of computers?

You never know when something is going to pay off somewhere. You bag on the feminist perspective on Aztec dance, but that's someone new looking at something in a way no one has before. And you never know what might get found.

Maybe it's nothing. But if we stop looking, were only finding nothing, guaranteed. The best things are found by people looking where no one else thinks to.

Like TFA said, modern STEM education is training you to be an automaton for the machine. And now AI can do that.

Better to learn STEM and learn some liberal (as in freedom) arts. And I don't want us to focus solely on STEM just to be outperformed by countries that do STEM and humanities.

Finally, if I may be so bold, it appears your political identity is clouding your judgment. We need to research everything. It's really impossible to overdo this. Just ask China.

Disclosure: I teach undergrad computer science.

[XorNot]

> You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.

I like how this criticism can never point to anything real, people just make something up and then assign an implausibly large budget to it and then say everyone is doing that.

[wannabe44]

Good that you asked, I found even worse wastages of your taxpayer money.

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/1d69a970-812a-43...

Or let's talk about our own field:

https://www.felienne.com/archives/8470

Everyone knows how ridiculous anti-science, anti-logic, and anti-progress propaganda has gotten. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in bad faith rhetoric.

Aside- the right had all the chances to be the side of science and logic, given how left-liberals deny genetics and realities of evolution. Alas, they have worse issues.

[vineyardmike]

> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction

Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education.

That said, not everything is about a job or work. Sometimes (usually) education is itself a goal.

[WalterBright]

> Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education

That's the plan, but it doesn't seem to work out too well.

> not everything is about a job or work

Yes, if you are independently wealthy. Need to pay back those student loans!

[imtringued]

If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people?

If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition.

You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it.

Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.

[adrianN]

Arguably an educated populace is a corner stone of democratic societies. Too much of a focus on economic applicability of education is dangerous imo.

[fwn]

It is worth noting that most of liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it gets much more expensive than anything a liberal arts teacher can come up with.

I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy (or even just prestigious) education somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts.

I do understand that the money is not just drained. Whenever I was on an American campus as a student, I was in awe at their extravagant setups. Lots of food, an irritating amount of sports, more like a small resort town than a place to do educational work.

No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.

[SanjayMehta]

A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily.

The other direction is possible but not so easy.

[vineyardmike]

Did you read the article? As it highlights elegantly, "liberal arts" is about the educational methodology and structure, not the course material. You can learn STEM subjects in a liberal arts education.

> fairly easily... not so easy.

Yea, totally, STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning ;)

[WalterBright]

> STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning

I learned how to learn by going through STEM.

Also, STEM produces right and wrong answers. If the airplane you design doesn't fly, you cannot pretend that it is flying.

That isn't true with liberal arts. Any failure can be explained away.

[SanjayMehta]

STEM majors are inherently better overall. Are you trying to be sarcastic or funny? I can't tell.

I've yet to find a liberal arts grad who even knows what a partial differential equation is.

[defrost]

You might need to get out more, many BAs understand what differential equations are.

  He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 and graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts.

  At Cambridge, Russell was introduced to philosophy 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

[WalterBright]

My college econ textbook went through a couple pages of math. I read through it and realized they were showing how to do a derivative, without using any of the usual nomenclature for calculus.

It was clear the authors did not expect the econ students to know calculus, and they obfuscated the calculus so they would not scare the students off.

[SanjayMehta]

Never met him. Have you?

[vineyardmike]

> Are you trying to be sarcastic or funny? I can't tell.

Take a liberal arts class and your reading comprehension may improve.

> knows what a partial differential equation is.

I’ve met a few but tbh that’s a pretty weird way to judge “inherently better”.

[alephnerd]

That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I)

Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.

[WalterBright]

At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment.

In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.

[alephnerd]

Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base.

Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited).

That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.

[WalterBright]

I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work.

I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes.

Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.

[alephnerd]

Yeah I can see why that left a bad taste.

[vixen99]

Some people say it nevertheless. Oscar Kambona, a Cabinet Minister in President Nyerere's Tanzanian Government tells how he met Mao in China. Prior to the meeting he spoke to some surgeons repairing a fractured leg. Were they satisfied the operation had been a success? "Yes", they said, "because we read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book before the operation. You can achieve anything if you follow a leader".