[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.