I've seen about 100x more content like "tech needs humanities" than I've seen like "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech". Seems suspicious.
If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.
It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.
It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".
I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas? Seems like a major failure if they can't communicate to those outside their field.
> I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?
Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.
Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.
Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
How you get "simple universal aphorism" from "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech" I don't know.
Hell, I can come up with one myself:
"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
On second thought, perhaps it's both after all :P
> "The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
That's certainly a simple universal aphorism.
By itself, though, it's completely useless.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless. However, the tech portion of your job is only a small minority of what you will be doing. You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, explaining why your vision is better, understanding why they think their vision is better, and then trying to figure out, which set of compromises is best.
And that just assumes that you remain in a tech career. Many people move their career over life. There is a lot of needed management and if you can do all of that there's a decent paycheck in it and some of you will prefer that. There are a number of other jobs that are not directly management, but are not tech-focused either and need to be managed.
And that's just your career. There's the rest of your life. Well, I certainly hope you're not working your entire life to death, but you find things outside of work to do.
> For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless.
I don't think anyone argued differently, the actual question is, are humanities good for anything at their current state of development?
> You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, [on, and on, and on, how there's a world outside of technology]
That doesn't automatically qualify these humanities as some sort of aid. Looking at the social developments in the last few decades, things appear to be going downhill and accelerating. Humanities seem to be contributing to that trend, or at least completely unable to reverse or slow it down.
Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap
if they cared to understand technology.
If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.
Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.
If your university were free would you think about it differently? I ask because some argue time is money so it's still not free however one of the great things about the study of humanities is to fill your life with meaning which changes what time is too. If you've not read or heard this commencement address from David Foster Wallace highly recommended <a href="https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/" rel="nofollow">https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
0xDEAFBEAD · · focus · HN ↗
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.
It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".
lostmsu · · focus · HN ↗
Do you?
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.
Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.
Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
> > "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech"
You are making a strawman of what OP said.
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
Hell, I can come up with one myself:
"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
On second thought, perhaps it's both after all :P
lapcat · · focus · HN ↗
That's certainly a simple universal aphorism.
By itself, though, it's completely useless.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
And that just assumes that you remain in a tech career. Many people move their career over life. There is a lot of needed management and if you can do all of that there's a decent paycheck in it and some of you will prefer that. There are a number of other jobs that are not directly management, but are not tech-focused either and need to be managed.
And that's just your career. There's the rest of your life. Well, I certainly hope you're not working your entire life to death, but you find things outside of work to do.
bigbadfeline · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think anyone argued differently, the actual question is, are humanities good for anything at their current state of development?
> You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, [on, and on, and on, how there's a world outside of technology]
That doesn't automatically qualify these humanities as some sort of aid. Looking at the social developments in the last few decades, things appear to be going downhill and accelerating. Humanities seem to be contributing to that trend, or at least completely unable to reverse or slow it down.
catchnear4321 · · focus · HN ↗
only one of these really considers the humanities aspect.
put more bluntly, recognizing the problem does not equate to having the solution. but it’s a fun problem to work on.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
EPWN3D · · focus · HN ↗
If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.
Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.
redwood · · focus · HN ↗