I think my current view is something like: Humanities are real and interesting, but much academic "humanities" work is highfalutin BS. People feel tech has a problem, and there's an excess of people with humanities credentials who want to feel valued. That doesn't mean people with humanities credentials are the solution to tech's problem. Those grads might be able to lecture you about how everything is terrifically problematic, but they won't necessarily be able to offer significant insight beyond that.
There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.
These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.
The thing is, these people always privilege the classics over more recent works that are just as philosophical. I for one probably learned more philosophy reading a pile of Neal Stephenson novels at age 16-18 than I did in college. Heck, my History and Philosophy of Science civilization sequence had a whole quarter on the Scientific Revolution, but after reading the Baroque Cycle it was mostly old hat. :P
neuroticnews25 · · focus · HN ↗
0xDEAFBEAD · · focus · HN ↗
There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.
These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
The thing is, these people always privilege the classics over more recent works that are just as philosophical. I for one probably learned more philosophy reading a pile of Neal Stephenson novels at age 16-18 than I did in college. Heck, my History and Philosophy of Science civilization sequence had a whole quarter on the Scientific Revolution, but after reading the Baroque Cycle it was mostly old hat. :P