Japan to close humanities departments.

[HAL]

Which magazine was it?

[pietillidie]

Mugwump and Pi, that Haidt article explains nothing and iterates the bleeding obvious: Plurality is preferable, and discrimination should be opposed.

Aside from that homily with which I strongly agree (who doesn't?), there is no testable theory on offer here. And what if monitoring discrimination more closely (good) results in more black and Latino students in those fields, but *less* conservative students? I mean, while we're offering up LQ guesses about something, that's just as likely an outcome.

[think positive]

[pietillidie]

Just a few mixed thoughts - no time to organise them properly.

On the humanities, they probably do look a waste of time to many, especially now the age of cognitive science is doing away with so much myth and nonsense, giving the humanities less to "talk" about.

In the past, few people were literate and science was completely inaccessible. So the humanities - arising as they did from theology and religious myth - played the role of science.

Then, in the early stages of science, we began to understand the natural world and devise rigorous ways of doing so. That led to a natural division between understanding "the world out there" (science, and its applied form, engineering), and understanding the subjective and experienced world (the humanities). Naturally, efforts were made to build a bridge between them (the social sciences).

In some ways, the humanities have been reduced to art; an abstract expression and discipline of technique valued as much for form and aesthetic pleasure as anything else. Just think of the pleasure of reading history or discussing films.

Hopefully, the social sciences will also be deconstructed as we get less ignorant and more competent; parts will be pushed towards the arts, and parts will be absorbed into the sciences. But I'm not sure that's something that can be policed formally; more likely, it will happen naturally.

It's easy to scoff at oral myth or cave paintings as primitive now, but these are the precursors to writing, literary records, philosophy, classical works, the great artists, the great authors, and so on. The story of the communication of complex ideas is a long one, and the modern humanities are part of that story.

The same applies to religion; as cringeworthy as it seems now, religion is actually the origin of systematic thought and was the main pretext for philosophy and science right through to only a couple of centuries ago. But we can't just rid the world of religion by policy; it still plays too much of a role in systematic human thought, like it or not.

The early social sciences are also cringeworthy from a certain perspective, but it has to be understood that many of these disciplines did pretty well in a context of hopeless ignorance. Again, we can scoff, but society still struggles with many things the social sciences understood decades ago.

As an example from the humanities, take the existentialist novelists (yawn, IMO, but...); most people still can't face the void of nothingness without clinging to religion, or individual Darwinian supremacy, or some pre-scientific nationalist exceptionalism, or such. But those authors were trying to formulate ways of doing so, and more than a few people could do with considering their ideas.

But the real rub is this: How many people have the maths, philosophy and general knowledge to do cutting-edge, HQ science or even engineering? A very small percentage. So, we either pick our way through at a more impressionistic level with humanities and the social sciences, or we sit about completely bereft of any systematic handle on the world and wait for a few geniuses to tell us what to think and do. Obviously, that doesn't cut it, either.

Ironically, scientists themselves usually know how limited what they do is, and will openly say they rely on the humanities and social sciences for new ideas and inspiration.

Calculation acts on perception, and perception is limited. Experience and social interaction heavily shape and control perception, but they're mostly expressed in language, not maths. That means language and thought expressed in language can either facilitate science by feeding it with rich ideas, or act as a bottleneck by feeding it limited, highly-policed ideas.

The interesting thing about language is that it's incredibly combinatorial, enabling us to "speak" new ideas into being. That is, new ideas are expressed in words in order to be communicated and spread across the population. Those new ideas are then combined with other ideas to produce more complex ideas, then hypotheses, then theories, and so on through to hard science *if we're lucky*. Sociologically, that takes advanced literacy and requires a very sophisticated process for communicating ideas. Certainly, the Internet is helping a lot in this regard, but drawings and campfire chats were deemed insufficient for developing and transmitting complex ideas several thousand years ago.

So, there's lots to consider when approaching the notion of "disciplines". Our brains are every bit as creative as they are systematic and computational for good reason: Without ideas and concepts, explored and packaged effectively for high fidelity transmission, there is nothing to run calculations on.

Would the number of HQ, complex ideas being circulated be reduced dramatically by eliminating all but approved disciplines? Would science and engineering, and economic production generally, be damaged by reducing the circulation of complex ideas?

My preference is to encourage the taking of double degrees which combine intellectual development and interest (e.g., history, philosophy or politics) with a more direct money maker such as engineering, programming, nursing, statistics, accounting, a trade, or whatever. These things shouldn't be an either/or choice.

[David]

Great post, PTID. One of the better things I've read on this topic.

[think positive]

Gees God help us when you have time!

[Pi]

[David]

Did you actually bother reading it?

And let's not get started on the right-wing/conservative backslapping sessions on here. I actually fear the notorious Stalinist VPT is losing its way.

[Mugwump]

^ yeah, it was one of PTID's better posts. Then I read his post indicating rooted complacency about the bias in publicly-funded university departments, and the warm feeling melted away. If the average social science dept were a public company, i think PTID would be skywriting about that level of unbalanced attribution of public funds in the service of a political agenda.

[HAL]

I don't think I've read that. Can you give me a reference?

[Pi]

[David]

I'd actually consider myself more of a utopian socialist, if you must know...

https://youtu.be/3plmkRy_k5o

[pietillidie]

[Pi]

^
The short answer is; yes, maybe, yes but not here and at least David got the joke

[pietillidie]

Fair enough! Merry Xmas!!