I studied chemistry in undergrad, but the classes I enjoyed the most by far were my humanities, maybe because it was a break from the grind of the undergrad chemistry sequence.
It's a little unfashionable, but I believe that the "finishing" aspect of humanities courses is underrated. My fellow STEM majors generally bellyached about having to meet their liberal arts gen ed requirements, but a good basic ethics course, a bit of literature, some history or basic anthropology goes a long way towards rounding someone out, and for some it opens a world they can explore and enjoy the rest of their lives.
CS Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" has a lot of these broad strokes correct. I think higher education got itself in trouble specifically when as an institution it stopped caring about moral/ethical formation. The result is a disintegration that results in engineers who can't be bothered to ask the Jurassic Park question to humanities undergrads that reject the notion of objective truth. (I exaggerate the margins to make my point more visible).
A complementary, very deep, take on the humanities from Brad DeLong.
Successful Future Humanities Programs Will Be Those That Provide High Literacy & Deep Numeracy
To get through the crisis, humanities programs should focus on equipping students to understand and act in the largely-symbolic networked world that surrounds them …
I was one of those engineering students who avoided classes with big writing requirements. Required to take eight humanities courses, I took for from the economics department. Even so, the history course I took led to a lifelong interest in reading history, which helps a lot in putting the current problems of life into perspective. Just don’t ask me to write about it. (FWIW, writing became a lot easier for me when typewriters were replaced by word processors. Cut, Copy, and Paste mean the world to me.)
Wow, 8 courses is a lot of humanities for an Eng degree. I think there was only room made for 2 humanities on the entire 8-course-per-semester schedule for me during my EE undergrad. So I took an Arts degree concurrently, but that really only required maybe 7 or 8 more courses, and an extra year. Taking history, economics, linguistics and politics nonetheless was my best time spent, even if I didn't have time for half the reading.
Notwithstanding, and maybe because of AI, I believe the ability to communicate, read, and listen well will become some of the few skills that will resist commodification.
Today I learned that United Healthcare used a faulty AI to determine if their elderly medicare advantage subscribers/customers qualified for authorization for needed post hospital care. Most of the time the AI just spit out denial letters with no reasons explaining why. Apparently they are being sued in US District Court for the District of Minnesota and are seeking a class action suit for people across the country (it is being brought by the estates of two deceased patients who were denied care) as this is malpractice and basically cheating people out of their medicare benefits... I mean, no actual medical professional looked at these .. just some algorithm AI. What is crazy is that United Health is still using this AI and Humana is using it too! I don't know how I missed this. I think it is nuts to sign up for Medicare Advantage plans. Stick with the A and the B folks. https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/
It reminds me of the old saw, "Live in New York, but leave before it makes you too hard. Live in San Francisco, but leave before it makes you too soft." BS, but well phrased.
The education version: "Take some STEM for objective truth, but leave before you forget the meaning of life. Take some humanities for the meaning of life, but leave before you forget the existence of objective truth."
I loved my college humanities classes too. But I'm struck by how interchangeable they were, hour for hour, with what I learned in very similar classes in high school, and while working with others at my office job, and writing at my office job, and from reading old literature and watching long-form TV every night for years, and from reading Noah's substack.
I've now spent at least 20x as long doing those other things as I would have spent on humanities classes if I'd done a humanities BA, so it's hard to say the humanities classes mattered much.
I think my experience is typical, or at least common. Many people who go to college take good classes in high school, most office jobs involve a lot of writing and working with others, most people watch long-form tv, many people read about ethical questions in their free time.
Although I enjoyed both, I didn't find high school courses comparable at all to humanities courses at university. The reading volume for a year-long high school course would be covered in a single week in a university weeder course, and the material was far more difficult.
I can't say that I've found TV that covers anything to similar breadth or depth, it's not a natural fit for the medium or the audience. And very few people read about ethical questions in their free time, most at best have familiarity because they are required to take a course to obtain or maintain a pro license.
I'm one of those who hated the humanities requirements as part of obtaining a BA, but appreciated the non-relevant courses I took because they happened to become relevant later in life post-college.
For me, I had the cynical attitude that humanities courses were a way to keep humanities professors busy and sell unnecessary books on me. I had Pell Grants that covered my tuition, but still had to spend about $1,000 a semester on books, money that I didn't have and I could not work because it would cost me my grant.
Why did you resent humanities requirements if you were getting a Bachelor of Arts? I'd understand the issue more if you sought a Bachelor of Sc. degree.
In the moment, like specifically when I was studying for my BA, I did not see how the humanities requirements as part of the core courses would be relevant to my chosen major let alone in life. Also, the sheer cost of books for the courses -- and the fear they would not be bought back at the end of the semester -- brought me anxiety each semester.
Costs and relevance, in short. It's once I left college that I got why I took humanities courses, because they did become relevant later on and sparked a lifelong love of learning and doing-by-learning.
Tbh if degrowthers now agree with mainstream opinion while still claiming to edgy and radical by playing silly language games, I think they can be safely ignored. Surely even if they "win" this vacuous non-argument, if they don't actually have a fundamental disagreement with the status quo then that victory would not have any material implications.
Still feels a bit like this is a "straw-man" in the real world - IMO. Yes, there are noisy "de-growthers" out there, but in the pragmatic everyday world of enviromentalists, etc. the push has almost always been for improved efficiency and good life without using as much resources (and creating unmeasured pollution externalities). GDP alone is a lousy measure since it rarely takes into account externalities - so a lot of this depends on what we measure as "growth". Is a world with the same GDP, but a lot less pollution related health issues "poorer"????
If several years went by with no growth of GDP but less pollution then, yes, we would be a lot poorer. The status quo is slowly growing GDP. Static GDP would be very bad.
Not convinced - obviously I put up a bit of an extreme case. Assuming your population is not growing (which is starting to happen here and elsewhere) - if GDP is increasing faster than inflation, then again it depends on what you are measuring. IF your goal is human welfare, then I'm very unconvinced that GDP is an accurate measure.
The always classic example of a hurricane or tornado or fire utterly destroying a town or region - then the rebuild greatly increases local GDP - but it is a long time before the population is even close to the same measure of human welfare.
Yeah, the limits of GDP in measuring actual welfare are well-known, and they're easy to expose in thought experiments. The real world doesn't provide a lot of magic wand style scenarios like lowering growth to improve externalities, although we arguably just went through a period like that. Our rivers no longer spontaneously catch on fire, air pollution has gone down dramatically, we don't worry about acid rain any longer, and the ozone hole is closing. On the downside, we also ended up mostly stopping nuclear power development, making housing incredibly expensive to what it was 50 years ago with land use restrictions, and making grid improvements difficult, among other examples. I wish we could have just done the "good stuff," but that rarely happens.
The even more important issue is that richer societies value externalities more highly. So at every point in time, you could either tackle those now, or just grow the economy and assume that wealth will lead to more action on externalities. Our cars and buildings are safer, healthcare is continually improving, and we care a lot more about the environment, and it's plausible that all of that happened because we "just" got richer. So the second order effects of growth are also pretty amazing.
So in a nutshell, yes, GDP is inevitably somewhat wrong, but on a year over year basis, I think it pretty reliably points in the direction of progress.
My feeling on humanities coursework is that I wouldn’t feel comfortable hiring someone who does not have the skills to write a research paper. At the undergraduate level, it is only in the humanities courses that you are asked to do so. The science classes are all problem sets and tests.
You’d be surprised at how few humanities and social science grads can actually write a proper research paper. One of my kids was “academic chair” at hist frat and his entire focus was teaching kids how to write research papers - the process was not taught in their high schools (many high school teachers being ill-educated and standards practically non-existent) and yet the college profs all assumed the students knew how to write one.
Private high schools (and some wealthy suburban public hs) do teach the practice, and upper level/seminar course work in humanities and social sciences should involve collaboration with professors in producing acceptable research papers . Of course, there has been a very recent, very public example that is a living indictment of QC and teaching quality at Phillips Exeter (as well as Stanford and Harvard).
A lot of this can be blamed on high-stakes testing in schools. Credentialed teachers know how to write, and know how to teach writing, particularly if their emphasis is on English or reading comprehension.
It's Goodhart's law in action -- when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Because it's hard for teachers to read essays at scale, more teaching time is devoted to problems that students will see on the tests. Teachers' abilities are evaluated on the basis of students filling out the right bubble.
Testing is an efficient system benefitting lawmakers, administrators and real estate agents, but it undermines the work of teachers and stultifies students.
One would have thought that knowledge - of the human condition, hatred, love, history, war, politics, philosophy would be reason enough to be well versed in humanities (yes, I am lumping in social “sciences”, including econ, psychology).
To reduce non-technical pursuits in business to “backslapping” is unbelievably simplistic. Every product or meme or narrative is consumed by humans. It is not the best built product that wins the battle.
Coding skills today will be about as useful as the skills I used at an old summer job I had repairing circuit boards- with solder. Between AI and the developing world, all the basic coding skills anyone would want will be available for next to nothing. Systems architecture and higher level supervisory and design skills will still be highly valued but are never going to support even a tiny fraction of the labor force (also because only a tiny fraction of people have the skills for this).
With social media we are becoming a society of Id and emotion rather than knowledge, understanding, analysis and perspective. Sure, the current professoriate in humanities and most social sciences is incapable of building out the latter characteristics in society, being consumed by Marxist dogma and activism, but that speaks to a need to revitalize and value humanities and social sciences. And yes, you can learn to code, learn some math and use spreadsheets while learning soft subjects.
At the dawn of the PC era (late 1970s) it was thought that everyone would have to have technical skills. My roommate (who became a PhD psychologist) had to take calculus and FORTRAN and SAS to get his undergrad degree. Even History majors had to take BASIC at my university (I don’t think English or language majors had to as computing was aligned with the stats classes that social science majors were required to take).
It is interesting that instead of embracing computing and better statistical analysis, these fields rejected it by the early 1990s at many universities. This was a mistake, obviously. The push to digital humanities that came later is not enough to overcome decades of separation from our tech-driven world.
Long way of saying that I think everyone at university should be exposed to humanities and social science and everyone should be exposed to tech, stats, math, CS.
Note that AI is going to help the process of selling/designing products for humans, too. Imagine creating hundreds of fake influencers who can iterate different approaches/pitches (perhaps using fake/prototype products that haven’t been built yet) plus using human interaction with LLMs as market research and to segment audiences. The potential for overload is immense, though.
What influencering (I know that's not a real word, but that's how millennials, zoomers and homelanders talk) has going for it is mostly the influencers being a perky, conventionally attractive woman.
The male influencer equivalent is being Andrew Tate in appearance and, ugh, outlook.
"The U.S. is not a plutocracy". I think that is FAR too strong a conclusion to draw from those redistribution statistics. And that conclusion contradicts the well known statistics about how shares of wealth and income have been increasing in the top 1%, not to mention the studies of how the interests of the 1% are represented in government policy far more than the interests of others. So maybe not a pure plutocracy, but rather a plutocracy that throws some crumbs to the masses to keep them from rising up. We've seen that in the past too.
Sounds like the top 1% is doing well, and the bottom 50% is doing relatively well; but the sort of people who work for the media, who are maybe at the 10% percentile of income/wealth, aren't doing quite so well, and they yell at the people above or below them depending on their partisan lean. And because they set the narrative, the received wisdom significantly underplays the state of the economy.
I think that his point was that if we were a plutocracy (where the wealthy were calling the shots), we would not have allowed the bottom 50% such an increase in prosperity. He was not arguing that the rich don't have more influence on politics than he (or you and I) would like. Merely that they aren't actually running the show completely (i.e. plutocracy).
The idea that it is a plutocracy at all suggests that there is fundamentally something wrong with our system of government. There isn't. Everyone, including the rich, deserves representation. Calling it a plutocracy because you believe that the rich are over-represented is just grousing. Work (vote, donate, proselytize) instead towards improving the balance of representation.
[edit: It's equivalent to Conservatives pretending that every petty bit of progressive monetary policy is "Communism."]
Obviously there is something wrong with our government in that the interests of the rich (and their corporations) are much better represented. Functionally, we are a plutocracy. Democracy implies equality of representation, and we do not have that. The proper "balance of representation" in democracy would leave the top 1% with 1% of the power. I could live with that.
And no, it's not the equivalent of conservatives yammering about "communism".
Asking about the social purpose of the humanities is like asking about the social purpose of religious faith. The value is to the individuals who study them, and that is what they are for, regardless of what other things come into society from the actions of those individuals. The liberal education is for the development of the human mind, not for production of social outputs. This has been so since classical times.
Yes, it is a great privilege to have the time and money and support to pursue this sort of personal self-development, and it's not surprising that there is less demand for it given the (unnecessarily) soaring cost of traditional university study and the credentialization of everything. I would argue that liberal education produces a great deal of value in the job market, but it's harder to discern (especially if you don't know how to look for it) because it's not a credential, it's not a body of knowledge, but a quality of the person.
Most universities are doing a terrible, terrible job of conveying what a humanities education is for. The "activist" turn has been absolutely destructive, and not even effective at self-protection. Much of the social-purpose stuff that universities are doing can be (and will be) done by alternative, more efficient methods: certificate programs, boot camps, apprenticeships, online programs, whatever. But only a university can fulfill the role of bringing people together to preserve and enrich knowledge, purely as knowledge. Otherwise, what good is it?
I think that solid, rigorous humanities education should move out of universities (for the most part) and into high schools. Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Edward Gibbon and so on are absolutely crucial thinkers to understand Western cultural heritage, and no matter what your skin color is if you're an American with English as your first language, you are a Westerner. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that offered philosophy my senior year and not to my surprise smart teenagers find philosophy very interesting - some of the study groups turned into engaged friendship circles that are still going. Some of them, if they're still engineers or business peons are probably more self aware with better judgment than others. If we could even raise teacher pay, good prospects as a high school teacher with engaged students might take a lot of the sting out of the wasteland that is the academic job market for humanities Ph.ds.
It still is a crisis. Generally, humanities majors were selected for good jobs in the past by being able to read and write when general standards for literacy were a lot lower and few people went to college. "Learning to think/write" is no longer enough and universities haven't caught up.
That is an interesting thought. In my mother's time (1950's) you had that kind of education (with Latin and everything) in the good public high schools that every sizeable city had. And of course it has always been so in the best-quality Catholic education. Even if you didn't go on to college, you could come out of high school with a first-rate mental foundation that would be valuable to you for the rest of your life. But many fewer people went to high school then. Kids were still going to work at 16.
I having trouble imagining how it could be done today, except in very selective schools. I mean, it could be done by extraordinary teachers (I had two) but by definition there are few of those. Even with the most motivated students, the pressure for grades and scores introduces a transactional quality that works against the goal of mental cultivation. As does, in spades, the political puritanism of the times.
My kids came out of their very fine high schools and colleges with the idea that the humanities are a bunch of correct moral judgments that their teachers and professors have imparted to them. They can write an essay pretty well, but the business of digesting different points of view and coming to your own understanding about what they say, doesn't seem to have been stressed much.
My main interest is history, and most of the historical works that have had enduring value and excitement for me have been produced by non-academic scholars: Ron Chernow, Daniel Yergin, Barbara Tuchman. I'm sure Eric Foner is valuable to Columbia University, but I don't think he needed Columbia to do the powerful work he has done on Reconstruction (and besides that was a long time ago). I don't know how academic historians can possibly produce anything of broader value in the treacherous political and career environment they work in. And I guess you could say it shows.
So if the university is good neither for teaching or research, what good it is it? For history, I've thought that maybe there's value in applying AI to the nuts and bolts of gathering and organizing facts and citations and making interconnections that junior academics have to do, leaving some kind of scholars workshop organization for the actual creative work of understanding and explanation.
I wonder what would happen if we went back to the system they had in the Middle Ages, where professors were paid per lecture by their students. Those who could really teach, would make a good living. Those who couldn't, would have to find other jobs.
My son was interested in philosophy and read different philosopher's works outside of his high school classes. He was able to apply what he read in history/social studies, government and his English class discussions. But I don't believe he had actual philosophy classes offered in high school. He went to community college and took those classes he was very interested in. After his service in the Navy, continued his degree studying psychology. His master's work, clinically, was in neuro-psych doing research on Dementia/Alzheimers assessment. He stayed for a year post grad and is now just working as a data scientist at a medical school. I think he wants to get back into clinical work though. He continues to have deep interest not only in philosophy but also spirituality (he has studied religions as well).
In theory, couldn't a humanities degree be quite affordable? You just need the teachers, right? Like the hardcore engineering degrees require some real physical plant investment... It seems odd to me that the humanities degrees are offered at a similar price.
Instructors in the humanities are paid peanuts though (sometimes as low as a few thousand dollars per class) the real problem is the giant stack of useless administrators sitting above them.
There is a thing called the Iceland Writers workshop where people can pay to go to Iceland for several days and participate in workshops with established invited writers. It’s not cheap but a few of these a year are cheaper than a university-based masters program and could provide a focused expert in-person component to an otherwise online structure, that could be better than weekly class attendance. I suspect things like this will get extended to other areas of the humanities.
Sounds like it's based on the Iowa Writers Workshop which may be the oldest and most famous of these. Though the Iceland version does have Jeanette Walls, who my wife is a huge fan of.
I guess? I think I'm also just underestimating the overhead of running the whole operation, now that I'm looking up some university budgets... I was just starting with a building and a few teachers & it seemed pretty straightforward :)
Couple things I have learned working at a four-year commuter college.
1) people do not realize just how cheap a college degree can be. You just go to community college for two years, living at home, and then attend a local college. Half of the cost is generally for room and board, and tuition at community colleges are either cheap, or now in some states free.
My daughter's degree was $25k which I think is very affordable, especially for a nursing degree. Part of this was because her first 2 years at CC were free (community college is free in our state). My son's degree was $80k. He went to a four-year college, lived on campus etc. My daughter's degree actually pays better as well.
When people think of the cost of college, they generally think of attending a four-year school and living on campus. Those things are nice but basically luxuries.
Also, community colleges are one of the great, unsung institutions in America. Please support them (again I work at a four-year college, so this is not self-promotion...community colleges really are an underappreciated institution).
2) This is really frustrating. At the college I work at the softer degree's, humanities, soft sciences, etc. pay for the prestige degree's (CS, engineering, etc.). I am not familiar enough with other universities to say this is universal but suspect it is. Basically, our psych, history, English type majors are overpaying (especially relative to job prospects but also just in terms of the cost of their degree), to fund your engineering, CS, hard sciences.
I have always thought that the purpose of the humanities is otium. This Latin word means “not working.” In Roman society, the slaves did the work, and the best of the masters, like Cicero and Seneca, used their non-working time to think things over. The results might be useful, or they might not be useful, but you didn’t have to justify your ruminations on the basis of utility.
For the first few centuries, science lived in the world of otium. Now we know that theoretical science will always lead to practical results, but that was seldom true for the first few centuries.
Otium produces the unexpected. If you always know where you’re going and why you’re going there, you will seldom end up with anything truly new.
I see it as a contrast between exploring and application. When you are focused on application, you are trying to commercialize an idea. When you are an explorer, you don't care whether those ideas have commercial applications or not. When I made a choice to be an explorer in the 1960s, I knew I was almost certainly not going to have a robust income.
The training element of classical education kind of fascinates me. Men of this class learned grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy to prepare them for persuasion and leadership among their peers, and for doing their duties to the state. St Augustine's otium allowed him to write the profoundest works of Christian philosophy, but when the people of his bishopric needed someone to go out and talk to the Vandals, he was ready. He had been prepared for it.
It is true that classical education was designed to enable the top layer of society to be great communicators— something like a combination of lawyer and PR man.
Augustine lived a life of otium before he became a bishop and that was the basis for his later achievements. Wikipedia states:
"Augustine looked back years later on the life at Cassiciacum, a villa outside of Milan where he gathered with his followers, and described it as Christianae vitae otium – the leisure of Christian life.[79]"
However, his job as a bishop took up many hours every day. He was expected to preach almost daily, and he was expected to arbitrate any dispute within his congregation, including the ownership of a sheep. The following is from Bing AI, which I find the most accessible and useful AI, when used with discretion:
"Augustine's office came with multiple tasks, and he became a busy man. He was famous for his knowledgeable preaching and was expected to hold sermons all over the place¹.
He was also known to approach officials and intercede on behalf of debtors or accused; prisons had to be visited and people needed protection from being ill-treated¹. Powerful landlords had to read his letters of reproof or advice when he intervened on behalf of their subordinates¹. Augustine's position included guidance of his clergy and monastery as well as administrative responsibility for the church’s finances¹.
In his role as an arbitrator, Augustine applied his comprehension of the divine agenda to the day-to-day legal conflicts in his bishop’s court¹. This role was an important part of his duties as a bishop and a key aspect of his leadership within his congregation¹.
On top of all this, Augustine also spent his meals lecturing his ecclesiastical household who were being prepared for church leadership— virtually all of them became bishops. Augustine's ecclesiastical household also became the ones who took down his sermons and made sure his writings were copied. They are responsible for his ongoing influence.
Augustine's practice became a model for other bishops—the junior clergy around the bishop's table became known as cannons. In superficial histories of the Middle Ages, one hears about monks and friars, but seldom about cannons who played who became the backbone of the dioceses.
I was immediately struck by the difference in style and clarity between the Wikipedia quote and the AI quote. The former was precise and readable, the second unfocused and pseudo-conversational. I don't expect phrases like "became a busy man" and "all over the place" in a description of duties; the organization of the presentation is inefficient and doesn't lead from one point to the next, producing some "Wait - what?" moments. It seems like more of an unorganized list than a cohesive explanation.
If this is a sample of AI output, I fear for our language.
Actually, Bing AI has three levels of style: More creative—more balanced—more precise. I have only ever asked for the more precise style. Generally speaking, the language of this Bing style is more academic in tone.
Basically, AI is plagiarism, and here it must be plagiarizing a breezy source. However, Bing did a much better job covering the wide range of Augustine's activities than Wikipedia did, it also has the advantage of Linking to source materials, and of course I just don't have time to rewrite everything. Bing did miss Augustine's role in establishing the concept of an ecclesiastical household of young men in training.
BTW, I shudder to think what Bing "more creative" would give me. "Ah, Augustine that poor man!"
Even if the people working on AI are highly educated and intelligent, they know they have to still be able to meet meet users at a 6th-grade level. In this way it's similar to journalism.
Good point. Because various AI programs are directed toward various goals, maybe there will one day be an AI program directed toward the needs of scholars. I tried the same search on Augustine on Chat GPT, and the product was much inferior.
I think of Gregory of Tours in a similar role (ecclesiastic and political) among the knife- and poison-wielding barbarians at the not-yet-court of the not-yet-French. He had to have a lot of skills, and much judgment and discretion.
Theoretical Science does not _always_ lead to practical results, and when it does it still often is in completely unexpected ways. If String Theory leads to high temperature superconductors, we can move it out of the world of otium, but nobody expected this, and it wasn't why the String Theorists got into the field.
But how much of this is selection bias? We all know of many, many cases where this practical development has occurred, but the cases where the theoretical science never lead anywhwere, or was mostly useless as science don't get remembered. As building computer models and simulations become the default way to do more and more theoretical science, it becomes ever easier to end up in theoretical cul-de-sacs which aren't grounded in reality at all and thus won't have any practical results. And how to we measure this? I think that justifying basic research on the grounds that it will eventually pay off is dangerous. Exploring and acquiring knowledge is a basic human good. Isn't that enough?
That's the point I was trying to make: exploring is worthwhile without a practical end in view. However, it is hard for me to understand how a successful advance in theory in the hard sciences would not have some payoff eventually.
Alas, I know. And I teach computer modelling classes. Computer models are a great way to play around with various aspects of your theory. But I find more of my students aren't interested in figuring out whether their ideas are correct or not. They want lessons in how to tweak the model to produce the result that they want for the next bit of funding, even if the theory is completely bogus.
Never heard the term "degrowth" and love this quote: "Degrowth can make these extravagant promises only by pretending that words suddenly mean the exact opposite of what they used to mean. Creating prosperity is growth. That is what growth is. That is what it means. That is its definition." A replay of communism with a different idealistic goal ?
Humanities are useful. I was a philosophy and economics major. Both were obviously useful, and one can theoretically trace a through line of economics to hedge funds to venture capital, etc, but the actual "skills" within economics were not actually that useful until "relearned" later on in context anyway.
Philosophy, on the other hand, has given me a lifelong ability to conceptualize arguments people have around morality and clarify them. Often to the degree that suddenly makes the other party surprised they held a somewhat inconsistent set of principles to begin with. It's also given me a much sounder basis to be comfortable holding views that sometimes are contrary to my peers. That's important because leadership in innovative fields is rarely about being exactly the same as everyone else.
Humanities are useful. I think they're even economically useful, which, as you say, in a world where soft skills are more and more important as a "human touch" when AI can take over more and more "boring hard stuff."
The bigger problem is the academy doesn't know how to frame that argument. Many of the professors have never worked a day in their lives outside the academy and don't know how it can be useful or not. This goes for some STEM professors as well—but they simply have an easier argument or don't have to make one at all. When students don't think a subject is useful in the "real world," the last group that can make a coherent argument about why that’s not true has never been in it.
Maybe we need to be careful about the term "plutocracy". Study after study has shown that the legislatures are far more responsive to the wealthy (donors, lobbyists, etc) than anything corresponding to their constituencies. Now, that inevitably leads to a skewed system in favor of an oligarchy (especially now that the doors are wide open on corporate and dark money contributions).
Yes, there have been some movements towards being more progressive, but in response to a system that had moved away from that for years (starting with Reagan). There is a reason why most people believe that the "system" is rigged against them - they see the wealthy able to get large tax breaks (and hide even larger sums), they see anti-labor practices, they see wealthy able to get off lightly on various financial crimes, they see no one punished for the 2008 crash (except the homeowners who lost their homes). Going to be awfully hard to counter that with a few studies that show things are starting to improve a bit.
I agree. There's a considerable difference between the government redistributing funds to the lower 50% and the 10-50% making a living wage from a single job.
I agree. At this point I have no faith in the Supreme Court. I feel that there are Justices who are bought and paid for and instead of relying on the Constitution and our laws, they instead, are motivated in their decisions by their religion... and of course the big money gifts, trips, etc.
It's important to distinguish between the social value of studying the Humanities and the social value of Humanities research. I think there is a lot of value in studying the Humanities, mostly for reason others have articulated below (see Casey). But I don't believe most Humanities research has a lot of social value.
History is an exception here. Original historical research often has a broad impact on how we understand the world, and it makes sense to have a group of people trained and incentivized to produce more of it. The rest of the Humanities are different imo (disclaimer--I am a philosophy PhD drop out). With a few rare exceptions, most of the original research produced by philosophy and lit professors is extremely insular and tailored to a narrow audience. There are exceptions (e.g. John Rawls) but they are rare and it's not obvious to me that we need to structure a whole profession around generating more original philosophy research. The real social value of Philosophy and Lit professors lies on the teaching side, but the incentives mostly reward research. Is it any wonder student interest is declining when professors spend most of their time thinking about what will impress their colleagues instead of what will be interesting and relevant to students.
Educators should agree that the “identitarian drift” noted by Mr. Harper conflicts with a liberal arts education.
The breadth of a liberal arts education teaches students to gather and evaluate information and ideas across disciplines; it is inherently apolitical. What is the difference between art and craft? Does this academic study engage in p-hacking? How do you utilize AI agents to generate an information campaign?
As an antidote to ‘siloing’, a liberal arts education can be more valuable than ever, both to the individual and to companies seeking qualified staff.
I studied science and English as an undergrad, English/fiction and expository writing in grad school. I was a working-class Catholic, pretty far from a WASP world. If forced to choose which was more valuable in the world outside academia, I’d go with English. There are plenty of examples of successful corporate leaders who studied anything but business. Herb Kelleher and Peter Thiel studied philosophy -- both were outliers in their respective business sectors.
Fortunately, I haven’t had to worry about money for decades, traveled the world, yadda, yadda, yadda. Thank goodness for the study of English and a love of reading. How does a guy like Warren Buffett spend most of his day? Answer: reading, thinking, and writing. If you do these well, you have only a handful of important business decisions to make in a lifetime.
Yeah, in principle the humanities is as much of a path to prosperity as STEM, if not more so in some cases. I think the issue is really adverse selection. Humanities for at least the last few decades seems to have segments that have vastly different approaches to whichever topic, some clarifying and some obfuscating (through indecipherable language, questionable theories, and leftist orientation). I would guess that as the field has gotten smaller, the obfuscation segment has grown in prominence. When (some of) the new ideas coming out of the humanities are things like "punctuality is white supremacy," something is clearly wrong.
I studied chemistry in undergrad, but the classes I enjoyed the most by far were my humanities, maybe because it was a break from the grind of the undergrad chemistry sequence.
It's a little unfashionable, but I believe that the "finishing" aspect of humanities courses is underrated. My fellow STEM majors generally bellyached about having to meet their liberal arts gen ed requirements, but a good basic ethics course, a bit of literature, some history or basic anthropology goes a long way towards rounding someone out, and for some it opens a world they can explore and enjoy the rest of their lives.
CS Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" has a lot of these broad strokes correct. I think higher education got itself in trouble specifically when as an institution it stopped caring about moral/ethical formation. The result is a disintegration that results in engineers who can't be bothered to ask the Jurassic Park question to humanities undergrads that reject the notion of objective truth. (I exaggerate the margins to make my point more visible).
Always love the roundups!
Yep, I think those are the "soft skills" that the humanities need to teach to make themselves seem valuable!
A complementary, very deep, take on the humanities from Brad DeLong.
Successful Future Humanities Programs Will Be Those That Provide High Literacy & Deep Numeracy
To get through the crisis, humanities programs should focus on equipping students to understand and act in the largely-symbolic networked world that surrounds them …
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/successful-future-humanities-programs
well said
I was one of those engineering students who avoided classes with big writing requirements. Required to take eight humanities courses, I took for from the economics department. Even so, the history course I took led to a lifelong interest in reading history, which helps a lot in putting the current problems of life into perspective. Just don’t ask me to write about it. (FWIW, writing became a lot easier for me when typewriters were replaced by word processors. Cut, Copy, and Paste mean the world to me.)
Wow, 8 courses is a lot of humanities for an Eng degree. I think there was only room made for 2 humanities on the entire 8-course-per-semester schedule for me during my EE undergrad. So I took an Arts degree concurrently, but that really only required maybe 7 or 8 more courses, and an extra year. Taking history, economics, linguistics and politics nonetheless was my best time spent, even if I didn't have time for half the reading.
Notwithstanding, and maybe because of AI, I believe the ability to communicate, read, and listen well will become some of the few skills that will resist commodification.
Today I learned that United Healthcare used a faulty AI to determine if their elderly medicare advantage subscribers/customers qualified for authorization for needed post hospital care. Most of the time the AI just spit out denial letters with no reasons explaining why. Apparently they are being sued in US District Court for the District of Minnesota and are seeking a class action suit for people across the country (it is being brought by the estates of two deceased patients who were denied care) as this is malpractice and basically cheating people out of their medicare benefits... I mean, no actual medical professional looked at these .. just some algorithm AI. What is crazy is that United Health is still using this AI and Humana is using it too! I don't know how I missed this. I think it is nuts to sign up for Medicare Advantage plans. Stick with the A and the B folks. https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/
It reminds me of the old saw, "Live in New York, but leave before it makes you too hard. Live in San Francisco, but leave before it makes you too soft." BS, but well phrased.
The education version: "Take some STEM for objective truth, but leave before you forget the meaning of life. Take some humanities for the meaning of life, but leave before you forget the existence of objective truth."
Hmm, not my finest work.
I can dig it
I loved my college humanities classes too. But I'm struck by how interchangeable they were, hour for hour, with what I learned in very similar classes in high school, and while working with others at my office job, and writing at my office job, and from reading old literature and watching long-form TV every night for years, and from reading Noah's substack.
I've now spent at least 20x as long doing those other things as I would have spent on humanities classes if I'd done a humanities BA, so it's hard to say the humanities classes mattered much.
I think my experience is typical, or at least common. Many people who go to college take good classes in high school, most office jobs involve a lot of writing and working with others, most people watch long-form tv, many people read about ethical questions in their free time.
I think you have a selection bias. Most people don't do all those things, just most people you work with and associate with.
Although I enjoyed both, I didn't find high school courses comparable at all to humanities courses at university. The reading volume for a year-long high school course would be covered in a single week in a university weeder course, and the material was far more difficult.
I can't say that I've found TV that covers anything to similar breadth or depth, it's not a natural fit for the medium or the audience. And very few people read about ethical questions in their free time, most at best have familiarity because they are required to take a course to obtain or maintain a pro license.
I'm one of those who hated the humanities requirements as part of obtaining a BA, but appreciated the non-relevant courses I took because they happened to become relevant later in life post-college.
For me, I had the cynical attitude that humanities courses were a way to keep humanities professors busy and sell unnecessary books on me. I had Pell Grants that covered my tuition, but still had to spend about $1,000 a semester on books, money that I didn't have and I could not work because it would cost me my grant.
Why did you resent humanities requirements if you were getting a Bachelor of Arts? I'd understand the issue more if you sought a Bachelor of Sc. degree.
In the moment, like specifically when I was studying for my BA, I did not see how the humanities requirements as part of the core courses would be relevant to my chosen major let alone in life. Also, the sheer cost of books for the courses -- and the fear they would not be bought back at the end of the semester -- brought me anxiety each semester.
Costs and relevance, in short. It's once I left college that I got why I took humanities courses, because they did become relevant later on and sparked a lifelong love of learning and doing-by-learning.
Tbh if degrowthers now agree with mainstream opinion while still claiming to edgy and radical by playing silly language games, I think they can be safely ignored. Surely even if they "win" this vacuous non-argument, if they don't actually have a fundamental disagreement with the status quo then that victory would not have any material implications.
Well, I tend to agree, but with one caveat. They themselves need to be kept out of positions of power and influence.
Still feels a bit like this is a "straw-man" in the real world - IMO. Yes, there are noisy "de-growthers" out there, but in the pragmatic everyday world of enviromentalists, etc. the push has almost always been for improved efficiency and good life without using as much resources (and creating unmeasured pollution externalities). GDP alone is a lousy measure since it rarely takes into account externalities - so a lot of this depends on what we measure as "growth". Is a world with the same GDP, but a lot less pollution related health issues "poorer"????
If several years went by with no growth of GDP but less pollution then, yes, we would be a lot poorer. The status quo is slowly growing GDP. Static GDP would be very bad.
Not convinced - obviously I put up a bit of an extreme case. Assuming your population is not growing (which is starting to happen here and elsewhere) - if GDP is increasing faster than inflation, then again it depends on what you are measuring. IF your goal is human welfare, then I'm very unconvinced that GDP is an accurate measure.
The always classic example of a hurricane or tornado or fire utterly destroying a town or region - then the rebuild greatly increases local GDP - but it is a long time before the population is even close to the same measure of human welfare.
Yeah, the limits of GDP in measuring actual welfare are well-known, and they're easy to expose in thought experiments. The real world doesn't provide a lot of magic wand style scenarios like lowering growth to improve externalities, although we arguably just went through a period like that. Our rivers no longer spontaneously catch on fire, air pollution has gone down dramatically, we don't worry about acid rain any longer, and the ozone hole is closing. On the downside, we also ended up mostly stopping nuclear power development, making housing incredibly expensive to what it was 50 years ago with land use restrictions, and making grid improvements difficult, among other examples. I wish we could have just done the "good stuff," but that rarely happens.
The even more important issue is that richer societies value externalities more highly. So at every point in time, you could either tackle those now, or just grow the economy and assume that wealth will lead to more action on externalities. Our cars and buildings are safer, healthcare is continually improving, and we care a lot more about the environment, and it's plausible that all of that happened because we "just" got richer. So the second order effects of growth are also pretty amazing.
So in a nutshell, yes, GDP is inevitably somewhat wrong, but on a year over year basis, I think it pretty reliably points in the direction of progress.
My feeling on humanities coursework is that I wouldn’t feel comfortable hiring someone who does not have the skills to write a research paper. At the undergraduate level, it is only in the humanities courses that you are asked to do so. The science classes are all problem sets and tests.
You’d be surprised at how few humanities and social science grads can actually write a proper research paper. One of my kids was “academic chair” at hist frat and his entire focus was teaching kids how to write research papers - the process was not taught in their high schools (many high school teachers being ill-educated and standards practically non-existent) and yet the college profs all assumed the students knew how to write one.
Private high schools (and some wealthy suburban public hs) do teach the practice, and upper level/seminar course work in humanities and social sciences should involve collaboration with professors in producing acceptable research papers . Of course, there has been a very recent, very public example that is a living indictment of QC and teaching quality at Phillips Exeter (as well as Stanford and Harvard).
A lot of this can be blamed on high-stakes testing in schools. Credentialed teachers know how to write, and know how to teach writing, particularly if their emphasis is on English or reading comprehension.
It's Goodhart's law in action -- when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Because it's hard for teachers to read essays at scale, more teaching time is devoted to problems that students will see on the tests. Teachers' abilities are evaluated on the basis of students filling out the right bubble.
Testing is an efficient system benefitting lawmakers, administrators and real estate agents, but it undermines the work of teachers and stultifies students.
Hmm
One would have thought that knowledge - of the human condition, hatred, love, history, war, politics, philosophy would be reason enough to be well versed in humanities (yes, I am lumping in social “sciences”, including econ, psychology).
To reduce non-technical pursuits in business to “backslapping” is unbelievably simplistic. Every product or meme or narrative is consumed by humans. It is not the best built product that wins the battle.
Coding skills today will be about as useful as the skills I used at an old summer job I had repairing circuit boards- with solder. Between AI and the developing world, all the basic coding skills anyone would want will be available for next to nothing. Systems architecture and higher level supervisory and design skills will still be highly valued but are never going to support even a tiny fraction of the labor force (also because only a tiny fraction of people have the skills for this).
With social media we are becoming a society of Id and emotion rather than knowledge, understanding, analysis and perspective. Sure, the current professoriate in humanities and most social sciences is incapable of building out the latter characteristics in society, being consumed by Marxist dogma and activism, but that speaks to a need to revitalize and value humanities and social sciences. And yes, you can learn to code, learn some math and use spreadsheets while learning soft subjects.
At the dawn of the PC era (late 1970s) it was thought that everyone would have to have technical skills. My roommate (who became a PhD psychologist) had to take calculus and FORTRAN and SAS to get his undergrad degree. Even History majors had to take BASIC at my university (I don’t think English or language majors had to as computing was aligned with the stats classes that social science majors were required to take).
It is interesting that instead of embracing computing and better statistical analysis, these fields rejected it by the early 1990s at many universities. This was a mistake, obviously. The push to digital humanities that came later is not enough to overcome decades of separation from our tech-driven world.
Long way of saying that I think everyone at university should be exposed to humanities and social science and everyone should be exposed to tech, stats, math, CS.
Note that AI is going to help the process of selling/designing products for humans, too. Imagine creating hundreds of fake influencers who can iterate different approaches/pitches (perhaps using fake/prototype products that haven’t been built yet) plus using human interaction with LLMs as market research and to segment audiences. The potential for overload is immense, though.
What influencering (I know that's not a real word, but that's how millennials, zoomers and homelanders talk) has going for it is mostly the influencers being a perky, conventionally attractive woman.
The male influencer equivalent is being Andrew Tate in appearance and, ugh, outlook.
"The U.S. is not a plutocracy". I think that is FAR too strong a conclusion to draw from those redistribution statistics. And that conclusion contradicts the well known statistics about how shares of wealth and income have been increasing in the top 1%, not to mention the studies of how the interests of the 1% are represented in government policy far more than the interests of others. So maybe not a pure plutocracy, but rather a plutocracy that throws some crumbs to the masses to keep them from rising up. We've seen that in the past too.
Sounds like the top 1% is doing well, and the bottom 50% is doing relatively well; but the sort of people who work for the media, who are maybe at the 10% percentile of income/wealth, aren't doing quite so well, and they yell at the people above or below them depending on their partisan lean. And because they set the narrative, the received wisdom significantly underplays the state of the economy.
I think that his point was that if we were a plutocracy (where the wealthy were calling the shots), we would not have allowed the bottom 50% such an increase in prosperity. He was not arguing that the rich don't have more influence on politics than he (or you and I) would like. Merely that they aren't actually running the show completely (i.e. plutocracy).
I wrote: "So maybe not a pure plutocracy".
The idea that it is a plutocracy at all suggests that there is fundamentally something wrong with our system of government. There isn't. Everyone, including the rich, deserves representation. Calling it a plutocracy because you believe that the rich are over-represented is just grousing. Work (vote, donate, proselytize) instead towards improving the balance of representation.
[edit: It's equivalent to Conservatives pretending that every petty bit of progressive monetary policy is "Communism."]
Obviously there is something wrong with our government in that the interests of the rich (and their corporations) are much better represented. Functionally, we are a plutocracy. Democracy implies equality of representation, and we do not have that. The proper "balance of representation" in democracy would leave the top 1% with 1% of the power. I could live with that.
And no, it's not the equivalent of conservatives yammering about "communism".
More like the morlocks and Eloi than a 1 percent thing, I think
Asking about the social purpose of the humanities is like asking about the social purpose of religious faith. The value is to the individuals who study them, and that is what they are for, regardless of what other things come into society from the actions of those individuals. The liberal education is for the development of the human mind, not for production of social outputs. This has been so since classical times.
Yes, it is a great privilege to have the time and money and support to pursue this sort of personal self-development, and it's not surprising that there is less demand for it given the (unnecessarily) soaring cost of traditional university study and the credentialization of everything. I would argue that liberal education produces a great deal of value in the job market, but it's harder to discern (especially if you don't know how to look for it) because it's not a credential, it's not a body of knowledge, but a quality of the person.
Most universities are doing a terrible, terrible job of conveying what a humanities education is for. The "activist" turn has been absolutely destructive, and not even effective at self-protection. Much of the social-purpose stuff that universities are doing can be (and will be) done by alternative, more efficient methods: certificate programs, boot camps, apprenticeships, online programs, whatever. But only a university can fulfill the role of bringing people together to preserve and enrich knowledge, purely as knowledge. Otherwise, what good is it?
I think that solid, rigorous humanities education should move out of universities (for the most part) and into high schools. Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Edward Gibbon and so on are absolutely crucial thinkers to understand Western cultural heritage, and no matter what your skin color is if you're an American with English as your first language, you are a Westerner. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that offered philosophy my senior year and not to my surprise smart teenagers find philosophy very interesting - some of the study groups turned into engaged friendship circles that are still going. Some of them, if they're still engineers or business peons are probably more self aware with better judgment than others. If we could even raise teacher pay, good prospects as a high school teacher with engaged students might take a lot of the sting out of the wasteland that is the academic job market for humanities Ph.ds.
It still is a crisis. Generally, humanities majors were selected for good jobs in the past by being able to read and write when general standards for literacy were a lot lower and few people went to college. "Learning to think/write" is no longer enough and universities haven't caught up.
That is an interesting thought. In my mother's time (1950's) you had that kind of education (with Latin and everything) in the good public high schools that every sizeable city had. And of course it has always been so in the best-quality Catholic education. Even if you didn't go on to college, you could come out of high school with a first-rate mental foundation that would be valuable to you for the rest of your life. But many fewer people went to high school then. Kids were still going to work at 16.
I having trouble imagining how it could be done today, except in very selective schools. I mean, it could be done by extraordinary teachers (I had two) but by definition there are few of those. Even with the most motivated students, the pressure for grades and scores introduces a transactional quality that works against the goal of mental cultivation. As does, in spades, the political puritanism of the times.
My kids came out of their very fine high schools and colleges with the idea that the humanities are a bunch of correct moral judgments that their teachers and professors have imparted to them. They can write an essay pretty well, but the business of digesting different points of view and coming to your own understanding about what they say, doesn't seem to have been stressed much.
My main interest is history, and most of the historical works that have had enduring value and excitement for me have been produced by non-academic scholars: Ron Chernow, Daniel Yergin, Barbara Tuchman. I'm sure Eric Foner is valuable to Columbia University, but I don't think he needed Columbia to do the powerful work he has done on Reconstruction (and besides that was a long time ago). I don't know how academic historians can possibly produce anything of broader value in the treacherous political and career environment they work in. And I guess you could say it shows.
So if the university is good neither for teaching or research, what good it is it? For history, I've thought that maybe there's value in applying AI to the nuts and bolts of gathering and organizing facts and citations and making interconnections that junior academics have to do, leaving some kind of scholars workshop organization for the actual creative work of understanding and explanation.
I wonder what would happen if we went back to the system they had in the Middle Ages, where professors were paid per lecture by their students. Those who could really teach, would make a good living. Those who couldn't, would have to find other jobs.
My son was interested in philosophy and read different philosopher's works outside of his high school classes. He was able to apply what he read in history/social studies, government and his English class discussions. But I don't believe he had actual philosophy classes offered in high school. He went to community college and took those classes he was very interested in. After his service in the Navy, continued his degree studying psychology. His master's work, clinically, was in neuro-psych doing research on Dementia/Alzheimers assessment. He stayed for a year post grad and is now just working as a data scientist at a medical school. I think he wants to get back into clinical work though. He continues to have deep interest not only in philosophy but also spirituality (he has studied religions as well).
In theory, couldn't a humanities degree be quite affordable? You just need the teachers, right? Like the hardcore engineering degrees require some real physical plant investment... It seems odd to me that the humanities degrees are offered at a similar price.
Cost disease: the people are the expensive part, because they don’t scale - at least not to grading, office hours, and in person discussion.
Instructors in the humanities are paid peanuts though (sometimes as low as a few thousand dollars per class) the real problem is the giant stack of useless administrators sitting above them.
There is a thing called the Iceland Writers workshop where people can pay to go to Iceland for several days and participate in workshops with established invited writers. It’s not cheap but a few of these a year are cheaper than a university-based masters program and could provide a focused expert in-person component to an otherwise online structure, that could be better than weekly class attendance. I suspect things like this will get extended to other areas of the humanities.
Sounds like it's based on the Iowa Writers Workshop which may be the oldest and most famous of these. Though the Iceland version does have Jeanette Walls, who my wife is a huge fan of.
I guess? I think I'm also just underestimating the overhead of running the whole operation, now that I'm looking up some university budgets... I was just starting with a building and a few teachers & it seemed pretty straightforward :)
Couple things I have learned working at a four-year commuter college.
1) people do not realize just how cheap a college degree can be. You just go to community college for two years, living at home, and then attend a local college. Half of the cost is generally for room and board, and tuition at community colleges are either cheap, or now in some states free.
My daughter's degree was $25k which I think is very affordable, especially for a nursing degree. Part of this was because her first 2 years at CC were free (community college is free in our state). My son's degree was $80k. He went to a four-year college, lived on campus etc. My daughter's degree actually pays better as well.
When people think of the cost of college, they generally think of attending a four-year school and living on campus. Those things are nice but basically luxuries.
Also, community colleges are one of the great, unsung institutions in America. Please support them (again I work at a four-year college, so this is not self-promotion...community colleges really are an underappreciated institution).
2) This is really frustrating. At the college I work at the softer degree's, humanities, soft sciences, etc. pay for the prestige degree's (CS, engineering, etc.). I am not familiar enough with other universities to say this is universal but suspect it is. Basically, our psych, history, English type majors are overpaying (especially relative to job prospects but also just in terms of the cost of their degree), to fund your engineering, CS, hard sciences.
I have always thought that the purpose of the humanities is otium. This Latin word means “not working.” In Roman society, the slaves did the work, and the best of the masters, like Cicero and Seneca, used their non-working time to think things over. The results might be useful, or they might not be useful, but you didn’t have to justify your ruminations on the basis of utility.
For the first few centuries, science lived in the world of otium. Now we know that theoretical science will always lead to practical results, but that was seldom true for the first few centuries.
Otium produces the unexpected. If you always know where you’re going and why you’re going there, you will seldom end up with anything truly new.
I see it as a contrast between exploring and application. When you are focused on application, you are trying to commercialize an idea. When you are an explorer, you don't care whether those ideas have commercial applications or not. When I made a choice to be an explorer in the 1960s, I knew I was almost certainly not going to have a robust income.
The training element of classical education kind of fascinates me. Men of this class learned grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy to prepare them for persuasion and leadership among their peers, and for doing their duties to the state. St Augustine's otium allowed him to write the profoundest works of Christian philosophy, but when the people of his bishopric needed someone to go out and talk to the Vandals, he was ready. He had been prepared for it.
It is true that classical education was designed to enable the top layer of society to be great communicators— something like a combination of lawyer and PR man.
Augustine lived a life of otium before he became a bishop and that was the basis for his later achievements. Wikipedia states:
"Augustine looked back years later on the life at Cassiciacum, a villa outside of Milan where he gathered with his followers, and described it as Christianae vitae otium – the leisure of Christian life.[79]"
However, his job as a bishop took up many hours every day. He was expected to preach almost daily, and he was expected to arbitrate any dispute within his congregation, including the ownership of a sheep. The following is from Bing AI, which I find the most accessible and useful AI, when used with discretion:
"Augustine's office came with multiple tasks, and he became a busy man. He was famous for his knowledgeable preaching and was expected to hold sermons all over the place¹.
He was also known to approach officials and intercede on behalf of debtors or accused; prisons had to be visited and people needed protection from being ill-treated¹. Powerful landlords had to read his letters of reproof or advice when he intervened on behalf of their subordinates¹. Augustine's position included guidance of his clergy and monastery as well as administrative responsibility for the church’s finances¹.
In his role as an arbitrator, Augustine applied his comprehension of the divine agenda to the day-to-day legal conflicts in his bishop’s court¹. This role was an important part of his duties as a bishop and a key aspect of his leadership within his congregation¹.
(1) Saint Augustine | Biography, Philosophy, Major Works, & Facts. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Augustine.
(2) Justice Applied by the Episcopal Arbitrator: Augustine and the Im .... https://www2.units.it/etica/2007_2/KUHN.pdf.
(3) Justice Applied by the Episcopal Arbitrator: Augustine and the .... https://www.openstarts.units.it/handle/10077/5268.
(4) Augustinians - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinians
On top of all this, Augustine also spent his meals lecturing his ecclesiastical household who were being prepared for church leadership— virtually all of them became bishops. Augustine's ecclesiastical household also became the ones who took down his sermons and made sure his writings were copied. They are responsible for his ongoing influence.
Augustine's practice became a model for other bishops—the junior clergy around the bishop's table became known as cannons. In superficial histories of the Middle Ages, one hears about monks and friars, but seldom about cannons who played who became the backbone of the dioceses.
I was immediately struck by the difference in style and clarity between the Wikipedia quote and the AI quote. The former was precise and readable, the second unfocused and pseudo-conversational. I don't expect phrases like "became a busy man" and "all over the place" in a description of duties; the organization of the presentation is inefficient and doesn't lead from one point to the next, producing some "Wait - what?" moments. It seems like more of an unorganized list than a cohesive explanation.
If this is a sample of AI output, I fear for our language.
Actually, Bing AI has three levels of style: More creative—more balanced—more precise. I have only ever asked for the more precise style. Generally speaking, the language of this Bing style is more academic in tone.
Basically, AI is plagiarism, and here it must be plagiarizing a breezy source. However, Bing did a much better job covering the wide range of Augustine's activities than Wikipedia did, it also has the advantage of Linking to source materials, and of course I just don't have time to rewrite everything. Bing did miss Augustine's role in establishing the concept of an ecclesiastical household of young men in training.
BTW, I shudder to think what Bing "more creative" would give me. "Ah, Augustine that poor man!"
Even if the people working on AI are highly educated and intelligent, they know they have to still be able to meet meet users at a 6th-grade level. In this way it's similar to journalism.
Good point. Because various AI programs are directed toward various goals, maybe there will one day be an AI program directed toward the needs of scholars. I tried the same search on Augustine on Chat GPT, and the product was much inferior.
I think of Gregory of Tours in a similar role (ecclesiastic and political) among the knife- and poison-wielding barbarians at the not-yet-court of the not-yet-French. He had to have a lot of skills, and much judgment and discretion.
Theoretical Science does not _always_ lead to practical results, and when it does it still often is in completely unexpected ways. If String Theory leads to high temperature superconductors, we can move it out of the world of otium, but nobody expected this, and it wasn't why the String Theorists got into the field.
I would be happy to correct my statement to almost always eventually leads to practical results.
But how much of this is selection bias? We all know of many, many cases where this practical development has occurred, but the cases where the theoretical science never lead anywhwere, or was mostly useless as science don't get remembered. As building computer models and simulations become the default way to do more and more theoretical science, it becomes ever easier to end up in theoretical cul-de-sacs which aren't grounded in reality at all and thus won't have any practical results. And how to we measure this? I think that justifying basic research on the grounds that it will eventually pay off is dangerous. Exploring and acquiring knowledge is a basic human good. Isn't that enough?
That's the point I was trying to make: exploring is worthwhile without a practical end in view. However, it is hard for me to understand how a successful advance in theory in the hard sciences would not have some payoff eventually.
The funding money tends to go toward popular pursuits with potential payoff. We’ve moved on quite a bit from the Royal Society days!
Alas, I know. And I teach computer modelling classes. Computer models are a great way to play around with various aspects of your theory. But I find more of my students aren't interested in figuring out whether their ideas are correct or not. They want lessons in how to tweak the model to produce the result that they want for the next bit of funding, even if the theory is completely bogus.
We're pretending that String Theory is science now? \S
Never heard the term "degrowth" and love this quote: "Degrowth can make these extravagant promises only by pretending that words suddenly mean the exact opposite of what they used to mean. Creating prosperity is growth. That is what growth is. That is what it means. That is its definition." A replay of communism with a different idealistic goal ?
Humanities are useful. I was a philosophy and economics major. Both were obviously useful, and one can theoretically trace a through line of economics to hedge funds to venture capital, etc, but the actual "skills" within economics were not actually that useful until "relearned" later on in context anyway.
Philosophy, on the other hand, has given me a lifelong ability to conceptualize arguments people have around morality and clarify them. Often to the degree that suddenly makes the other party surprised they held a somewhat inconsistent set of principles to begin with. It's also given me a much sounder basis to be comfortable holding views that sometimes are contrary to my peers. That's important because leadership in innovative fields is rarely about being exactly the same as everyone else.
Humanities are useful. I think they're even economically useful, which, as you say, in a world where soft skills are more and more important as a "human touch" when AI can take over more and more "boring hard stuff."
The bigger problem is the academy doesn't know how to frame that argument. Many of the professors have never worked a day in their lives outside the academy and don't know how it can be useful or not. This goes for some STEM professors as well—but they simply have an easier argument or don't have to make one at all. When students don't think a subject is useful in the "real world," the last group that can make a coherent argument about why that’s not true has never been in it.
Maybe we need to be careful about the term "plutocracy". Study after study has shown that the legislatures are far more responsive to the wealthy (donors, lobbyists, etc) than anything corresponding to their constituencies. Now, that inevitably leads to a skewed system in favor of an oligarchy (especially now that the doors are wide open on corporate and dark money contributions).
Yes, there have been some movements towards being more progressive, but in response to a system that had moved away from that for years (starting with Reagan). There is a reason why most people believe that the "system" is rigged against them - they see the wealthy able to get large tax breaks (and hide even larger sums), they see anti-labor practices, they see wealthy able to get off lightly on various financial crimes, they see no one punished for the 2008 crash (except the homeowners who lost their homes). Going to be awfully hard to counter that with a few studies that show things are starting to improve a bit.
I agree. There's a considerable difference between the government redistributing funds to the lower 50% and the 10-50% making a living wage from a single job.
I agree. At this point I have no faith in the Supreme Court. I feel that there are Justices who are bought and paid for and instead of relying on the Constitution and our laws, they instead, are motivated in their decisions by their religion... and of course the big money gifts, trips, etc.
I've got a lot more reading to do now!! Good stuff
It's important to distinguish between the social value of studying the Humanities and the social value of Humanities research. I think there is a lot of value in studying the Humanities, mostly for reason others have articulated below (see Casey). But I don't believe most Humanities research has a lot of social value.
History is an exception here. Original historical research often has a broad impact on how we understand the world, and it makes sense to have a group of people trained and incentivized to produce more of it. The rest of the Humanities are different imo (disclaimer--I am a philosophy PhD drop out). With a few rare exceptions, most of the original research produced by philosophy and lit professors is extremely insular and tailored to a narrow audience. There are exceptions (e.g. John Rawls) but they are rare and it's not obvious to me that we need to structure a whole profession around generating more original philosophy research. The real social value of Philosophy and Lit professors lies on the teaching side, but the incentives mostly reward research. Is it any wonder student interest is declining when professors spend most of their time thinking about what will impress their colleagues instead of what will be interesting and relevant to students.
“the potentially FRAUDULENT research in question is on the topic of DISHONESTY, and has little if any connection to economics.”
How ironic is that? Was the research funded by the Mar a Lago Foundation?
Conducted by the Christopher Rufo Honorary Chair of Academic Ethics?
Educators should agree that the “identitarian drift” noted by Mr. Harper conflicts with a liberal arts education.
The breadth of a liberal arts education teaches students to gather and evaluate information and ideas across disciplines; it is inherently apolitical. What is the difference between art and craft? Does this academic study engage in p-hacking? How do you utilize AI agents to generate an information campaign?
As an antidote to ‘siloing’, a liberal arts education can be more valuable than ever, both to the individual and to companies seeking qualified staff.
I studied science and English as an undergrad, English/fiction and expository writing in grad school. I was a working-class Catholic, pretty far from a WASP world. If forced to choose which was more valuable in the world outside academia, I’d go with English. There are plenty of examples of successful corporate leaders who studied anything but business. Herb Kelleher and Peter Thiel studied philosophy -- both were outliers in their respective business sectors.
Fortunately, I haven’t had to worry about money for decades, traveled the world, yadda, yadda, yadda. Thank goodness for the study of English and a love of reading. How does a guy like Warren Buffett spend most of his day? Answer: reading, thinking, and writing. If you do these well, you have only a handful of important business decisions to make in a lifetime.
Yeah, in principle the humanities is as much of a path to prosperity as STEM, if not more so in some cases. I think the issue is really adverse selection. Humanities for at least the last few decades seems to have segments that have vastly different approaches to whichever topic, some clarifying and some obfuscating (through indecipherable language, questionable theories, and leftist orientation). I would guess that as the field has gotten smaller, the obfuscation segment has grown in prominence. When (some of) the new ideas coming out of the humanities are things like "punctuality is white supremacy," something is clearly wrong.