posted on August 22, 2018 06:11 PM by
u/zhezhijian
28
u/BewareTheSphere50 pointsat 1534962990.000000
I wouldn’t put an average humanities student (across all humanities
fields) up against an average non-humanities student, though.
I think what a lot of opinions in that thread, including the one I’ve
quoted, overlook is that it’s not STEM vs humanities, because the
average non-humanities student is, in fact, a business major.
I'm pretty sure Galef, like most STEM-aholics, mistakes an inability to cope with ambiguity for a sign of intelligence. She looks at something like the arts, sees that there's no right answer, and concludes that these fields must automatically be stupid, instead of thinking, "hm, maybe there's something here that I don't get and I should work on that."
Really, I think we should emphasize more that while there are no "right" answers per se, there are (if you'll allow me a bit of vulgar Popperism here) definitely wrong ones. And a lot of them. Memetics is gibberish, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker are full of shit, pop sociobiology has been debunked, Michel Foucault never said that any view is as good as any other, etc. Frameworks like Whig history and orthogenetic evolution have been discarded for good reason. For the rationalists, however, they're completely impervious to reason or evidence because to debunk them is to debunk major tenets of rationalism.
>mistakes an inability to cope with ambiguity for a sign of intelligence
Can't find it right now, but someone demonstrated a relationship between occurrences of all kind of bigotry and difficulty coping with ambiguity. If that's truly the case, that explains a lot about what's regularly mocked on this sub.
There's a possible link between being an engineer and becoming a terrorist: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/03/scientists-easy-prey-jihadis-terrorists-engineering-mindset
> What Rose has done is to highlight three specific traits that characterise the “engineering mindset”: first, it asks “why argue when there is one best solution?”; second, it asserts “if only people were rational, remedies would be simple”; and third, it appeals to those with an underlying craving for a lost order, which lies at the heart of both salafi and jihadi ideology.
>“why argue when there is one best solution?
>
>“if only people were rational, remedies would be simple”
It's ironic that those mindsets are celebrated in engineering and other STEM subjects because they're antithetical to the flexible thinking espoused in Polya's *How to Solve It* and hell, innovation in general. People vigorously trying to push One Right Answer^(TM) need to at least fucking attempt to speak in caveats, exemptions, and qualifiers instead of talking with the arrogance of people who refuse to adapt to changing problem definitions. Wasn't there a whole book about the catastrophic failures of top-down imposed "scientific" solutions, *Seeing Like A State,* which Scott reviewed a while ago? Did they not learn anything?
There was a thread on that a while back and I think we all concluded that the lesson Alexander took from Seeing Like a State was the problem that the state enterprises were merely poorly optimized.
My takeaway was that Scott is emotionally stunted. The book is so obviously written to engineer an attitude of humility, but I don't think Scott is capable of grokking that due to aforementioned emotional stuntedness.
You've hit on one of the central contradictions of the rationalist project, which is that everyone is going to think about the social and metaphysical worlds but the rationals, at the same time, have to discard much of the body of work in these areas because of their slavish devotion to scientistic aesthetics. So because everything has to be reworked ostensibly from first principles, what you end up with is a mangled hodgepodge of archaic and uncredited social theory, pop science, incoherent analogies from engineering and programming, mis-applied mathematical theorems, armchair speculation, and techno-fetishist reworkings of religion. Of course, none of this is really from first principles -- it comes from the "common sense" (really the "deposit of prejudices" as Einstein reportedly called it) understanding of the world mostly derived from 21st c. tech-sector workers living in California. As a result, it's not surprising that they end up replicating slight updates or variations on older forms of bullshit like Whig history or eugenics.
> As a result, it's not surprising that they end up replicating slight updates or variations on older forms of bullshit like Whig history or eugenics.
Working from first principles, I've discovered this novel* conclusion!
*I've never checked if it's actually new, or discredited. Just if my political sphere or forum has been talking about it recently.
Ok, it's old. But, using the "science" of epistemology, it's obviously worth a revisit, because *this time* the argument could be right. Note: still haven't checked old arguments. That's *bias*.
>*this time*
The classic "[bad science](https://www.jstor.org/stable/688902?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)" defense. If you have to open your book or article with a disclaimer that the old eugenics was bad but we've got the good stuff now, it's time to reevaluate your entire career trajectory, and your morality.
> But wait, one place where it is covered is in graduate logic courses, which is part of the - gasp - philosophy department.
Serious question: what is the philosophical interest in Brouwer's fixed point theorem?
I ask because, as someone with a PhD in logic, it wasn't covered in any of the logic classes I took. (We did prove it in a topology class though.) And the logical interest in Brouwer's theorem isn't in the theorem per se. Rather, the interest is in the metamathematics/phil. o' math implications of the theorem—it's not constructively valid, it's equivalent to weak König's lemma over RCA\_0, etc. So while I wouldn't be surprised to see it covered in a philosophy of mathematics class, I'm not sure why it would show up in a logic class in a philosophy department.
> Yeah, I was referring to philosophy of mathematics.
Ah, gotcha.
> What's your thesis about?
Set theory. (I'd prefer not to be more specific on a public forum.)
Oh, no, I don't care about this forum becoming too toxic. I _prefer_ it when this forum is nasty to ignorant, racist rationalists. Mostly I was remembering how BrotherOfASun was accusing me of being emotionally abusive while you were going hmm, maybe BrotherOfASun has a point about this place being too toxic, even though that douchebag cared more about Ozy's hurt feelings than the rationalist community driving Kathy to suicide and /u/PolyamorousNephandus confronted him about it, and he dodged her point. I vividly recall feeling annoyed at your priorities.
>I apologise for making "maybe he has a point" seem like it was directed at you, though.
Not your fault, though I do appreciate it! I don't expect you to be familiar with what he said to me and PolyamorousNephandus, or to feel as crappy as I did about it, but I walked away with the very strong feeling he was acting in bad faith, and that he'd been the one saying abusive things. I was mostly disappointed in you for taking advice from an asshole on being _nicer_ to rationalist assholes when you have been so splendidly sneerful!
Hah, it is partly out of self-interest. I was extremely angry when he accused me of being borderline emotionally abusive, and him being a dick to you was such sweet vindication. There's nothing worse than a nerd using sanctimonious bad-faith earnestness to cover up his own bad behavior.
Haaahahaha a rationalist questioning the value of the humanities?
That never happens. I was never told my political degree meant nothing
because I wasn’t developing an app. Haaaahahahahaha.
And then: rationalists end up hopelessly politically naive and ineffectual at attaining their political goals. It's a mind-killer, I don't need to pay attention to ti!
With the power of Bayes' Theorem I can derive politics from first principles and my resulting mental model is that neoliberal democracy is a benevolent utopia, so it must be the blacks who are wrong.
It is also worth noting with Bayes Theorem that rationalists should be governed only by themselves and so not only is neoliberal democracy a benevolent utopia, it is also a bureaucratic hellhole in which the intelligentsia are kept down by malevolent forces, and Peter Thiel should be our god and master by virtue of how smart he is.
Also, the blacks are wrong and fucking land mines will solve immigration.
> fucking land mines will solve immigration.
Honestly, that's my rhetorical technique. I need more tests of MAGA-crowd morality. I check where they deem too far:
1) $50B wall, passable with ladders or tunnels
2) Deep landmines. North Korea is best Korean ideas
3) Same distance, but instead a poisonous moat
4) Moats are expensive, just dump [radioactive cobalt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60). Illegal crossers die, or are easily detected with a Geiger counter.
5) Destroy Mexico
6) Ask someone who got this far.
> Is there any evidence a STEM education makes you less likely to have dumb/over-simplistic views?
Most of what I've learned about nuance, humanity, and kindness has come from someone from a non-STEM background, so.
>Is there any evidence a STEM education makes you less likely to have dumb/over-simplistic views?
I feel like it makes you more likely to ignore non-quantitative views.
Source: this guy was STEM in a liberal arts college. N= roughly 50 people I talked to. Most of whom liked drinking. People are obviously perfectly honest and random when drinking.
Edit: Like all proper STEM students, I've plainly stated my bias, so my results take such bias into effect. Good day sir.
No, it just lets you marshal more facts in favor of your dumb and
over-simplistic views. That’s the only way I can explain folks like
Steven Pinker, Samuel Huntington, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson,
etc.
Pinker was also a well-regarded cognitive scientist working in language learnability and visual perception. Doesn't mean he isn't peddling bullshit now.
Most of these guys are. Their bullshit tends to come out whenever they step out of their actual (usually quite boring) specialization. Classic case of "I wrote something good about this one thing so therefore my grand theory of Everything must be right!" (also, it sells more, so why do real research when you can spew out shit and earn the money?)
Huntington's stuff was part of his actual academic work though. Unless we're talking about some bullshit he was on besides the racial essentialism that underpinned "Clash of Civilizations?"
It's why I wouldn't bundle him in with the Pinker-esque breed of rationalist-bros. He was doing actual political science using the standard methodologies of the discipline and was properly familiar with the relevant work that had been done in that field before. Even the political scientists who strongly disagree with him take his work seriously. He's not someone you can casually dismiss out of hand.
He had some blind spots and empirical issues that led him to be wrong on some key points. But that puts him in the same boat as people like Fukuyama or Fouad Ajami. While their big-ideas were off, a lot of the argument that went into them made some strong, even prescient and original observations. It's a mistake to dismiss him as just being a total crank.
This is in contrast to guys like Pinker who are just 100% engaged in motivated reasoning and sophistry. There isn't anything of value there, it's really work on the level of stoner Freshmen doing "philosophy." They're totally unfamiliar with most of the actual hard work in the field and they pull a lot of sleight of hand to score rhetorical points rather than make strong arguments.
This is essentially what I mean by simply having the ability to marshal more facts for your over-simplistic ideas. It's fair to say that Pinker's recent stuff is not even really part of an academic discourse (at best in a weird gray zone created by the publishing industry), but my general point was that you can make an over-simplified look even better if you have some engagement with the reality of current (or then-current) academic discourse that puts you above cranks. Whether or not these were based on standard political science methodology of the time, Huntington and Fukuyama's popular work is a rehash of the debates between normative theory/culture-history (or "racial essentialism" as you call it) and social evolutionism, respectively, that started in the 19th c. This is why Huntington's main thesis is debunked trivially by people like [Said](https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-The-Myth-of-Clash-Civilizations-Transcript.pdf) or [Graeber](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west). It was out of date before it was even published -- Wolf outlined all the problems with it just in his [introduction to his book Europe and the People Without History](https://is.muni.cz/el/1490/jaro2015/CZS13/um/lecture1/1_4_Wolf.pdf) before Huntington put pen to paper for Clash of Civilizations.
>Whether or not these were based on standard political science methodology of the time, Huntington and Fukuyama's popular work is a rehash of the debates between normative theory/culture-history (or "racial essentialism" as you call it) and social evolutionism that started in the 19th c. This is why Huntington's main thesis is debunked trivially by people like Said or Graeber.
There is a difference in *how* he's being debunked though. Huntington gets debunked by people reading what he's saying, breaking his account down to its constituent claims, and pointing out the places where he's operating from a faulty premise. That's just standard dialectical refinement of ideas. This is what I mean when I say even his detractors take him seriously. There is actual value in that kind of debate, and despite being wrong in general, he still makes some strong and prescient points along the way that are worth grappling with.
In contrast, when you listen to Pinker talk he's not really *saying* anything worthwhile. It's hard to even know where to start when talking about him because the whole edifice is dodgy. You kind of just [stand there blinking, dumbfounded.](https://d34tp322e0pcja.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/29125856/thats-not-how-this-works.gif)
>Huntington gets debunked by people reading what he's saying, breaking his account down to its constituent claims, and pointing out the places where he's operating from a faulty premise.
People have done the same thing with Pinker's pop stuff -- Huntington just doesn't make the same basic, blatant factual errors that Pinker does because his work is within his own field. I'm not saying everything Huntington does is bullshit, I'm saying it gives credibility to an over-simplified thesis BECAUSE it is buttressed by so much scholarly content. I'd buy that this was a dialectical refinement of ideas if it weren't published in 1993, which is an extremely late date to be rehashing that sort of normative model or racial essentialism.
>Huntington just doesn't make the same basic, blatant factual errors that Pinker does because his work is within his own field.
That's kind of my point. The fact that he doesn't make those blatant errors is why he got taken seriously. When someone is totally off base it's hard to argue with them because the sheer volume of nonsense overwhelms. It's trying to work against a Gish Gallop.
I guess my general point is kind of a reference to Frankfurt's bit in "On Bullshit." The bullshit artist is distinct from the liar or the person who is merely wrong about something. The 2 latter groups need to actually care about what the truth is, the liar because they want to lead you away from it and the wrong person because they're actually trying to get there themselves.
The bullshit artist, on the other hand, doesn't give a damn about what is or isn't true. They just want to say whatever they need to say to score rhetorical points for their position. It's this sort of indifference to the actual truth that makes it impossible to have productive discussions with the professional trolls and nonsense launderers. But you can have productive discussions with the people who are merely wrong.
> I'd buy that this was a dialectical refinement of ideas if it weren't published in 1993, which is an extremely late date to be rehashing that sort of normative model or racial essentialism.
Academia is a gerontocracy though. If you were publishing in 1993, your peers were mostly people who came of age when Jim Crow was a thing people were sincerely taking sides on.
I was mostly thinking of the historians (who are the ones I'm familiar with) VVD's work on classical greek warfare was considered stellar for it's time, and IIRC some of Ferguson's more limited stuff on victorian banking is considered OK as well.
Humanities undergrad: dumb, stupid opinions they should’ve been
embarrassed to express
STEM undergrad: dumb, stupid opinions they should’ve been embarrassed
to express, but now with a commitment to quantitative tools even where
that’s out of place, so you can tell it was a stemmy
This all seems a little disingenuous on our parts.
Someone said, “I dare you to read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s attempts at
political commentary and tell me we need more focus on STEM and less on
humanities.” And she asks, essentially, is that the goal of a humanities
education and does a humanities education succeed at that goal?
That is, she’s making a counterpoint within a specific argument and
most people here seem to be looking at it was an attack on the
humanities full-bore.
I never know what counts as the humanities, in particular with regard
to the non-economic social sciences. But, when I was involved with
teaching sociology undergraduates, this was a question I thought about a
lot and I’m not sure others thought about as much. Why would
they—teaching isn’t rewarded at the kind of universities I’ve worked
at.
I certainly have encountered my fair share of dumb, oversimplistic
views from undergraduate majors in the humanities and social sciences.
I’ve encountered many oversimplistic views about, say, religious people.
I’ve encountered many oversimplistic views about rural people. I’ve
encountered many oversimplistic views about academic discourses that
they take as givens rather than active discourses (one that comes to
mind is when words may have multiple technical definitions, such as
racism potentially meaning “prejudice plus power” but also potentially
having another definition—there’s certainly work being done by defining
racism that way as opposed to another way, but many people who insist on
that as the definition I haven’t seen articulate that
argument).
Anyway, I think in general the humanities and humanistic social
sciences do produce people better equipped to think critically about our
world, but I’m not sure what I’d point to, other than like the
Engineers of Jihad (which I don’t think necessarily applies to the
STM of STEM).
I think there is real value to the humanities, but it’s often not
about things like this.
I don't see how they don't claim to be objective. The Minitrue element of course takes it to the next level, but that's to be expected from Rationalia Man.
CHE recently ran a good piece on the bullshit of utilitarian defenses of the humanities.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/There-Is-No-Case-for-the/242724
Nobody here is saying that an education in the humanities is a surefire antidote to oversimplification, but questioning whether studying the humanities is necessary to complex and nuanced thoughts on political issues is pretty stupid. What people on this sub are reacting to is a long history of disrespect towards the subject of humanities, as enacted by STEMLords. You seem content to confine your reaction to the narrowest possible point, and good for you, I'm sure you're an excellent academic, but this place is called SneerClub for a reason.
“Literally where’s the evidence that getting an education in politics
and history might help you say fewer dumb things about politics and
history i mean literally wheres the evidence you cant show me cuz there
just isnt any”
The funny thing is that a lot of really intelligent people in science
gravitate toward learning about philosophy, etc. later in life. Sean
Carrol said in a podcast that he realized way later in life that Hume
was his intellectual hero. And Hume was just trolling…
I think what a lot of opinions in that thread, including the one I’ve quoted, overlook is that it’s not STEM vs humanities, because the average non-humanities student is, in fact, a business major.
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Haaahahaha a rationalist questioning the value of the humanities? That never happens. I was never told my political degree meant nothing because I wasn’t developing an app. Haaaahahahahaha.
[deleted]
No, it just lets you marshal more facts in favor of your dumb and over-simplistic views. That’s the only way I can explain folks like Steven Pinker, Samuel Huntington, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, etc.
Humanities undergrad: dumb, stupid opinions they should’ve been embarrassed to express
STEM undergrad: dumb, stupid opinions they should’ve been embarrassed to express, but now with a commitment to quantitative tools even where that’s out of place, so you can tell it was a stemmy
This all seems a little disingenuous on our parts.
Someone said, “I dare you to read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s attempts at political commentary and tell me we need more focus on STEM and less on humanities.” And she asks, essentially, is that the goal of a humanities education and does a humanities education succeed at that goal?
That is, she’s making a counterpoint within a specific argument and most people here seem to be looking at it was an attack on the humanities full-bore.
I never know what counts as the humanities, in particular with regard to the non-economic social sciences. But, when I was involved with teaching sociology undergraduates, this was a question I thought about a lot and I’m not sure others thought about as much. Why would they—teaching isn’t rewarded at the kind of universities I’ve worked at.
I certainly have encountered my fair share of dumb, oversimplistic views from undergraduate majors in the humanities and social sciences. I’ve encountered many oversimplistic views about, say, religious people. I’ve encountered many oversimplistic views about rural people. I’ve encountered many oversimplistic views about academic discourses that they take as givens rather than active discourses (one that comes to mind is when words may have multiple technical definitions, such as racism potentially meaning “prejudice plus power” but also potentially having another definition—there’s certainly work being done by defining racism that way as opposed to another way, but many people who insist on that as the definition I haven’t seen articulate that argument).
Anyway, I think in general the humanities and humanistic social sciences do produce people better equipped to think critically about our world, but I’m not sure what I’d point to, other than like the Engineers of Jihad (which I don’t think necessarily applies to the STM of STEM).
I think there is real value to the humanities, but it’s often not about things like this.
“Literally where’s the evidence that getting an education in politics and history might help you say fewer dumb things about politics and history i mean literally wheres the evidence you cant show me cuz there just isnt any”
The funny thing is that a lot of really intelligent people in science gravitate toward learning about philosophy, etc. later in life. Sean Carrol said in a podcast that he realized way later in life that Hume was his intellectual hero. And Hume was just trolling…
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