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Why Engineering Freshmen Should Take Humanities Courses
Lasrick sends in an article from John Horgan at Scientific American explaining why he thinks engineering freshmen should make a bit of space in their course-load for the humanities. Quoting:
"But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, 'This is how things are.' They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities,
BULLSHIT.
The "humanities" in modern American academia are so fucking orthodox they might as well be called the "government worship department."
Scientists should take courses on Rational Thinking. That's basically what you're after here, and it has the advantage of specifically targetting the problems you are trying to address, rather than taking the shotgun approach and trying to get every STEM student to become a Renaissance Man.
Engineering students should take courses in law so they can have some idea how to avoid legal problems.
Also, it could give us some lawyers who actually know what they are talking about.
I would have thought it more important that humanities students take a basic science and engineering course, so they at least have some understanding of how things work, scientific method, and what a theory is. I think the idea that scepticism comes from humanities rather than science is a joke, and shows a complete misunderstanding of falsifiability and Karl Popper's work on the philosophy of science.
In general, advocates of the humanities have done a poor job of explaining why they are necessary. Which is problematic given that one of the things one would hope that someone in the humanities could do was come up with excellent persuasive arguments about things.
Engineering students should take humanities courses, and they often do. But humanities students should also take science and engineering courses. It's called a liberal arts education, and it should be mandatory. No English major, anthropologist, or historian should get a degree without demonstrating a reasonable understanding of statistics, calculus, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
Unfortunately, most people educated in the humanities are thoroughly ignorant of science, engineering, and mathematics. As a consequences, they are completely baffled by how the modern world works and then proceed to produce utter garbage in their own fields as a result.
I was always taught the opposite...
Are you in the faculty of contradiction?
As someone with an engineering and philosophy degree, I found the humanities are just as deluded if not more so. Sure there is room for interpretation in a way that isn't possible with a science that has a greater likelihood of having a verifiable subject matter. But too often that interpretation is a narrow path. Don't believe me. Try supporting something outside the canon of though in humanities and you will face just as much dogma as anywhere else. The Humanities have their idols too, and they don't want to change them like either.
Learning Science/Engineering **should** teach logic and an understanding of fallacies. These are the most subversive skills one can have because few things in society measure up when you can see why they are incomplete or just plain wrong.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
The majority of engineering programs I have seen in Australian universities include non-technical content in the form of humanities, economics, accounting, and law units. Is this unusual? They are supposed to produce well rounded engineers, but generally demonstrate that square pegs and round holes are only sometimes compatible.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
The article seems to imply that the humanities are not science, but helping the real science (and lists engineering, of all things). I completely disagree!
Science is a way of thinking, an approach --- you can and must apply it to everything: Humanities as well as Natural Sciences as well as Engineering. It includes rigorous work, sceptical thinking, an open mind, etc. --- and it is necessary for ALL scientists to follow, regardless of their field.
I think it's just Americans.
The rest of the world doesn't even comprehend this bizarre concept of 'the humanities' that you've invented, and would outright piss itself laughing at the ridiculous arguments about its 'necessity' or otherwise in which you manage to tie yourselves up.
'Justifying their existence' is trivial, but also unnecessary: to the demand, I reply 'ars gratia artis'...
"In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, 'This is how things are.'"
That's a funny way to hear "those are only approximations", "there's always going to be some margin of error" or "we're not 100% sure how this behaves".
Many recorded signals and data are filled with noise making it difficult to tell what you are looking at. I guess it depends what level of science education you deal with, but when I teach, students look at the figures and graphs presented in the literature. Some of the effects are easy to see, others are very subtle. A basic understanding of statistics is critical for describing how we come to measure phenomena. From statistical mechanics, to understanding co-morbid disease, or computer vision, probability distributions show just how variable most things in the world actually are. If you tried to stop a stopwatch at the 1 second mark many times in a row, very rarely do you actually hit the goal, but if you plot your responses they will cluster around a mean of more or less 1 second. A large part of forming a scientist is knowing how to play in these distributions of samples.
What about the process of science? Framing a good question is hard. Is the question testable? 'What does the universe look like' is an ill posed question for a scientist. What form could the answer possibly take? If you can whittle it down, say 'what does the universe look like in the infrared spectrum.' Ok, this we can start collecting data to address, but can you still say what the answer might look like? The more specific the question, the better. If you can't clearly say what form the answer will take, then how can you expect to find it in the data?
How long have we been searching through SETI data? How will you know what evidence of communication from an extraplanetary source looks like? Is it more likely that we will find false positives, or let actual alien missives go undetected?
I think with regards to what the humanities can contribute to science education, philosophy and framing of questions is huge. Ultimately the scientist and philosopher are starting the from same place - wanting to answer a question, the difference is in how they go about finding the answer. Communication skills can never hurt scientists either - how many of you have tried to pick up a journal article expecting it to make sense on the first read? Anything that can help frame and communicate uncertainty would benefit scholars of science, but I think it naive to imply that these skills and foci are not already taught in science curricula.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
It's not just Americans, but it is the idea that everything you learn must be done in the interest of making money.
The Humanities are important because they link people with their culture on a deeper level than the latest blockbuster does. They enrich the soul and give you a place in eternity, which in turn boosts your self esteem and reduces depression. Even the things your average geek enjoys like video games and science fiction are informed on a deep level by culture and the arts.
In short, Humanities deal with the things that make life worth living. Dressing it up as hard science does both science and the arts a disservice.
In my experience, scientists and engineers come ladled with doubts on human authority. In fact, it is often something that derives their dislike of the humanities—they trust numbers and figures, but when it comes to interpreting poems or arguing politics, their skepticism leads them to wish little to do with it. (and if it's not skepticism then it's their relative lack of skill)
I go to an engineering school which has almost no arts program. (Some english, history, and philosophy -- just what we need for general accreditation.) Although I myself am pretty keen on literature and many of the humanities, I hear all the gripes from the engineers. And I can tell you exactly what is wrong with this "scientists need humanities to understand such and such" approach. Scientists and engineers understand exactly what they need to achieve what they want, and thoroughly resent being shoe-horned into somebody else's idea of a well-rounded graduate when it has absolutely nothing to do with their personal interest or goals.
If you want the STEM crowd to embrace the humanities, stop trying to justify why they should join your program and come up with a new program especially for them. Let their literature be Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. Teach them "Art in Fractional Dimension with Computer Generated Imagery." Give them a music class where they build instruments and synthesizers. Let them walk into the classroom and feel on the very first day like they have something to contribute.
When science and math students walk into a humanities classroom and all their talent and ability in math and science is immediately considered moot, it's not them rejecting the humanities, it's the humanities rejecting them.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
You say we need this to learn uncertainty, doubt and skepticism? .... silly, silly, silly ...
Maybe you missed the obvious but real engineers and scientists are pre-wired with doubt, skepticism and an every questioning, non-believing nature. We end up being what we are because we question everything, we want to know why the things are the way that they are, why things work the way that they do etc. I don't know any real engineer or scientist that is willing to leave well enough alone or do something just because it's "the way things are supposed to be" As for uncertainty ... that's a science unto itself. We all know that the world is chaos incarnate but that doesn't keep us from trying to spot the patterns :D
I almost flunked out of college in computer science because I couldn't pass my humanities classes. I had to take writing 5 times in order to finally pass--and I mean literally 5.
American English is my native language, and I'm much better at spelling and grammar than most people I know. I just can't think of things to say about literature and history for which I care nothing. In other words, my computer science brain is not well-versed in the ancient art that they eloquently call "bullshit".
If students graduate from university without a knowledge of the world outside their field, this is a despicable failure of the primary (and secondary education). Most education systems are built to give us a broad knowledge at a lower level and let us focus as we move up the educational pyramid, because only the rare renaissance genius has the ability to excel in everything. This story makes it seem as if John Horgan has some fantastic idea about giving us a broader education, but the only difference is that he feels we are focusing too early.
That, and he shows the amazing arrogance (and ignorance) to assume that his field is the important one, which the oher parties should study. Does he not think that chemical engineers may receive the same curiosity and refusal to accept "facts" from simply studying chemical science? The may also get relevant domain knowledge.
But there is one important reason why (male) engineering students may want to study humanities; your chances of procreating may increase massively. If for no other reason, then for the sheer number of women attending these courses.
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific.
But not academic.The humanities have become woefully dogmatic and riddled with citogenesis, where theories without a solid body of supporting evidence are held up as solid platforms from which other assumptions can be made. Then again, perhaps the humanities could use an influx of students of engineering and hard sciences. Could be entertaining...
The problem with what Mr Horgan is advocating is that his argument is based on his view of the Humanities subjects that he teaches, and the way he teaches them.
His view of science subjects, as fields dominated by facts and accepted doctrine based on those facts is an accurate representation of the way science subjects are taught by many teachers, but it does not match the science teaching I received from the teachers and lecturers throughout my school and university life.
There, I was taught that scientific "facts" are opinions tested and supported by experimentation, and which have not yet been proven incorrect. I was taught to consider the experiences of others, but to keep my eyes open and brain engaged, observe the world around me and to form my own opinions, then conduct my own experiments to determine the validity of those opinions. I was given the freedom to decide on the nature of those experiments - did I want to form experiments with a goal of proving and supporting my opinions (the "bias for confirmation" approach, and one in which Mr Horgan is right - we do have an immense capacity for self-and collective delusion), or did I want to actually test the accuracy of those opinions by trying to disprove them?
In short, my science teachers taught me to see all sides of a question, consider as many variables as I could find, look at things as they are instead of how I would like them to be, and form opinions based on those observations. But also to continuously re-evaluate my opinions in the light of any new information that comes to light.
I cannot comment readily on the teaching of the Humanities subjects, as from the age of 14 I concentrated exclusively on the mathematics and science disciplines, plus the fact that some of my friends were starting to experience a pronounced swelling in the chest area. However, my anecdotal recollection is that a lot of my humanities lessons were dominated by "facts" based on what was written in the Bible, a history book, geological or archaeological "facts", and accepted grammar in foreign languages.
On that basis, I feel a more accurate target for his attention would be the teaching methods in schools across all disciplines, where the individual teachers discourage independent critical thinking in favour of memorizing lists of "facts" designed to (1) prepare students for an exam, and (2) give the teacher an easier lesson plan with less preparation.
So, a professor who teaches humanities at a time when getting a job is difficult, getting a job with a humanities degree is considered a joke, and the president has put out a call for more STEM graduates, says that STEM students should take a humanities course (like his!) because it is a necessity. I wish I could believe there is no self-serving interest.
I think it lacks a bit of openness and empathy to claim that they '[they] have done a poor job of explaining why they are necessary'.
If you read any book of Dan Ariely (or even more profound, Daniel Kahneman), you could discover that we often act in very irrational ways, which also influences us in our everyday live, which does not exclude engineering work or scientific research (e.g. read the example of Kahneman, where he explains how he changed his way of going through exam papers).
Furthermore, it has a direct link to neuroscientists like David Eaglemen, which shed(s) light on similar issues from a different ( 'scientific') perspective.
There are many more examples from philosophy, economics, etc which could potentially (re)form the world view of any one of us (IMHO especially rational thinking engineers/scientists).
It is very well possible that they have done a poor job to convince you of their necessity. Regarding me, they have done an exceptional job.
He may have found a way to teach the humanities that "give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism" but those concepts are fundamental to understanding how science works and students should be getting them in their science courses. As much as some scientific education is didactic fact-loading, it is equally possible to deliver a humanities course which is dogmatic - and possibly more common seeing as the route between a text and its accepted interpretation might be significantly more difficult to lead a student through than the route between some scientific evidence and the theory that it supports.
I am also confused at how him defining psychology as a "soft" science then allows him to lump it in with the humanities?
The truth is that everyone wants to manipulate science and engineering to do their bidding and see things their way king of the same way religious people keep trying to equate science to religion or creationism to scientific theory.
Some will insist scientists and engineers should take philosophy.
Some will insist on law.
Some will insist on theology.
Some will insist on women's studies.
Some will insist on green-studies/eco-whateverism (ie, not the science focused one).
Some will insist on basket weaving.
To meet girls. Simple!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Great post! As someone pointed out in the discussion to a similar story a few months ago, once civilization gets above the level of mere subsistence, culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence--something I wholeheartedly agree with, even though I'm an engineer.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I am arguing all the scientific journals collective form a long scientific debate, each sci entist asking himself/herself asking a question she/he may think as relevant and present evidence. The questions keep fragmenting, they keep presenting evidence and eventually science comes to some kind of consensus without anyone particularly named judge or calling an end to debate.
One of them main things these humanities guys don't get it, though you can question anything, you have to accept and concede when the evidence goes against you. No matter how seriously you believe it, if it is wrong, if it is shown to be wrong, you can not dredge up all old questions all over again. There is no shame in being wrong, or changing one's mind after being persuaded by evidence. There is nothing off the record.
Of course I am generalizing based on long flame wars on creationist / evolution fora. May be I am wrong. Also scientists should also present all evidence against the point they are advocating. Like me admitting that I am generalizing based on a limited self selected subset of humanities people.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is there an actual "humanities" tag in slashdot?
Sure, humans have an innate capacity for deluding themselves.
But if you look at what the field of dedicated humanities "researchers" have produced, it staggeringly dwarfs the delusion of ordinary people.
More "humanities" equals more delusion, not less.
Obviously, you do not have a clue as to what the humanities are or what they can do for a person.
For a lesson in the humanities from a scientist I direct you to the "Cosmos" miniseries aired on PBS in 1980 (it's on DVD) created by and featuring the late astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan. While that show dealt primarily with astronomy and science, it literally oozed with the humanities. I was 17 when it first aired and it had a tremendous affect upon me. This show was one of the guiding forces of my life.
If there is any truth touted by this show it's the simple fact that the humanities are absolutely necessary for a scientist or an engineer to be fully human.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
It sounds like you've never studied Humanities at all. The true nature of such studies is a little different from your orgasmic ode to culture and the arts.
Where the definition of fully human is having been educated in humanities. And thus the circular reasoning was concluded.
Bert
At RIT, we (the engineers) had to take at least one class in each of several branches of Liberal Arts; sociology, philosophy, etc. Then we had to go on and do a "concentration" in one of those areas (a few classes short of a minor). I think this worked out well and gave us a very well rounded education. On top of this, our engineering professors stressed a level of ethics in our classes. You were always made to think about the ramifications your actions as an engineer would have on the end users. My concentration was in philosophy and this definitely played into the whole, "Think about why you're doing this and what effects it will have," mentality.
While I may have gone on to work for the military industrial complex, I instead wound up taking a job designing fire trucks. I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that my products save lives and protect property.
On the other hand, I get extremely frustrated when I see my customers waste taxpayer money with pretty much no oversight and no regards to the effectiveness of the truck so long as it wins trophies in the parade, but that's another debate...
The case for the humanities is easy:
A metaphor
Say life is about finding the shortest path through a graph. Science tells you what the edges of the graph are -- what nodes are connected to what other nodes. Engineering gives you a shortest-path algorithm (say, Dijkstra's). The humanities tell you what node to find the shortest path to
. A control-theoretic perspective:
More generally, the world has a state x(t), and science gives us the transition model -- the function f such that,
dx/dt = f(x,u)
where u(t) is our control input to the world at time t. This is Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, or Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, or whatever.
Engineering is about the following problem: Given a functional V that takes a state trajectory and returns a cost for that trajectory (this summarizes our opinion about what we want and what we do not want), solve (or approximately solve) the following optimization problem:
minu V(x) s.t. dx/dt = f(x,u) x(0) = x0
In other words: Having decided what I want (V), and having figured out how the universe will react to my actions (f), figure out how to make the universe do what I want.
The humanities are about deciding what functional V to use. Science can't give it to you: It's an input to this whole thing.
The above formulation can be tweaked a little -- for instance, there is no uncertainty involved -- but it captures the gist of things.
Which humanities? Music? Languages? History? Writing? Theology? Politics? Economics? Business? Given the amount of material that is being taught by rote and memorization in many humanities courses, it's not clear that "doubt" is a fundamental aspect of humanities. But doubt, and _testing_ are certainly core to good science courses. So is measurement and checking your work for engineering. And part of the very core of modern physics is the Heisenberg Indeterminacy principle: the fact that doing the measurement _itself_ changes the state of what you're measure. How much more doubt could you desire?
There are many reasons to study many fields in college: Too small a focus means you're vulnerable to tremendous errors from lack of knowledge of the other fields:, or even awareness of when consultation is needed. For example, learning to write well helps tremendously with _publishing_ your science or engineering work, and it's visibly lacking for many less skilled engineers I know.
Just because a large proportion of formal Humanities studies are inbred pissing contests doesn't mean that the subject isn't worth studying.
I still stand by my post although on reflection I would use the word "mind" where I put "soul."
Any engineering course worth its weight DOES NOT say this is the way the world is; it DOES teach a healthy skepticism.
In my first aero course, a quarter of the credit was for identifying weather an answer looked possible, or looked like malarky.
Other courses pointed out the variances from theideal gas law, and where they come from, and how they can be approximated.
Other courses pointed out non-newtonian behavior. Other courses dealt with the practical limitations of our understanding of structures, and disasters that have sometimes resulted.
The key here, though, is that all this healthy skepticism is based in reality. No tinfoil hat.
The Humanities, admittedly, also attempt to base their skepticism in reality. However, not having had a rigorous proving method, they have less success.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The rest of the world doesn't even comprehend this bizarre concept of 'the humanities' that you've invented...
That would be some trick, Americans defining the modern word "humanities" in Renaissance Europe. (The concept dates back to at least classical Rome.)
I am incredibly offended by the tone in the comments thread initiated by this parent node. One generalization after another. Don't count on me to come back and consult the Slashdot community on any worthwhile issue.
I have a doctorate in computer engineering. While working on that, I did coursework in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. While my CS courses were challenging, and I learned a lot, it was familiar territory with familiar thinking. In the social science courses, I had to think in a different way. Engiineering papers and psych papers are organized in totally different ways and have totally different concepts of proof. I came away from those courses not just more knowledgable but feeling as though I had grown as a person.
This is the kind of thing we want undergrads to get out of humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences. Make people think in unfamiliar ways, and then they'll come back to their own familiar domains with new approaches. It is this cross polination that forms the basis for fundamental approaches in psychology now; signal detection theory was brought over by an electrical engineer.
Also, if you're an engineer, and you want to meet really really smart women, take grad courses in psychology. :)
But don't all students have a humanities requirement? Why is this even worth writing, let alone worth posting to slashdot? Is he trying to require upper level humanities classes? I got a BA and a BS (not in engineering but Info Sys equivalent), so I already had required humanities classes taken care of. However my BS required 15 credits of humanities/ethics/social science.
When I was at MIT in the sixties, all undergraduates were required to take four semesters of "Humanities," in which we read chunks of Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Shakespeare (King Lear, I remember) and I-forget-what-all. The current requirements actually are eight semesters properly distributed in "HASS," Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and perhaps some current student will be able to say more about what that amounts to.
It wasn't a waste of time but I've never been really sure about the whole Great Books, "core" curriculum, Western canon thing. I think I learned much more about having a skeptical attitude from my science and engineering profs and from my fellow students than I did from my humanities courses. Science as taught at MIT then was not at all an authoritarian dispensation of knowledge.
The doctrine of the permanent value of certain "Great" works is sometimes called "educational perennialism," and reaches a high degree of development at St. John's College, Annapolis, where all subjects, including the sciences, are taught directly from original source texts. By all accounts it turns out well-qualified students although I'm not sure how many of them go on to engineering careers.
There is a certain arbitrary character to it. It took me a long time to figure out what the big deal about Latin and Greek was. In high school I took Latin and my understanding was that learning Latin would teach logical thought, and put me into contact with "great" works. Gradually I figured out that the reason why public high schools have Latin was that they were imitating prep schools; prep schools taught Latin because it was once an admissions requirement to Harvard; Harvard required Latin because it was imitating Oxford; Oxford required Latin because it had historic ties to the Church of England, and the Church of England was an offshoot of the Catholic-in-the-large sense church, which in turn spoke Latin (in the West) and Greek (in the East). There was also, I guess, some authentic personal enthusiasm on the part of some well-educated Brits in the 1800s for the "classics," i.e. they got a kick out of reading Horace's take on things, but I think it was mostly a cultural and historic heritage from the Church.
How many Victorian-era colleges taught Arabic so that students would be able to read al-KhwÄrizmÄ in the original, I wonder?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
(disclosure: I've been a student and I've been faculty. I write from the position of both)
Most of the STEM topics, even at the freshman level, are taught by people who *are* willing to consider that they've "got it wrong" - that their understanding of the subject is in fact incorrect or insufficient, and if someone - anyone - comes to them with a good reason to think otherwise, it's a learning opportunity for everyone. Sure, you need to show a good test case, but there's nothing like getting a full professor into the lab with you and an oscilloscope to really *learn*.
Most of the "humanities" topics are taught by people who fall to the "proof by authority" model; that because someone Respected says it's so, then it's so and any other viewpoint is simply incorrect. This point of view is especially rife in the Classics; given the finite set of source material (what remained after Alexandria burned), one can only mull so much, then it's all just rote learning. (I'll give a shout-out to sociologists here, because a lot of them at least try to do good science.)
What I still don't understand: how someone can get a four-year degree yet be unable to solve a simple system of linear equations (say, three unknowns)... and then consider themselves to be "well-rounded". Even two unknowns... and occasionally to my chagrin - ONE unknown. As in "didn't pass algebra". W. T. F. ??? Or not know the difference between mean, median, and mode? Or why light beams are a quarter as bright from only twice as far away... or how salt dissolves differently from sugar.
No wonder there's a glut of worthless college degrees on the market; rote learning without ability to reason is sufficient only to earn the title of "well educated slave", not "contributor to society".
We don't need more well-educated slaves. We need contributors.
People who study the humanities are better able to communicate with others on engineering issues. The ability to draw analogies from a broad base of understanding is immensely helpful in describing complex problems and solutions.
Well, let me make the case for them:
1. There's more to "the humanities" than literature and the arts. They also include language and linguistics, philosophy, and sometimes history.
2. There are skills that fall under "the humanities" that are damn useful - anyone can benefit from being able to write or speak well, anyone can benefit from learning what is and isn't a valid argument, and anyone can benefit from learning how to extract an idea of reality from documents that are frequently suspect or outright lying.
3. There are overlaps between humanities and STEM fields. For example, writing a decent compiler or interpreter requires concepts from linguistics.
4. The point of education isn't just to produce workers. An educated person should have a basic understanding in a wide variety of fields, not enough to necessarily be an expert but enough to understand an argument about a subject and how to verify claims made about it.
I am officially gone from
When I was in engineering at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) in the mid-80s, it was already mandatory for students to take a humanities course each year (after the first). I took introductory Classics, Philosophy, and Religion. They weren't bird courses but they were a nice break from the applied maths and science courses that filled the rest of my life.
Of course, some engineers gamed the system by taking the Logic course from the Philosophy Department.
Engineers see plenty of uncertainty in their junior/senior lab courses. The whole point there is to show them that the world does not follow theory and they have to figure out how to deal with it.
I am thankful my dad encouraged me to go into engineering as opposed to pure science. He said the biggest difference were the engineering labs and he was totally correct IMHO.
I don't understand the need to pit religion against science, or for that matter the humanities. Admittedly I'm not an evangelical christian who's tethered to a literal interpretation of the Creation account in the Bible, but I have always found that science compliments my faith, and vice versa. They also serve two very different needs in my life. I also don't think the humanities are the only source for teaching you to question assumptions--all the best science courses I've taken have made that plenty evident. I also doubt the value of being subversive--imo that's just rhetoric to make it sound exciting to the current generation of kids who think they have to be activists. I have found that the humanities teach a person patient communication, the ability to take in many viewpoints, tolerance and balance, and yet think in new ways--perhaps finding ways to allow all to coexist. For example, I remember the first time I encountered debate and discovered that all my natural tendencies to debate had latin names like "ad hominem"... or "ad absurdum"...
Speaking purely from a pragmatist's approach, with the cost of education, taking classes that require me to spout what some disagreeable professor is thinking on his pet-topics, all in the name of some sort of false sophistication seems a waste of money. If the humanities teach valuable skills, relevant to today, they will survive, because they will give those graduates obtaining them an advantage in this era. If the intent is to be a naysayer for everything, then it's just as irrelevant as a doomsday religion that continues to readjust the date for the end of the world...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I've taught at four US universities--two R1s (University of StateName) and two teaching schools (StateName State University). At all of them all students were required to take core curriculum courses, which meant a minimum dose of humanities and science for everyone. So why are so many people saying "humanities students should take sciences?" Aren't they where you went to school? (Side note: Horgan says humanities is the source of skepticism? WTF? That's equally or more true of science. Granted, the "scientific method" is derived from ideas by people like Epicurus, who would be a "humanist" today, but back then there was no one to enforce this contemporary trades-based artificial divide between the arts and sciences.)
Read Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hoftstader. Mind blowing, and shows how science is not the same as deterministic. The humanities are all about non-deterministic
That's right. You're already doomed to a career in engineering and science because you think logically and analytically. We're going to cure all that by having you take courses in humanities. Then you'll fit in with the rest of the country, and won't feel so out of place with the government we have.
Besides, no one should conplain about having to take humanities courses. They take very little time for thought, and anyone could pass them.
"The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific."
Courses which encourage skepticism, critical thinking and rejection of authority sound great. In my experience however, many college "humanities" courses only enforced the dogma of political correctness and bland mainstream thinking.
As an engineer, I was required to take a specific "communications" course. I was so pissed at having to endure this politically correct brainwashing that I wrote a letter to the Dean of the college of engineering to complain. One of the textbooks in this course was even named "Diversity". Total waste of time and money. College English? Waste hours dissecting fiction and poetry for supposed hidden meanings? Economics? Mainstream Keynesian/Monetarist crap. Stimulus is good, fractional reserve banking is normal, the Fed is above reproach, etc.
Psychology-101 and philosophy-101 were the exceptions. The statement that "the humanities" are somehow subversive by nature is WAY too broad.
Engineers could benefit enormously with one semester or two of humanities. A little knowledge of sociology, anthropology, psychology or economics can open the minds of engineers. And, let`s be honest, engineers are very intelligent, but could go farther on their careers and theirs lifes with better inter-personal skills.
For myself, I am doing the other inverse route. I have always been a nerd, but made a very unwise decision to go for a major on Communication studies, to become a journalist. I began using Linux during college, around 1998, as a hobby. When I started working, I wrote for a newspaper about (surprise!) computers and the interwebs. That was when I met Slashdot.
Unhappy with my career choice, I pursued another major, on Economics, and my favorite courses were calculus and econometrics. Now I work on the financial department of an engineer firm, and spend much of my time analyzing data and writing small VBS scripts (we use Oracle Hyperion to retrieve data from a database to MS Excel).
And for the title of the post... yes, 80% the parties on humanities majors are better than the parties on technological courses. (I have just created this statistic, of course)
"If you read any book of Dan Ariely (or even more profound, Daniel Kahneman),"
Thanks, but I get enough Israeli propaganda through the USA media and entertainment establishments.
I took engineering 25 years ago. As I recall, an engineering student didn't have a lot of spare class slots that can be devoted to extra humanities courses without stretching a BS degree to 4 years. No, the classes aren't necessarily worthless (there are some...), but you have to choose your poison.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I'd agree but also throw an additional argument on top of that. Humanities introduce a number of skills that are useful for the application and spread of science and engineering that are difficult to find adequate time for in a science or engineering course. When I think about where I learned research, supporting an argument, and explaining that argument cohesively, then I think back to literature, history, and communication courses. When I think about what best prepared me for designing a tool for an end user, I think back to psychology and sociology. The foundational concepts of logic and logical progression of thought that are foundational to Computer Science were formed centuries before by philosophers. When I think about how to present data in ways that is comprehensible and appealing, then I think back to visual arts and auditory arts. You will also find the very practical foreign language studies lumped under humanities but those skills are very applicable if you either work for a company with foreign customers or present your discoveries at international conferences.
So true. Or as Albert Einstein said:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind."
John Taylor Gatto talks about the core purpose of education in his writings, which include self-development, becoming a good citizen, and preparation for work. Unfortunately, so much focus now in schools is on preparation for work, and it is overall preparation for work like rote factory work that is less and less in existence. But, adding some humanities courses when someone is 18-21 can't repair all the damage of a missing part of K-12.
http://www.awakenedamerican.com/content/john-taylor-gatto-explains-secrets-elite-boarding-school-education
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinate
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Much as I hate people saying +1 etc, if you're going to make good posts like this, why not do so under your own ID?
If your normal engineering courses doesn't already do this, there's something fishy going on.
I would have expected the opposite argument, that the humanists need to have some natural science and math courses, because: They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific.
That said, everyone should have a basic course in science theory (at least the logic part). (Especially politicians.)
I find it amusing that this argument is still continuing (and will likely continue to occur). I graduated in mechanical engineering almost 35 year ago. On top of the usual heavy engineering workload; requirements to graduate included two full credit (two-semester courses) in the humanities. I also had to have a full credit course in either biology or geology, a one semester course in business, a one credit course in communications (mostly technical writing) as well as some intermediate to advanced (second, third and fourth year) courses in taught by other faculties in the Engineering Department; three one-semester electrical engineering courses, one civil engineering course and one metallurgy / materials science course. This was of course on top of the regular core and elective mechanical engineering courses. After graduation, I had to pass a course in law and one in ethics to get my professional engineering licence, on top of meeting all of the other technical requirements. Frankly, the business and communications courses have been more important in my career than a number of the pure engineering courses. My daughter graduated with an arts degree last year; she went this route because she was not particularly good at maths and sciences. She needed two science credits to graduate (full year courses). She founds these tough, but admits that she has a much more rounded view of the world because of it. We graduated from two different universities; they are consistently ranked as the top two or three in the country. Perhaps these schools are onto something I’ve been working as an engineering manager for over 30 years, and have at various times in my career been involved in college recruitment, hiring, training and mentoring of engineering grads. The one predominant trend that I have noticed is that the young engineers that had a broader, more diversified education (i.e. beyond the purely technical courses) tended to be better engineers; they were generally more successful; they were better at solving problems, meeting their deliverables and meeting deadlines. They also tended to have more successful career paths. The people that were more the “pure techies” tended to get stuck on minutia and had trouble seeing how their work fit into the “big picture”. Corporately, we tended to hire what we saw as more well-rounded individuals. So, stop whining and get a broader education. You may not realize it now, but it will actually work to your advantage over your career.
The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.
Dude, if the way engineering and science are taught doesn't give one a healthy dose of skepticism, they are not being taught right. The humanities are not the answer to incorrect teaching of science or engineering. Feynman's Caltech commencement speech is all about how science should be done. It's all about doubting yourself and actively working to undermine your warm feeling of being right. You must be your worst adversary - that way, and only that way, you can be guaranteed to win the battle. You control your worst enemy. That's the way good science is done, that's the way good engineering is done.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm an engineer and I took all my electives in fine arts... Prettier girls there than at the engineering school :)
Research within the humanities is mostly useless for the society at large.
You think history is useless, or that perhaps we already know as much of it as we need to?
That's called bad engineering. A few humanities course won't fix that.
Did you ever take a humanities class?
Yes, at school. This is where everyone should be exposed to a broad range of subjects to a reasonable level so they have an idea of which area (sciences, engineering, humanities etc.) they want to study at university. In the system I went through (before the UK government damaged it) everyone going to university had to do maths up to basic calculus, english language and literature plus a foreign language and a humanity up to the age of 16 (O' level) if they wanted to go to university.
If students are no longer leaving school with a broad enough and deep enough background as they should then fix the schools: don't dump the responsibility on the universities. Any broadening of programs at university comes at a cost of either lengthening the program or lowering the standards required to graduate in the particular field of study.
Why should students of engineering and other tech fields study the humanities? So they can read and write!!!
They enrich the soul and give you a place in eternity
What's a "soul" and where is "eternity"? How big is the place I get in eternity if I take humanities? Do they need engineers to build it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Societies are prey of people ignorant of science. They believe that any arbitrary model can be applied to a society, and they blame the common citizens if it fails. Look at the catastrophes that marxism and monetarism had produced. If you had taught physics to freshmen, you have found that most of them have a hard time grasping the mater and energy conservation principles. How much science economists and politicians know? That explains a lot of what is going wrong in this world.
IMHO, the time and place for humanities is in high-school. When you get to college, you are better served by focusing your time there on the discipline you've chosen. If I'm spending $200k for professional training, I want classes that are going to prepare me to enter the workplace. Last time I checked, high-tech companies don't list cultural anthropology or women's studies on their list of candidate prerequisites.
For my own part, I was fortunate to live near NYC during my elementary and high-school years. I went to lots of museums, Broadway shows, opera, the ballet. My school had a strong music and theater program. English and history classes were pretty deep. And you didn't have to involve yourself in varsity sports if you didn't want to. Too much emphasis is placed on sports in high-school. All of this gave me a much broader foundation once I got to college.
Agreed. You, however, would need to post differently than as "coward" and "anonymous" for me to be willing to engage into any close-to-serious discussion, Sir.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
online classes are better then big lecture classes done by TA's and can be a lot cheaper as well.
College costs are way to high with lot's of skills gaps to be adding more required classes do you want what used to take 4 years to be 6 years now?
1) Old famous philosophers. Meh. More modern philosophers (e.g. Popper, Hofstadter) whose ideas on epistimology are directly related to science. Yes. Worth studying. Engineering is build in science, which is in turn, built on epistemology.
2) Psychology courses related to the psychoanalytic school? Waste of time. Neurophysiology and Evolutionary psychology, in contrast, show you how you do things and why you do things respectively. Machinery only exists to serve people. If you don't understand what people want, and why, you *will* fail.
3) Biology and ecology. Useful for any engineer. Natural systems are studies of genetic algorithms and generated solutions in action at different domains of complexity. You'd be nuts to ignore them.
4) History. A definite yes. Problems (engineering and otherwise) have been solved in *many* different ways over time. Social contexts have drifted drastically. The ancient Romans would be aghast at our political and sexual behaviors. Theirs were *quite* different. Engineering was different too. Consider that their cement was superior to ours.
5) Anthropology, both primate and social. This too, helps explaing why we do what we do, and sort of rubs your nose in the fact that *your* peculiar, local social context, including your understanding of engineering, is just one of many. Something most Americans, engineers or not, fail to realize. Primate anthropology demonstrates that there are many different successful strategies for success in nature. The patriarchal society of Chimps and the matriarchal societies of bonobos couldn't be more different. Both are successful species. You're forced to understand that there are many different solutions for almost every problem.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I don't know about you guys, but it was compulsory just about everywhere in the 1980s to have some non-engineering subjects in the mix. Simple philosophy (logic really) was encouraged along with subjects to improve the writing skills of engineering students. Choosing nothing but engineering, science and mathematics was not allowed in some places.
I agree engineering students should get some basic classes on economy and maybe one on communication so they stop making awful presentations. But psychology, sociology, etc., hell no!
I disagree. Ideally, a product should be designed for users to quickly learn how to use it correctly. Engineering such a product requires at least some understanding of user psychology.
Engineering is more about analysing problems, seeing the possible solutions for said problems and then implementing them.
And when one of these problems is preventing PEBKAC, knowledge of psychology plays a key role in said analysis. Or perhaps we just have different definitions of "psychology".
In video game you need to tell a good story. And there are guidelines for that going all the way back to Aristotle's seminal work called Poetics. It also greatly helps if you are familar with how stories have been told in great literature, movies, and even comic books. Crappy video games are missing important elecemnts like dramatic conflit, background development, character development, artistic flourish, etc. You learn all these studying other media and earlier works.
the most logical conclusion one can make is that the education system in the US is sorely lacking in producing well rounded individuals. Then again, it is the fate of the USians to bicker amongst themselves and divide themselves by such important issues as which hand they masturbate with.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I try to avoid becoming involved with ./ articles that are little more than glorified blogposts, but this is a subject near and dear to my heart. I am an engineer who graduated from a 'liberal arts' college that offered six majors: math, physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, and computer science. There was, however, a Humanities and Social Sciences department, and students are required to take eleven courses (including an introductory course on random topics that emphasizes writing skills) from the 'Hums' before they can graduate, regardless of their major.
It's my conclusion, from experience, observations, and a lot of thought on the topic, that this is a good approach. It forces highly-intelligent technical people to spend significant time ourside of their comfort zone, which in itself is a valuable experience. What's more, because so many of these highly-intelligent technical people are able to follow Hum topics that actually interest them (you are required to choose an area of concentration for at least four of your eleven course), there's a lot of critical thinking going on between the students and Hum professors. This prevents the latter group from being too fring-idealogical (you know what I'm talking about--the avowed communist economics teacher who tells engineers that it is immoral for them to make a profit from their work, for one arbitrary example); professors actually have to stay on their toes, and some of them even enjoy dropping marginal / controversial / partisan topics into their courses every know and then just to watch the students react and critically tear it apart. Lots of fun discussions occurs.
That having been said, TFA is completely the wrong approach. This idea of 'science-vs-non-science' is absurd, but even worse than the condescending elitism shown by the scientific side of the discussion is when you find gentlemen like this author, who somehow manage to convince themselves that they are the Secret Guardians of the Superior Non-Rational Secrets to the Universe, which mere reason (and scientists who use it) can never hope to comprehend. (Don't tell me you haven't meet anyone like this--there are at least four in every Coffee Bean at any given point in time, reading their latest Jenny McCarthy blog post and trying to pass head shots off to anyone who looks like an acting agent.) This isn't skepticism (which is a profoundly scientific trait, by the way, despite what TFA tries to advocate); this is blind contrarianism with a dash of well-read, modern pseudo-intellectualist voodoo.
... because they will grow up to be ill-informed pseudo-libertarians that are highly educated, but not on topics that influence political and social decision-making.
You have to understand the lives of others if you will make decisions that impact them.
You can't call yourself educated unless you have at least some background in both science and the humanities. I would extend the author's argument to go both ways - science majors need humanities courses so they have some idea of the human environment in which science is conducted and which it influences, and humanities majors need science and math courses so they have some of the logical discipline that those courses provide.
I was a humanities major, but I had a strong interest in science. Until I was in college I didn't do much with this interest due to bad math anxiety, but as a soph I decided to extend myself and take some courses in the "science track". We were on the block system, in which we took one course per month. So I spent one intense month learning calculus, and then one very intense month learning classical physics. I was fortunate to have good teachers or this could have been a disaster, but I aced calc and got a B+ in physics. The experience showed me that I wasn't really cut out for the sciences (although I ended up as a software engineer). But it was a good experience that strengthened my ability to think logically, and that increased my appreciation for math and science. Seeing physics laws derived step-by-step on the blackboard (that dates me!) was an incredible thrill, and gave me insight into how the mathematician's and scientist's brains work, and what drives scientists in their work.
I also took, in both college and grad school, some logic, philosophy of science, and statistics courses. All of them led me to a greater understanding of how science works as opposed to how most people think it works.
Getting a mix of science and humanities made me a better person, a person more able to understand issues that affect my life and the life of the community. I encourage students to study both.
No sig? Sigh...
But my motivations aren't entirely selfless. The fact is, some of my best students have been engineering students. Any humanities course I teach focuses on interpretive and argumentative skills, i.e. on reading and writing. While I admit that these skills rarely come naturally to engineering students, this doesn't bother me. My job, after all, is to teach. Compared to students pursuing most other disciplines, many engineering students seem to have a better understanding of the importance of keeping up with homework. I'm sure this is a consequence of the level of work they're expected to complete in their core courses. Since they're willing to do the homework, and both the homework and class are designed to teach them the skills I'd have them learn, the engineering students often show far more progress than many humanities students. The latter, I'm sad to say, seem rather to assume that reading and writing well aren't skills acquired through hard work but should come naturally if you sleep through enough courses.
I see people arguing the need for STEM majors to take humanities classes, and vice versa, and I wonder where the hell you went to school that they didn't require this? I had to take nearly 30 hours of math, science, and technology classes for my 124 hour BA. (I had 12 hours of science, 8 of math, a course on archaeological science and technology, and a course on surveying that included learning math above the 8 hours I took.) People I knew in STEM programs were in a similar boat with taking humanities classes at the same university. Damn if I am not a better person for it too.
I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that Slashdot doesn't have much use for humanities but I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Do you go to college to get a job or to become a better person? I think the typical answer to that question has changed a lot over the years.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Here is how it works folks:
In schools in Canada you already have to do this. This was true at my school (Queen's) from 2002 - 2006. The problem is they give you the least interesting course list to choose from. There were lots of great courses I wanted to take, such as an english course in science fiction. Not allowed --did not have the pre-req. Instead you pull from the driest of 100 level courses. On top of that, you are taking 6 to 9 STEM courses and dying under the workload. Then you have to find a dry, introduction course that fits into your schedule. This pretty much cuts down the majority of the list. If there was anything interesting, chances are it doesn't fit your schedule. So you treat it like the joke it is --find the easiest one that fits into your schedule because no one gives a shit. Preferably one that you can skip class and still get an A. My favourite quote from the macroeconomics (it was an evening course, so even though I had class from 8 am - 5 pm with no break, I was blessed with an hour off for dinner before returning to campus) professor was right before we wrote the final exam "Most of you don't know this, but I'm your professor!".
I would love to see the humanities take courses in things like basic geology, math, physics, logic, infrastructure, costing, or logic. Most of my humanities friends are woefully ignorant of how the world works, where everything comes from, and the real cost (monetarily, environmentally, etc.) of our society.
Science does not bother with gaining most knowledge. [...] What is the average mass of a fart? Scientists start every process with a hypothesis
You'd be surprised. Some global warming hypotheses include the greenhouse contribution of methane waste from the digestive tracts of livestock.
In humanities, you parrot the professor and get a good grade. In tech courses, you objectively prove what you know is right and get a good grade.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Take your nose out of the clouds.
Until a few years ago, university was about humanities (including pure science and math)
Defining math and science as part of the humanities? A standard disingenuous rhetorical trick is to redefine terms to suit your argument, but this is too obvious.
Relatively few went to university, and those that did mostly weren't doing it to make money (a few profession, like law and medicine being obvious exceptions; their specialized training came later.)
That was probably true in the middle ages, but for several centuries before the post-WWII university boom, most students were sons of the wealthy in search of an excuse to party for a few years (hardly a 20th century invention) and get a sheepskin that was "prestigious" (at least in the sense of indicating you were part of the upper crud, er, I mean crust). The students who were satisfied with a gentleman's 'C' served a purpose though, as their tuition, and the endowments given by their parents to get their none too bright or hardworking offspring into the right school, helped pay for the education of scholarship students and for the work of professors who were actual scholars.
If a high proportion of executives and leaders had college degrees, it was about being able to think, understand the past, and hold an intelligent conversation, NOT about being trained in their job.
Were you able to keep a straight face while writing that? That might have been the theory, but in reality an educated idiot is still an idiot. For most "executives and leaders" the value was making contacts with fellow members of the upper crud, and maybe learning a few pretentious Latin phrases.
I am disappointed how narrow and limited the education system is in North America. My experience is with Canada specifically but I think it applies to the US as well. When I grew up, in Yugoslavia, by grade 7 everyone was required to take Math, Physics, Biology, History, Chemistry, Geography, Art, Music. In total, about a dozen subjects. By grade 9 that included 2 foreign languages as well as Latin. This mean that every student, regardless of their "preference" was exposed to a wide variety of subjects and influences.
Having a broader education enriches your life because it lets you interpret things from various angles and draw on many references. It lets you relate to your fellow students better and lets you have richer conversations and interactions with them.
I'm sure many of you think that something like Latin is a waste of time but I still used it, almost daily, to figure out foreign languages or the etymology of words or what is written on a dollar bill. ;)
I wish we would stop coddling our young people and expose them to as much as possible. Only then can they reach their full potential and know what they want in life.
Reading over this thread:
It appears as though many of us self-identified techs and engineers already have a reasonable exposure to the humanities and philosophy. We just didn't shell out for credit hours in them.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
all of these facts are great and let you deal with the pragmatic and practical in the name of science, but, in the end, you also need to evolve the human side of the equation, if only because you are going to be dealing with people and might even be in a position of lead and/or mentor and in that respect, understanding how to deal with others is a win-win for all. Many great minds are actually poor people persons and often, to the detriment of their own path to success.
History is certainly one of the subjects that could be useful because we could learn something and avoid making the same mistakes over and over. Unfortunately that's not the focus of the historians, they are in it more for the spectacular things. So they spend endless time and money discussing if some ancient piece of fabric in some church belonged to some guy who lived around there. On the other hand they ignore many of the things that could help us today. So yes, as we do it right now history is mostly useless because we don't focus on usefulness here.
"But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."
That's pretty much what I got out of my getting acquainted with philosophy.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
In a word, Hume.
That dude does more to question the fundemental, philosophical principles of science than just about any philosopher.
Philosophy examines the fundamentals of thought.
History gives us context for our place in the world.
Economics helps justify and reason the misery we live in.
A foreign language introduces you to a different mode of expression and how your native language might need more or less regularity to it's verbs and their conjugations.
All of the social sciences try to apply reason to a disorderly and messy world, some times it works better than others.
Then again, I got tired of my fellow engineers in school thinking they were so much better than everyone else. I really enjoyed all of my non-STEM classes. While they might have been "easier", they were just as thought provoking and fun as any thermodynamics or rocket propulsion class I took.
BS AAE 1993
But the calculus they teach in intro calculus courses is no better; "here are formulas, memorize how to use them to get results that we'll accept". No math teacher I ever had in first-year math courses at university, nor ever heard about, bothered to explain anything but rote formula-use. No explanations of why, no explanations of what was being done, and the pace entirely dictated by best-case memorization of each rote step, not the relative complexity of concepts (which leads any student actually trying to conceptualize the mathematics in question alternating between bored and frantic).
Your objection to intro stats courses is just an objection to intro courses in general. And you're not wrong, but . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It's a form of argument known as reductio ad absurdum. It amazes me that having studied humanities at university you have not seen it before especially since I learnt this as school when, apparently, I lacked sufficient "life experience" to really understand it. Ah but now we are broaching another topic: irony.
It's easy to see your chosen field as something everyone else should learn the "basics" of, but so can everyone else with respect to their field. The first two years of a college degree have become an incoherent mishmash of well intended requirements that blend together into an apathy inspiring sludge. Then when students struggle to care about classes, or only produce bare minimum to pass work, students are told there is something wrong with them. As someone who just finished up his 2-year I saw so very much of this. So many want their subject to be required, but then no one wants to be responsible for the negative consequences of their implementation. It's just the student's fault.
Particularly useful are courses tailored to we STEM-types (not that they should be so-limited), just as there are "physics for poets" classes. They can set up a dialogue between "the Two Cultures" which is particularly helpful (just because you CAN make an atomic bomb ... or mine tar-sands, or drug restrained undergrads to probe their minds at McGill ... SHOULD you? ). It helps you to understand the impact of your work on the humanity which pays for it (and to explain yourself in terms that recognize universal concerns). They can raise the kind of questions that E.O. Wilson considers essential for the best scientists, and help us to cognize and affirm the limitations of the scientific method explored by JWN Sullivan, Kuhn, Feyerabend, et. al.
The most influential class in my life was such a class, devised by a physicist to explore experiences people had while making scientific discoveries, and comparing them to age-old pre-scientific experiences. Once I finished school, the questions that single class provoked occupied my (non-tech) free time for the next 15 years ... and so enriched my life. "There's more in Heaven and on Earth ... Horatio."
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The field of engineering is more like that of a technologist (learning and applying currently well accepted science to perform the job of creating things). A scientific field is more one that is building the base of scientific knowledge which often is incremental from currently well accepted science. Of course there is a big overlap between the two in practice, but when reflected back to undergraduate instruction level, they become suspiciously similar, so much so that it's really hard to distinguish. I would argue that at the undergraduate teaching level, there's not much of a difference between science and technology. All the topics have a "dogma" of some sort which has been decided to be taught by the masters of currucula often in a framework that reflects culture of field. Any so called labs or experiments have well understood answers (and students often are subjected to negative reinforcement if they stray off the beaten path) and are only designed to give a "flavor" of science (like a sad version of a cargo cult).
SO if all students are doing is surveying the history of field (which pretty much sums up undergraduate level instruction), it's pretty much all humanities courses people are taking at that level (since technology is part of the recorded culture of humanity). Probably the only real thing that distinguishs a "humanities" course from a "technology" or "science" course from a knowledge point of view is how recent the history is, what aptitudes/prerequisites are required to understand the material covered, and maybe perhaps how relavent the topic is to future employers...
FWIW, I basically came to this opinion many years ago when I was doing "alumni-calling" for free-pizza and beer. I rang up an alum who was a biologist that graduated 1 year before watson and crick got their nobel prize for discovering DNA. He was still practicing molecular biology, but pretty much had to catch up in grad-school on all stuff that was actually going on during undergrad (as opposed to what the undergrad classes covered). We chatted a while about what he thought about undergraduate level education in biology before this and although he thought he learned a small about the scientific method and the practice of real-world science, the bulk of his classes were pretty much pre-DNA dogma and none of them even mentioned topics around the 3-d structure of molecules or X-ray crystallography which would become his area of specialization (although he did have some exposure to that through talking to a few professors in the chemistry dept.). The undergraduate classes he remembered most, were in fact humanities classes since they had ideas that were more stable over time and he wished he would have taken more of them.
Are you in the faculty of contradiction?
No.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Are STEM freshmen mature enough to think about the good or bad consequences of what science and engineering makes possible? Same question, a bit more frightening, with medicine freshmen.
> The humanities, at least the way I teach them...
News flash: Humanities teacher thinks more students should take Humanities courses. Details at 11.
I personally am a student in the humanities (medieval history of the church to be exact), and yes, I'll admit there are flaws to knowing only them: Engineering and science courses provide an insight into the world that cannot be obtained otherwise. They've taught me about genetics, how to build a computer, how batteries work, how to decipher an electrical schematic diagram... I wouldn't give those experiences back for anything. It lets me appreciate the work Phil Plait does on his blog or the efforts of Neil DeGrasse Tyson to educate the people. I wouldn't be able to understand the jokes within SMBC or XKCD without them. I grew up watching Bill Nye and loving every second of it. Hell, I've been following Slashdot for over ten years since I was in elementary school because it continues to fascinate me.
But not as much as medieval history fascinated me. I knew from middle school that my dream was to become a professor in that field: I preferred Steven Runciman and St. Augustine of Hippo over my brother's O'Reilly books. I've been working hard each day learning Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, and Old English to be able to read the texts that are pertinent to my field. Admittedly I don't have to work out the stress in the joists like a structural engineer, or figure out why this code isn't producing the right results, or decide what's the best method to administer medicine. I have to look at the evidence given to me (textual, archaeological, linguistic) and come to my own conclusions about what happened over a millennium ago and why. Can anyone really prove me wrong? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can back up your opinions, but many times there isn't enough evidence besides giving your impression. Occasionally we have a discovery like Sutton Hoo or Nag Hammadi that give a complete paradigm shift, but that's about it. It's never a slam dunk like in 1919 when Arthur Eddington helped Einstein overturn Newton for good.
But that doesn't mean the humanities and its pursuit are useless.
I'll be honest with you: I hate literature and art history. They were as boring to me as mathematics, and it's a struggle to stay awake in all of them. But I've never thought of any of them as lesser than the other. Mathematics, even those that seem useless at the time, ultimately help in endless fields: When imaginary numbers appeared on the scene, they only solved certain formulas and that was about it. "Imaginary" was coined by Descartes in a derogatory fashion. And look now at the practical applications. Literature provides our society with culture and can be an actual impetus for change: Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" against McCarthy or Dickens' "Bleak House" against the British judiciary system. Can you imagine a society without Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, or Orwell? Whether you like it or not, they've helped define our vocabulary and views about humanity and society. Art history explores human expression, whether it's my favorite period of the baroque, or the symbolism within the Renaissance, or even something as ridiculous as Dadaism. That's the stepping stones that we've built on to create our world today. Even if you haven't studied them, the influence is there.
I can say as a historian and someone who is deeply involved with Christianity, I really wish people studied those more. People's ignorance is overwhelming and frustrating. Politicians screw around my field just as much as they do with science. Recently we mocked Sarah Palin and her misinterpretation of Paul Revere's ride, but for someone like me I spot problems with politicians' words every day. I can't tell you how much I want to punch someone in the face when they say, "The Founding Fathers would [agree and support with whatever I have to say]." And as someone who doesn't specialize in American history, I can say Americans' knowledge about world history is just appalling. If people learned about it more, maybe they'd have more insight about why certain portions of the Middle East hate one another. Or why the Korea
is that the social scientists, counselors, psychologists, and all the other people who specialized in the humanities are the ones who have to pick up the pieces after the scientists and engineers fall victim to depression, or discover that life isn't fair and cannot be reasoned with. No amount of logic or reason in the world will help with a major clinical depression, or grief after a loved one dies (or decides that he/she is sick of you and doesn't love you anymore). It enrages me that the same people who insist that logic and reason are supreme, are the same ones who tell a person suffering from clinical depression to "snap out" of it, or simply reason their way out. Science, logic, and reason are no antidote to the vast storms of emotional pain that come with death, divorce, and the random accidents of life. Such things require people who can embrace doubt, ambiguity, and flat-out paradoxical paradigms of emotion and half-truths. I just wish engineers and scientists and materialists of all sorts would give a little more credence and acceptance to those who choose to go into the humanities. Because sooner or later, a situation will arise where logic, reason, and rationality won't be of any help at all. And that's where the humanities step in.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
What is this shit about how science gives you certainty? Arguable, perhaps, in the context of some disciplines and skill levels. Introductory calculus is known. There are very few discoveries to be made in the context of introductory calculus.
But, it seriously sounds like nobody has ever taken a class that "does" science (which is unknown) as opposed to "teach" science (which is more or less known). If you are looking for such a discipline, try cognitive neuroscience. Which is extremely not well known.
Nothing wrong with the humanities, but being a programmer exposes you to enough uncertainty, doubt and skepticism for a lifetime. Same probably applies to any of the sciences. What's more, the uncertainty in science can be measured. Not so much for the uncertainty in the humanities.
...the teaching of basic literacy and communications skills. Like...I don't know, writing?
The humanities should be good for us and I realize most /.ers are liberal, but:
I've been around long enough to believe in Capitalism and that the entitlement mentality is a losing proposition. Spreading the wealth around has always ended up costing the middle class. I don't care how much the other guy makes as long as I receive fair compensation.
The government can neither protect us, or support us. It only provides the illusion of protection for liberties. I'd much prefer the freedoms with a little more risk.
I say this because it is what I've seen much of the humanities promoting (giving freedoms for support and safety)
There is no such thing as treating every one equally. You hold the exceptional back and lift the mediocre up which destroys incentive to do better.
No system is perfect, but I'll take what we had 40 years ago, warts and all, over what we have now and where we are headed
The problem with your statement is that it will be interpreted completely differently depending on your stance on the subject.
For your post to spur a relevant discussion and have real meaning you would have to elaborate a bit more.
How about: Joseph Mengele had a scientific education.
Of course, the question in the summary is about engineers, like Osama bin Laden, or alternately Massoud Shah (who led the Northern Alliance before being assassinated by al Quaeda the day before the Towers were attacked). One on each side should work better.
Neither can the humanities. You have to work it out for yourself.
To meet girls. No other reason.
I see. John Horgan wants "the humanities" to teach "skepticism" for...
wait for it...
evolution.
Every single "humanities" class I had to take at MIT was totally worthless.
I remember one of them, Clapping for Credit everyone called it... "for your final, you have to memorize and perform this Bach piece even though you've never played the piano before".
Yeah that was a super good use of my time.