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'Why Liberal Arts and the Humanities Are as Important as Engineering' (wadhwa.com)
Engineering professor Vivek Wadha writes: A technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible. With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
The article, presumably written by a liberal arts major, extols the importance of "critical thinking", yet is just a string of conjectures based on no evidence, displaying a clear lack of critical thinking.
You don't need a music, arts, literature or psychology to have empathy. Further, there really is a war on the middle class jobs - construction workers, plumbers, electricians, etc.. We've basically stereotyped these jobs as the low-class when the majority of people with degrees can't wire in a new light switch or change their car tire.
As far as music, most tech people are musically inclined. They go together. But liberal arts. A wasted college course. Wasted money.
Because if it weren't for liberal arts majors, the STEM people wouldn't be able to go home after work and watch Netflix.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
True enough. Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans. Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth. And that's why social sciences as taught in academia are pretty much worthless these days.
Fortunately, you don't need to be a history major (or minor) in order to learn these things, there are plenty of excellent books and online lectures, and I encourage everybody to listen to them. But listen critically and distinguish between indoctrination, advocacy, and scholarship.
A musician is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
I've been 3D-printing a lot of the music I've composed. So far no one wants to listen to it. If you want a sample, PM me your phone number and I'll send it to you on my quantumfax with teleport enabled.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The humanities teaches nothing accept discrimination and indoctrination because it has now relegated itself to an "in crowd" echo chamber and is becoming more and more anti-science as time has gone by.
It pretty much creates the premise that only "accredited" people are allowed to discuss human issues with any authority which is total bunk. The goal seems to be taking possession of humanity/liberal arts as an idea away from everyone else that did not attend. Every person unto themselves, regardless of race, minority/majority, religion, politic, ethnic, or whatever "label" you can think of has a right to represent their own ideas about humanity and life. It is a natural extension of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy except it is now a formally indoctrinated fallacy.
You want to be a philosopher then go be it, Academia needs to keep its pie hole clamped on the subject as it no longer caters to all possible philosophers and only says that "certain ones" should be allowed the right to speak.
Well, there are many engineers who are accomplished musicians and are also well read. What you study at university, forms a basis for life-long learning.
If not surprising, then you showed skill at prediction.
The nice thing about the STEM side of things is being able to show skill at prediction. The Liberal Arts side of things doesn't. The former group tries to model the world as it is, the later on how they imagine it is.
For instance if you thought Trump had no chance of winning the last presidential election, then your model of the universe was grossly wrong. Far wronger than can be patched up by adding "russian collusion" to the model.
"His name was James Damore."
In for-profit capitalism, humanities are unimportant. Inhumanities are. The goal is not "usability" (though it may fall out as a side effect) but rather stickiness, which is a polite way of saying addictiveness. It is true studying the humanities may help in for-profit capitalism, but only if they are applied to the goal of manipulation rather than the goal to "help us".
The liberal arts and humanities could be as important as they once were but not as the perverted ideological joke they are rightfully seen as now.
In science, even an incorrect prediction can be valuable if it's disproven and gets you closer to the truth. Discovery and learning are iterative processes.
Wish I had mod points, +1
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
You want liberal arts and the humanities because you _can_ teach critical thinking. If you're dealing with someone that doesn't get that naturally you need a subject simple enough they can grasp it. Liberal arts fits the bill. Maybe they won't grasp everything, but unlike Math there's value in being 50% right.
As for why you want to train people to think critically, well, if you don't like dictatorships & fascism then you want an electorate that thinks critically. I mean, ever notice how one of the 1st things a dictator does is go after the intelligentsia?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Tanking enrolment means less profit for the university.
http://sappingattention.blogsp...
Only enrolment in Gender Studies remained stable. No surprise there. They cry the loudest to get "diversity programme" running. There are lucrative (although parasitic) jobs for that segment.
that has been on the table for 50 years. FIFTY YEARS yet there has been nothing to actually apply it to.
now what they need is MARKETING ETHICS as that's where it really is needed, the act of selling something thats not as self driving as self driving and so forth - there is actually no need to ponder should it hit a deer or a truck in a case it had to choose.
also marketing ethics about ai. ai just means information technology now. fucking excel sheets are sold as AI. anything making binary choices is being now sold as AI.
so these AI ethicists, robot rights experts etc - they're just selling bullshit. they want a cheque and way to get it is just to bullshit. that's what we need critical thinking against in the media.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Except when you just imagine another term for your model, instead of identify another term for your model.... there is then no proven and disproven. There is only the eternal theory and the quest for a model that finally fits it.
"His name was James Damore."
In before the anti-intellectual comments about "snowflakes" and "gender theory majors" commence.
No need. The anti-intellectuals in those majors have already done a bang-up job of showing why they need to have funding cut. Bret Weinstein explains it very well, Jordan Peterson shows a great example of those students who trash private property to stop views from being expressed. And Melissa Click is an exemplar of that egotism wrapped in a bubble of anti-intellectualism, that supports and teaches students to shutdown view points that are contrary to the groupthink. Being a victim is profitable, pretending you're outraged is currency.
But hey, believe whatever you want. Don't pretend that there's a swath of the humanities and liberal arts that have their heads shoves so far up their own asses that they sniff farts. Don't believe that this same elitism isn't a cancer that gets people fired from their jobs for making a joke based on personal experience(Sir Tim Hunt) and then drives them from their own country. Or creates a climate of intimidation and fear over wearing the "wrong kind of shirt" like with Matt Taylor.
Om, nomnomnom...
I hate to agree with Ben Stein, but about 40 years ago (while finishing college at beer drenched Michigan State) I read a short essay in Playboy and never forgot it...
If I recall correctly at my advanced age, the claim was that before World War II when far fewer Americans went to college, many students from wealthy backgrounds studied liberal arts because they would not really have to work or else they already had nice careers waiting for them because of their birth.
After World War II and the G.I. Bill explosion in college students, many students from modest backgrounds wanted to study liberal arts so they, too, could have the traditional polish of the wealthy. But Stein claimed this was a fallacy - that those working class background students assumed that the intellectual, liberal arts background caused those in the upper class to become successful, but actually they had the liberal arts education precisely because their wealthier backgrounds allowed them the luxury of not really having to learn a trade.
Of course, we will always need English professors, historians, philosophers, et cetera, but not nearly at the quantity produced by colleges each year.
Looking back, I had a great time at a big, fairly average college in the late 1970's, but now I realize it was only because my late father had worked so hard, lived cheaply, and invested for many years. But as a straight economic investment in my future, it did not really pay off. Of course I have no one to blame for my choices but myself.
Tom from Traverse City
+1, We as a society don't value things that are important.
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Plenty of people in the engineering and I.T. fields also have their heads up their anal orifices. Elon Musk anyone? Look at Tesla's parts availabilily ... how dare a mere plebe un-authorized mechanic presume to want to work on a Tesla? Tim Cook. Let's show some courage by stripping useful functionality out of our products and reduce them to toys for the lowest common denominator.
Frankly, people SHOULD have the right to protest against wrong or abhorrent views. The Earth is NOT flat. Global warming is a real thing. Treating fellow humans badly because of the color of their skin or their country of birth is abhorrent. Deal with it.
Snow noted the divide, and suggested that "Literary" types needed to learn science, while noting that "Scientific" types already knew, or at least valued, Arts and Literature.
The debate has now been going for over 50 years and shows no signs of resolution.
While I'm not sure that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics should be the touchstone, I would argue that any graduand that can't demonstrate both a knowledge of the scientific method and an appreciation of art or literature should be required to do so before they can graduate.
I'd also like to see something like Ethics 101 and Aesthetics 101 as compulsory subjects.
I'm realistic enough not to actually expect any of these things to happen.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
The commercial application of "humanities" is called "marketing," and yes, it is very relevant to the modern world.
Who knew! Upper management consists of people with little technical skills and good people skills! And if you want to be one of those people, by all means, don't get an engineering degree and get a social science degree instead.
But let's be clear about this: these people are by and large not successful because they understand the Enlightenment or good design, they are successful because they understand Machiavelli and politics, something that success in a social science environment prepares them for.
Whoa, what a jump. CEOs and heads of product engineering don't "work hand in hand" with people, they lead and direct.
Well, that is certainly good advice. Add to that the notion that government shouldn't pick winners and losers among academic fields and instead let the market decide.
Don't worry. liberal arts and humanities majors, you are _also_ important and valuable members of society. Ok, so maybe you are not as smart as the engineering majors, but that's ok. You are _emotionally_ intelligent, and that is also a valuable trait. And true, your deep understanding of the human condition has not prevented you from going down a path that pretty much guarantees you will never be able to buy a house, but you can compensate for that by finding a line of work where your mastery of human interaction will in fact be appreciated.
And yes, I would like some fries with that, thank you for asking!
Sure, and let's look. When was the last time Elon Musk was going out of his way to push his ideology on everyone, and then stating that if you don't follow it you're a racist/sexist/homophobe/fascist/nazi/. When was the last time that Tim Cook used his position to turn around and shutdown free speech? But we can see the organized events from university professors, to shut down a group of MRA's who are gathered to talk about the inequality in family law. Pulling fire alarms, making fake police calls, and other shitty behavior. We can see the students being given extra credits for a course if they protest a speaker who doesn't hold the same views, to the point where the police cancel the event for fear that the protestors will turn violent.
Frankly, people SHOULD have the right to protest against wrong or abhorrent views. The Earth is NOT flat. Global warming is a real thing. Treating fellow humans badly because of the color of their skin or their country of birth is abhorrent. Deal with it.
Well I'd agree with that, more or less. So why aren't you up in arms when someone points out the number of educators in the humanities and liberal arts and/or leftwing elitists, and so-on who hold racist views? Or indoctrinate students into these views? I mean the NYT just finished hiring a devout anti-white racist for example, who has a track record of literal years of being such. Then there's the educators in the universities(of all flavors, but predominantly liberal colleges, but in nearly all universities) who push sexism against men, and racism against anyone who isn't black.
And why is it that when average people call this absolute bullshit out, that the response from the left is to circle the wagons and screech that "the accusers are sexist/racist/fascist/etc/etc/etc." Why is there a literal culture of fear against particular groups of racists, if we're agreeing that all racism is bad.
Perhaps when you say "deal with it" you mean that the rules and laws should be applied equally? In which case, I'm sure you'd agree with me that the little snot rag that the NYT hired should be canned. After all, they canned another reporter for having vocal disagreements with a white supremacist.
Om, nomnomnom...
That their liberal arts degree isn't making them as much as their STEM pals.
I do not disagree that art should inform things like engineering. But the culture surrounding the liberal arts should be kept in a separate institution. In NS there was a Tech school called TUNS. It kicked ass and took names. Many of its students went on to graduate work in places like MIT. It was primarily an engineering school with not much straying from that core.
But it had a problem. The tutiton was ~$3500 (at the time about average for any Uni in Canada). But $3500 didn't cover the cost of educating an engineer. Whereas there was a nearby school called Dal that had mostly art students who were also charged around $3000. The budgeted cost to educate an undergrad art student at the time was around $1500. This left lots of room to pay for things like medicine ($35k) or dentistry ($50k). It also left room for them to take over the financially struggling TUNS.
TUNS was crushed under the bureaucratic crush of Dal. Computer services were taken over by Dal and (literally not joking) renamed Borg. But worst of all the cultural policies of fairness and inclusion were dumped on the school. So mandates of having mostly locals attend (so as to foster the next generation of local engineers) was turfed and the school was overrun with foreigners who rarely stayed one day after graduating. This was also good economics as foreign students are charged far more.
But no longer was the school even focusing on the best and the brightest but wafting around on the whims of the politically correct far left wing people found in the liberal arts programs.
So I see having liberal arts and technical educations being a terrible mix. If you want the best and the brightest forming generation after generation of you local engineering and science community, then let practical efficient(ish) schools do their own thing. If you want an 8th rate joke of a tech school to emerge, then follow the lead that was set in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Annual average growth isn't 4% -- 4% is quarter-on-quarter, a number that was hit repeatedly when Obama was president. You're buying the hype.
Democracy is over-rated when the voters support wrong or abhorrent ideas. There's a reason why the US is a republic, not a pure democracy.
When was the last time that Tim Cook used his position to turn around and shutdown free speech?
I don't know about Tim Cook specifically, but please. The Apple Store does it all the time.
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One engineer can build a fire. Two or more will still be arguing about whether to optimise it for light, heat, efficiency, ease of use etc when the rescuers arrive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Taking Facebook as the example - The ethics were clearly understood from the outset. It wasn't a fuzzy or difficult line to comprehend. The real problem is free markets have no rules. If Zuckerberg didn't beeline to the bottom then someone else would've.
Presumably Facebook will subsequently strongly advocate for certain rules to be cast into law as suits them.
Humanities asks questions. Engineering provides solutions. That's pretty much the difference right there.
What gave you that idea? Did I say that anywhere? If so, please point out where.
To be clear: you can study science and engineering on your own as well; you don't need to go to university either.
It's indeed true that "important" and "paid well" are not necessarily the same. Those who make smart or wise observations may not be paid so well and that could be a problem.
For example, solving "how" to make automated military tanks may skip over the question of "why" because those solving "how" are paid too well to bother.
Table-ized A.I.
So you don't value history as important or learning from it. That is why your opinion is is a mod point of -1.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
... uh ... still not entirely sure how you got that from what I said.
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I don't know about Tim Cook specifically, but please. The Apple Store does it all the time.
And we're talking about individuals, education, universities, and not the corporate environment at the moment.
Om, nomnomnom...
Back a long time ago, my economics professor started his economics 101 for engineers with following statement:
Engineers are the camels salemen ride one.
This is still true today.
As to liberal arts and humanities being necessary to create better products, that might be true, if those branches would offer any systematic or useful approaches to apply them. Those sitting around and just discussing which reality is more worthy are just a wast of time.
Liberal arts are as important as engineering, indeed. Where would we be without our artists, our philosophers, musicians, playwrites and humanists? But if you do pursue liberal arts, please don't expect to earn the same amount of money as STEM. On the other hand, a four year liberal arts degree is generally more fun, a bit easier and you get laid a whole bunch more. Fact.
If you can possibly manage it, consider a combined STEM + liberal arts path. The technical term for it is "renaissance".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Frankly, people SHOULD have the right to protest against wrong or abhorrent views.
Giving people the right to protest against things you don't support also gives them the right to protest against things you support. Unfortunately the recent wave of activism has been around shutting down only *some* peoples right to protest.
Put another way, if you support the prevention of protesting against the policies that *YOU* support, then you're a hypocritical asshole, regardless of what policies you actually support.
When I did my engineering degree the university forced me to do a series of modules on something they called "sociology of engineering" or something similar. That was back in 1979. It was a complete waste of time.
A problem with liberal arts is that whatever its merits, it frequently isn't applied.
Consider medicine... we value people with medical degrees, right? But what if you don't use it? I mean, you don't do anything with it at all.
It is all well and good to say that some CEOs in tech were able to use it to help their product design. But that is a very obscure and rarefied context. What about everyone else in the company?
Ultimately, you're going to be left arguing it does in "mysterious ways"... that there are subtle influences that help all sorts of things in ways that you can't really prove one way or the other.
You could do that with theology though as well... that's where this argument goes.
And I could show you lots of company heads from times gone by that said as much about their faith in God or whatever as helping them with their company.
I'm not disparaging liberal arts, rather I'm suggesting that they take a greater interest in applying themselves. Instead of going always for this "holistic person" concept, they should look at how language can help an individual... how art and history and philosophy, etc can help.
I'm not saying don't teach roughly the same thing. I'm saying teach it in a different way so that it has a better chance of being used.
Because if it isn't used, it is useless. The most amazing machine for doing whatever has zero value if it isn't used. The most amazing information about whatever is useless if it isn't used.
It MUST be used or it is useless.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Frankly, people SHOULD have the right to protest against wrong or abhorrent views. The Earth is NOT flat. Global warming is a real thing. Treating fellow humans badly because of the color of their skin or their country of birth is abhorrent. Deal with it.
Well I'd agree with that, more or less.
More or less, eh? That doesn't sound like an unqualified agreement. So, which is the less part? with you it could be anything, but I think the earth not being flat is most likely.
So why aren't you up in arms when someone points out the number of educators in the humanities and liberal arts and/or leftwing elitists, and so-on who hold racist views?
Because your definition of the word "racist" doesn't match anyone else's except for the small, loud minority of right-idenifying internet posters who want to discredit the entire idea of racism.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
> A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches
Why is that the more there are nontech persons in a dev team the less the applications are usable ?
The right sentence would be a psychologist is more likely to know how to trick people into thinking "right" ( = like the psychologist)
The last time I checked the word "racist" was defined as someone who considers a specific race to be superior to others. Usually implying that people belonging to a certain race have some kind of advantage or deserve preference, while people of another race are unable or unfit to do or be something, based solely on them belonging to a certain race.
What's your definition?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design
This is complete nonsense.
There are just as many people with empathy who study useful subjects as there are who study arts and humanities. And just as many sociopaths and crazies, too. Writing turgid prose, discordant music, and making self-indulgent art or design does not imbue someone with empathy. Nor do "deep" and ambiguous creations mean someone is enigmatic, insightful or more intelligent - it often means that they are confused, unable to communicate clearly and don't really know what it is they are trying to put across. Just as scientists are often accused of being.
Most of the artists I know will tell you "I do it for myself, not for other people" when asked to explain their work. That is not the sign of an "empathic" personality.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you don't like what's happening at Yale, you could always get a degree from Oral Roberts.
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Nothing alone is the answer. That goes double for technology.
Technology is an enabler, no more and no less. It's up to us to decide how we use it.
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We do not have a lot of people that can be good at either. Both areas require dedication and talent. Sure, we should make sure the rare people that have it do get into the respective fields, but that will be 10% of the population, if that. The real problem we have at this time in both IT and liberal arts is far too many people that are bad at it and should never have gone there.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... as it is the foundation of the scientific method.
Also someone who can apply critical thinking to scientific or technological problems can also apply it to other subjects, what he may be lacking is knowledge.
Sadly there's a spreading trend in humanities to teach "critical theory" instead of critical thinking, and the former is the precise opposite of the latter. "Critical theory" is political indoctrination, pure and simple. The Lindsay Shepherd affair at Wilfried Laurier University is a prime example: Lindsay wanted an open discussion and students to come to their own conclusions but her superiors wanted indoctrination with their political agenda.
Tl;dr:
Teaching students to chant "Hail Hillary" is not critical thinking.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
That pretty much sums up liberal arts and humanities.
You've got that backwards. STEM are intellectuals, liberal arts are the anti-intellectuals painting themselves as intellectuals.
I read a short essay in Playboy
Yeah, sure you did . . . ;-)
More honestly in reality.
Liberal Arts == Content Comsumption 101.
Humanities == Indentitarian Politics 101.
The arts and humanities ain't what they used to fucking be. How about Socio-Economics 101, how law, politics, justice, social services work. Things like teaching students how to be properly politically active, at federal, state and local level. Understanding laws and legislation and how policy creation works.
Teaching them how to be effective citizens in control of their government.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The question is, what jobs are there out there for people with those degrees?
Because if it weren't for liberal arts majors, the STEM people wouldn't be able to go home after work and watch Netflix.
We would be able to but we would not want to.
"Quit teaching all humanities" is your POV, because you're upset about something? Wow. That's nutty. Perhaps you need to study some humanities.
I don't respond to AC's.
In case anyone was wondering about the latter details:
Notice how the MSM (Mainstream Media) ignored the context of Sir Tim Hunt's joke: (my emphasis added)
Here is the high resolution zoom of Matt Taylor's shirt. Notice how the "mob rule" conveniently ignored the fact that
that it was designed by a woman, Elly Prizeman.
*facepalm*
Liberal Arts and the Humanities are indeed as important as Engineering.
However, Liberal Arts DEGREES are not as important as Engineering DEGREES.
Yes, it's important to have art and music and an appreciation for history, but I really would like someone to be ACTUALLY TRAINED AND CERTIFIED when they start calculating the load-moment on that bridge they're building.
-Styopa
Yeah, but how many of those in your example resulted in having others' speech or viewpoints squashed, or have someone lose their livelihood based solely upon non-proven, non-litigated charges and accusations?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Forgot to add: The reasons Sir Tim Hunt's joke was funny was because it was based on personal experience:
* He met his wife in the laboratory while she was married to another man.
Without the *context* of the joke the mob rule read it literally instead of sarcastic self-deprecating humor.
Also, it was a Korean female politician who had "thanked the ladies for the lunch." but apparently a lie tweeted made it as if Hunt had said "thanks to the women journalists for making lunch". Dr Scott Watkins provided clarification but by then the damage had been done.
You can read the actual events.
if everyone received an ACTUAL education then who would bag groceries and serve coffee at starbucks?
besides someones got to fund these for profit colleges by massively over paying to get a BS degree in womyns studies with a minor in basket weaving and whitewater rafting.
> Or creates a climate of intimidation and fear over wearing the "wrong kind of shirt" like with Matt Taylor.
Indeed.
Man, Matt Taylor: Philae lander spacecraft in space for 10 years; lands it on a comet.
Woman, Katie Mack: Ignores what the man just accomplished; complains that him wearing his *birthday gift* shirt DESIGNED by a woman, is sexist. Ignores Kim karTrashian nudes.
"which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do" Citation please
"but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design". Citation please
"psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer" Psychology isn't a humanities or a liberal art.
"A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine" Nonsense
"you'll note that engineers are heavily overrepresented there" No I will not. Do you have a citation please? Your humanities are showing.
Because a good Barista is damn hard to find.
- -
__
The problem isn't that LA and Humanities are unimportant. The problem is that supply massively outstrips demand. ~4 million degrees are issued per year in the US. That's an ocean of candidates you can get lost in. Graduating into that ocean with $40,000 of non-dischargeable debt and no actionable career plan is not a reliable recipe for success.
Ethics, anyone? The liberal arts types are the intuitives and the perceivers. They are a balance and the conscience of our societies. They put the big picture together. They are the ones that see the dangers of unrestrained technology and the intrusions into our lives. They are the ones that read Asimov and hold the 3 laws of robotics to be sacred and they should extend to artificial intelligence. The anthropologists, sociologists, historians, etc. are necessary. Especially historians. "He who fails to learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them."
Absolutely. A pro-reason education is useful. A post-modern "there-is-no-truth-only-competing-power-structures" simply has to go. It's a foolish philosophy (that had interesting and thoughtful roots) that became an tool for indoctrination.
History can be very interesting. For instance, the development of technology, and mathematical notation, (algebra, before the middle of the 17th C was written out in complete sentences.) This information is a fun and useful addition to ones appreciation of the world and beauty around us.
"Learning" that math, and the use of reason, just "perpetuates-the tyrannical-patriarchal-colonialism-of-the existing-power-structure" does what? First it's foolishness to say that we can't know anything. And secondly knowledge of a particular physical structure (say the existence of elements and atoms, and how these atoms interact with each other) does not promote the effing "patriarchy."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Despite what you'd expect, some of the articles in Playboy are top notch. It's stuff you'd expect to see in the New Yorker, not a skin magazine.
I've seen enough cries of "racism" in my lifetime that basically shows that anyone using it generically for "I don't like that view" is an idiot. Just recently one went something like this
"He's a White Supremacist"
"Dude, I'm Japanese"
The Cry has become null and void, because crying "racism" is simply a shortcut for a complete and utter lack of critical thought.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Unfortunately for you, and those that hold a somewhat (and seemingly) reasonable viewpoint, the term has been co-opted by the political left and used as a battle cry to remove any reason to have any sort of civil conversation about their proposed policies. Add in a dose of "patriarchy" and "cis gendered" and you end up with the inter-sectional idiocy being foisted upon college students.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
tl/dr--he misses the reason why a&h are good, which is "It can't be turtles all the way down."
Engineering solves a problem, does the useful task, accomplishes some goal. These are all good things. Engineering does this sort of thing in an engineering domain--that is, we (engineers) deal with stuff you can plan, design, execute, measure, control, and so forth. Objectively observable stuff. So, engineering is useful because it produces other things which are useful.
Engineering is a means to an end (which is usually a means to another end, turtles, etc.)
Liberal arts, humanities, etc. can do that sort of thing as well, which seems to be the point Prof. Wadha is trying to make. That a&h can produce something that we can all measure and agree exists, so are useful in the same way as engineering. Social scientists can define and measure empathy; empathy makes better design; better design makes better products; therefore art is good.
Means to an end.
Prof Wadha misses the larger point of a&h: You gotta have something that doesn't keep justifying itself by facilitating the next thing. Well, you don't *have* to, but if you don't, then you're just chasing your tail. At some point, you have to answer the question "What's it all for".
Arts and Humanities (the one at hand would be philosophy) aren't necessarily a means to an end; they *are* good in and of themselves. "Pure" science can be similarly good. The whole point of being a self-aware person (or "human", but the times, they are a-changin...) is that you do or experience, or be something that is axiomatically good--not good because of something outside of itself.
Fulfillment doesn't come from doing something that gets you something that gets you something that... You can ride that train for a while, but eventually you figure out you've been running in circles.
Something that has no purpose outside of itself, but is still good must therefore be innately good.
Of course there are things that both have purpose and are good by themselves (friendship, perhaps?), but it's easier to identify those that stand alone.
Art is a particularly good example of this kind of thing. "Pure Science" us a less strict example--these things *might* make you some money one day, but we do them because they are good. Knowledge of the universe is good because it is good. Whether we build something with that knowledge or not.
This is the point of engineering, agriculture, medicine, etc. To make it possible for us to be human and do and be those things that are in themselves good.
Disclaimer--I am an engineer.
As an aside, I take issue with the statement "You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools; turning engineers into artists is hard." Engineering is a hell of a lot more than using software and graphics tools! And art is a hell of a lot more than slapping paint on canvas.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Then you went to a poor university. At my university (where I earned my BSEE), I had to have 20 credit hours of philosophy, 20 credit hours of English (10 of that was classical literature and analysis), 10 hours of art, 10 hours of history, and 10 hours of other humanities (including business, foreign language, or others). Of the 206 credit hours needed to graduate, 35% were for humanities/liberal arts. In other words, we received a universal education background. As was expected in classical universities.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There's a reason Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot went after the STEM people first...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I am also an expert on moo shu pork and General Tso's chicken.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Someone who avoids small errors on their way to the grand fallacy. It applies to any field of endeavor.
woosh
indeed
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I come at this as an engineer with a designer in the family, but I don't think people are giving enough credit to the value of good design. Yes, theoretically, you can learn about art and design from self study, but that's the same attitude of those who say they can write software through self study: yes, you can, but unless you're a one-in-a-million genius, it probably won't be any good. A well trained designer is not that different from a well trained software engineer: four to eight years of theory and training reinforced by years of professional practice, continuous study of new and historical techniques, etc.
My general criticism of these kind of articles is that they tend to just blend all the humanities together as if they're all the same, much like how they just lump STEM together. Much like how you wouldn't ask a civil engineer to design a microprocessor, saying that an English major can design an interface just as well as an actual designer or asking a musician to organize large quantities of government data as effectively as a library archivist is just as silly.
Engineering, Science and Math has lead to every major advancement humanity has ever made, Liberal Studies and Humanities, has lead to hurt feelings and cuddle parties.
Because you're seeing them just like some people saw blacks and women early on in their campaigns to appeal to the humanity of their fellow Americans, to get their particular grievances out in the open so that all of us could advance as a society.
That you see their complaints as "whiny" and that you view them as "losers" speaks infinite volumes about who you are. You lack compassion and encourage others to condemn and attack people who are in pain. You feel not only justified in doing so, you feel it is the right thing to do and are seeking not only the approval of others but also their assistance.
Human rights are not a zero sum game. Taking care of one "group" in society doesn't mean that other "groups" get left behind. Compassionately listening for the truth costs nothing, and usually results in the individual seeing in themselves what has caused them to be so callous toward others. As a result, when human rights are pursued and codified into the common consciousness everyone benefits. The conduit connecting us all is strengthened.
Special treatment, on the other hand, is a zero sum game that results in division, subjugation, control, and genocidal attacks on other groups. This is the realm of "survival" level thinking and is the only choice when the objective of the exercise requires taking from others to be fulfilled.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
It's a word about as well-defined as "fascist", but as I understand it, it usually means someone who discriminates based on race -- rather than blindly checking just an actually relevant trait of an individual. Thus, killing Jews for being Jews, or giving Blacks more points for university admission is racism.
If you say that admitting that a specific race is superior on the average with regard to a specific trait than others, then you can call me a racist, because I say that, given two traits that are completely independent, and follow gene-like changes and spread, with probability 1 they will show correlation (skin shade being one of the traits). On the other hand, no race is superior to another for all traits, otherwise it would quickly out-compete the other. And, at least within current human population, individual variance is far bigger than racial "bonuses", to the point that eg. saving some recruiting costs by not even testing those of a "worse" race is not worth losing that part of the talent pool.
Thus, for me, racism is any kind of preferential treatment based on race, be it refusing to enroll/hire/elect someone, or picking a worse candidate just because people of same skin color are "underrepresented".
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Well, whaddaya know! We found the one guy who actually read the articles!
were also talented artists and/or musicians. Their hobbies have included painting, clay sculpture, and playing in orchestra or other bands. The best artists I have known, were "only" artists, but that wasn't a limitation of their abilities, but rather a limitation of their education or of the brainwashing they received about how they lacked the "smarts" to be anything but an artist.
If you are reading this and are pre-college, and have talents in the arts, and believe (or are being told) you are somehow lacking the smarts to pursue engineering, then I encourage you to reconsider. The people telling you this are probably HS counselors or others that are not engineers. They do not know engineering except by proxy of the students they've encouraged in that direction. Their failure isn't in the students that pursued engineering and washed out. Their failure was in the students they encouraged to do pursue liberal arts instead, that could have been great engineers.
One of the very best engineers I've ever worked with was--when she was in high school--a mostly C's student that drew horses in class instead of taking notes and did not know what she wanted to pursue if she went to college. Her father suggested she pursue mechanical engineering and lacking any other particular ambition, did just that. She discovered college classes weren't as crappy as in HS and she did her homework, got good grades, graduated and got a job at NASA designing cool shit.
She regularly cites her creative talents as giving her an edge in her design work. When she was just staring out and needed to think through a mechanism design, she made paper crafted models with tape and paperclips to gain understanding and validate her ideas, and later discovered this wasn't an uncommon practice among engineers at NASA.
I know all this because I talked with her about education paths when we were both mentoring a HS robotics club. She was incensed at the teacher running the club that would direct the "artsy" kids to create the posters and design the t-shirts for the club, rather than have them focus on the robotics. The teacher was setting those kids "artsy" kids expectations low and perpetuating the stereotyping that participating in a robotics club could have overcome.
Liberal arts are important to society and artists are certainly important to society, but being an artist and making a living are, except for a rare few, not the same activity. Whatever spark of creativity and originality that exists inside you is valuable and usable in engineering.
but like science you better be prepared to put up or shut up. There are some opinions that are just so obviously wrong they don't deserve consideration. Somewhere along the line we started acting like everybody's unsupported opinion had value (right around the time economists started buying into the Laffer curve I think). Academia of all stripes isn't like that. If you've got some fresh new insights by all means, bring them.
OTOH the sort of crap that used to fly in the 1950s that was used to excuse "Manifest Destiny" and the like is rightfully being called out as bullshit. Not that folks in Texas (who've managed to change references the American slave trade to make it sound like the slaves were paid laborers, I kid you not) got the memo. But folks like Aronra of Youtube fame are still going to call them out on it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The phrase "as important as" has never be spotted in a document at a reading level above sophomoric.
True story: if 2 g of beta cells in your pancreas die, without extreme intervention, you die too. Gram for gram, the most important cells in your entire body? (Everything is better with the Betteridge treatment.)
Quora: Which element is the most important for human survival?
Hint: if you're reading Quora, you're doing it wrong.
1.8: Essential Elements for Life
Selenium is a good bet here, punching way above its weight class: just 2 mg in the body is considered essential for life. Good lord, that makes selenium a THOUSAND TIMES more important than beta cells.
So that's my haul from 5 minutes of pinhead masturbation. Was it as good for you, too?
>we will always need English professors, historians, philosophers
No. We need English teachers, not professors, "historian" is a synonym for a "propagandist" and philosophy should be a hobby of physicists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Honestly, you could learn a lot more about China from Naomi Wu's twitter feed.
Her English is easier on the eyes, too.
Racism literally means that you believe the differences between races are substantive.
There are not even legit biological differences that group into the purported races. Genetically it is complete hogwash.
It doesn't become racism only when you decide that you must be superior to others, it starts when you get tricked into believing that the categories are substantive.
There is no contradiction between being a White Supremacist and being Japanese. That is just about the stupidest and most ignorant thing I've heard about race today, and I'm right here in this thread reading it.
Indentitarian Politics? What is that, the politics of getting words stuck between your teeth as a way of life?
I tried hard, I dug up the Latin root and everything, but that's the best I can come up with. WTF are you even talking about? Don't forget to include an idea between the derps.
Apparently wearing a shirt, designed by a woman, is "magically" sexist.
*facepalm*
Well, we do know that wearing a shirt designed by a woman doesn't mean you're not a sexist, so I get suspicious at your construction. You're asking people to make assumptions that are not falsifiable, while also claiming to possess some sort of knowledge or idea. That adds up to something suspicious, in my experience.
To quote the chair of my old Classics department:
"A liberal arts education prepares you to fully enjoy a life it will never help you to afford". Equally apropos, "Majoring in philosophy prepares you to seek the answers to life's big questions -- like, 'do you want fries with that?'"
Personally, I find that a liberal arts education has value and is worthy of pursuit. However, unless you have a head start in life, or are prepared to suffer, you may not want to actually major in something soft, or at least not end there.
Studying literature helps you to understand that words matter and how to parse text for meaning. That's valuable if you decide to become a lawyer, but then you're making money from having studied the law, not from having read Milton. Likewise, studying history ought to help provide ample examples of decisions having long tails of consequence.
Whenever this topic comes up, I find it helpful to reference John Adams:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
At the macro level, he's talking about the struggle for independence, followed by the struggle to build a functioning state that can support a vibrant culture. At the micro level, he's saying that a family's arch is usually begun by a struggle in one generation get their children educated with the hopes that those children will study practical arts and sciences that will get them employed. They can then, hopefully, build a fortune that would allow the third generation the opportunity to study more "frivolous" topics.
the tl;dr is that if you're the first in your family to go to college, you're probably better off not majoring in anything with the word "studies" in the title.
I dunno about equal importance, but the pathetic amount of humanities in most engineering degree requirements is sad.
Actually both engineering and general humanities are sadly lacking in history, and ripe to bite on the first apple dangled by a charismatic demagogue.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Don't criticize. Those dictators hadn't learned how to successfully radicalize them the way Japanese cult leaders and certain religions have.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Classically, the "liberal arts" were seven specific fields of study, five of which were forms of math: the "trivum" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, plus the "quadrivium" arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics, i.e. cyclical functions, like trigonometric ones) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics, i.e. mostly calculus).
Today they seem to be treated as a synonym to the "humanities", and I'm at a loss as to what exactly those are supposed to be other than "not a (physical) science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field".
Psychology seems to be counted sometimes, but that's a physical science, a level of abstraction up from biology. Sociology, which seems to always be counted as such, is likewise a level of abstraction up from ecology (societies are basically human ecosystems), which in turn is definitely also a physical science on par with biology even though I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "STEM" blowhards here wanted to count it as some "soft, leftist" field because of its environmentalist connotations.
Mathematics also isn't a physical science, or even an application thereof as engineering and technology are. But I guess math gets lumped in with them because the physical sciences use lots of math?
So how about fields like political science and economics, which use extensive math in things like control theory, voting theory, game theory, decision theory, and so on? Those aren't physical sciences, not even to the extent that sociology is, because they're talking about prescriptive rather than descriptive topics: what kind of actions it would be rational to take, not just what kind of action people do in fact take. You might call them "ethical sciences" (at least I would like to). But they're definitely not physical sciences, which seems to exclude them from STEM even though they rely just as much on math?
What about linguistics, which is not just anthropology of language but an abstract field with close connections to mathematics at times? Linguistics and mathematics seem to have about equal claim to the field of logic.
And what about philosophy, which like mathematics and linguistics is a highly abstract field, and like mathematics is extremely rigorous in its logic (sharing at least as equal a claim to that field as math or language do), yet largely unconcerned with the empirical observations of the physical sciences, and lays the groundwork of the "ethical sciences" as much as it does the physical ones?
The arts are definitely not physical sciences, or any kind of science at all. So are those "the humanities"? Do you just mean "the arts" when you say "the humanities"? If so, then don't go lumping linguistics, philosophy, the "ethical sciences" like economics and political science, and some actual empirical physical sciences like psychology and sociology in with it. Those are all their own separate things, and really don't belong in one category with each other (any more than mathematics belongs in the same category as the physical sciences and applications thereof in engineering and technology).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yeah, you keep telling yourselves that when at work you have to say "Would you like fries with that, sir?"
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Maybe I was doubly lucky, I had a Media class with a similar professor and had a comparable experience. Granted, I took both classes over ten years ago, but it might be why I don't automatically subscribe to the notion that "Universities are Indoctrinating the Youth!" Academia always gets smack from the types of people who say that. It's nothing new. It's a free country though - they can keep out and professors can keep on doing what they do in accordance to what they think works. So long as this remains the case I don't really care all that much.
As for your experience, I'm sorry to hear that you had a bad one. I had some bad experiences too (hard to understand foreign teachers, one really irritated Iranian who did not appreciate being taped, and one instructor who didn't quite know what she was doing). You gotta take some of the good with some of the bad. Understand that your experience need not be the rule nor the exception. Just know that it's not a zero sum choice between rote memorization and pointless free-for-all: it *can* be good, yes, even liberal arts.
If you don't like what's happening at Yale, you could always get a degree from Oral Roberts.
At the rate of companies now ignoring graduates from universities, it's not going to matter. Before the current employment boom in the US there was already a large upswing in companies wanting to hire people "fresh from high school" or "high school only" not because of various shit reasons, but because they could be trained for the job far easier then someone with a chip on their shoulder the size of Pontiac, Michigan.
Om, nomnomnom...
Because your definition of the word "racist" doesn't match anyone else's except for the small, loud minority of right-idenifying internet posters who want to discredit the entire idea of racism.
Considering you've screeched in the past that "islam" is a race, that should narrow down the definition difference between you and me.
Om, nomnomnom...
There is no contradiction between being a White Supremacist and being Japanese. That is just about the stupidest and most ignorant thing I've heard about race today, and I'm right here in this thread reading it.
True, they call themselves banana's in a non-pejorative. However, when people screech that "islam is a race" it's pretty easy to tell exactly what their definition of racism is. That's right beside the part where they start saying that blacks can't be racist, and racism against whites isn't racism.
Om, nomnomnom...
So which part just painted you a bigot? The part where you went anti-egalitarian, or the part where you don't believe that there's serious issues with suicide support, parental issues, paternity, abuses by childrens aid groups, or of flagrant abuses in family courts where men see suicide as the only way out because they're financially ruined.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, we do know that wearing a shirt designed by a woman doesn't mean you're not a sexist, so I get suspicious at your construction. You're asking people to make assumptions that are not falsifiable, while also claiming to possess some sort of knowledge or idea. That adds up to something suspicious, in my experience.
Is this your first experience to the "everything is sexist/misogyny/rape" mob rule that's been going on the last decade or so via social media, where even if you're a feminist female monster who's raped people the media will ignore it and paint the victim as the aggressor.
Their point is exactly this. It's sexist because "women" not because it was designed by a woman. But because it has women on it, the fact that it was designed as such means that she's an ignorant anti-feminist steeped in misogyny that believes that the proper place for a female is pregnant. And I sure wish I was making that up, instead of it being part and parcel of what's taught in higher education today, and parroted on feminist news/blogs/opinion sites.
Om, nomnomnom...
Have you missed what's been going on the last 10-18 years or so? Because universities are cutting out the "classical" components of their curriculum, everything from math, economics, philosophy, literature those last two are being painted as "white supremacy and colonialism" in the top tier western universities these days. Hell you can graduate from a top 50 university in the US today, and not have to take algebra, economics, or english, but have a required 10-30hr flavor of social justice course. Some universities you can't graduate without a minimum 10hr social justice course of some kind.
Seriously the points that people like Peterson and Weinstein have been making regards to this problem have been building for quite a while, and Peterson falls directly into the classical liberal camp and Weinstein falls into progressive-liberal. The latter of the two is more progressive then your average /.er.
Om, nomnomnom...
Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do.
Are you kidding me? Have you seen the content of modern humanities courses?
They are so full of "pomo, deconstructionist, everything is a social construct" BS that humanities grads are the very LEAST qualified people to be able to think critically, of any humans.
No, actually, if you're not sexist you don't care who made it, and you can just judge it based on the imagery.
And, news flash, whenever there is harmful Foo-ism running rampant there will be examples of Foos that are also anti-Foo, for various reasons. Only Fooists are going to point at that as if it changes the debate. It is not substantive in any way.
You're starting to think about it for the first time, good job.
But actually, historically lots of white racists like to find a black person who is also racist against black people, and use that as if it means something. It means nothing, though. That's the team you accidentally find yourself joining when you "go there."
Why don't you just man up...
why don't I just man up and waste vast amounts of time unpacking a tissue of lies only for him to turn aronud and post more. Yeah that sounds like a fantastic idea. If he can get to the point without blatant falsehoods first, then I'll listen to that point. Until then, I'll stop reading at the first falsehood.
There is an idea propagated by the dishonest on the internet that the onus is on the reader to plough through arbitrarily large amounts of crap to gind the grain of truth. In reality it's way quicker to generate bullshit than disprove it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
My mathematical logic course as an undergrad was about half mathematicians and half philosophers. Very interesting mix.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Thing is, blacks and women are still having problems with their human rights. Discrimination is still rampant.
Men? Not so much.
Everyone experiences discrimination. Even you discriminate against men, by not listening to their claims and spreading hurtful gossip about the disposition of every person who is a men's rights activist. If you haven't met them all then your estimation of their character is something you invented in your mind and then tried to get other people to believe and support by falsely stating it as a fact.. That's just like saying a minority is lazy, shiftless, criminal, and bad for property values. Think on that.
Here's an example of what MRA's talk about: The difference in workplace deaths between men and women is drastic. Men experience over 90% of workplace deaths.
If you think that dying at a 12 to 1 ratio is something men should just keep quiet about you are a very sick person. If women or minorities were dying at work at a 12 to 1 ratio would you call them the "whiniest bunch of losers"? What kind of "whataboutism" drives your internal operation such that you can have a heart for people in need of being heard and supported, but at the same time can say "You've got a penis, you're good. I don't want to hear you."
I am hoping that you are just ignorant of the facts. I don't know what kind of person disparages people who are dying in disproportionately large numbers while in the act of supporting their families, providing valuable services to the community, and driving the economy. I wouldn't know what to call someone who knew the facts and was ok with this. I can't imagine someone knowing this and then insulting people who said "We're tired of dying, can we talk about this?"
If you do indeed care about other humans, and you care about discrimination, I ask you to take a close look at what you have said and compare it to what you say you stand for. If you really do have an ear for others pain and you care for others your words do not back that up.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I'm sorry. Are you complaining that people don't raptly listen about how you are persecuted on the Internet? And comparing it to a still real discrimination in housing, employment and other matters? Let me call you a whaaaambulance, stat.
No. I'm talking about basic human communication, empathy, compassion, and love.
If you cannot even provide a listening space and instead give derision and spitefulness you have only accomplished one thing: restricting and reducing your own capacity to experience and create love, compassion, and empathy. It's like drinking the pain away. Sure, it numbs your agony, but at the same time it takes away your ability to experience joy and be satisfied with life and yourself.
To the extent that you turn an opportunity to express compassion into an expression of contempt, to that same extent you limit your capacity to experience and give compassion. For instance I mentioned death rates and males. The minorities you mention have males in them. In fact, a disproportionately large number of men who die at work are minorities. In your reply you just intimated that housing discrimination is a more pressing issue than companies working minority employees to death. I truly have no reference point from which to compare the two things, but I would, without a single doubt in my head, come out in the corner of reducing workplace deaths of people who are traditionally marginalized. It encompasses a part of employment discrimination, which you pointed to already, and quite frankly I have never seen a dead person purchase a house.
I can tell you this though, anyone who dismisses the issue of men's death rate at work is not firing on all cylinders where it matters. Not the head, the heart.
Forgive my digression, I just wanted to point toward something that seems a little questionable in your logic. Questionable logic in otherwise rational individuals always points toward an emotional and personal issue.
I only mention this because if you want to truly be able to give yourself to the causes that matter the most to you, those things inside you that you feel so strongly about that you want them to be manifest in this world through you, you could do yourself far worse than getting connected to compassion and love. To the degree that you deny it to any other human, you deny it to others and even to yourself.
The derision you are using to cover up what you really feel points toward pain, anger, doubt, and loss. To someone like me it looks like there is something you are holding onto. Something that hurt you deeply and ever since then you have never forgiven yourself.
Once you realize that freedom, life, compassion, empathy, and love are not zero sum games you can start to have them all of the time, and foment them in every relationship. So rather than jealously guarding and hoarding them they become the water you swim in.
Best of luck with your pain. I was able to leave mine behind. I sincerely hope the same for you.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.