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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.
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.
I know it's not fashionable to RTFA, but to skip the very first word of the summary? That's going for a new low.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The article, presumably written by a liberal arts major
I realize it’s a rather long summary; but the first two words of the lede state quite clearly that the dude is an engineering professor.
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?
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The author is an Engineering professor. He is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. He has taught at Duke, Stanford and Emory.
See, this is why liberal arts and the humanities are so important. If you'd studied them, you might have thought to check the motherfucking article before spouting off about how this guy is just some liberal arts loser.
I would think that someone who jumped straight to, "he studied macrame" without even glancing at the article might not want to throw any stones about "critical thinking".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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...
Ethics have been on the table for 50 years, yes. But only because it's been 50 years and we still haven't learned a goddamn thing.
If more of us software engineers had studied some liberal arts or humanities, maybe fewer of us would work for companies that suck up personal information and sell it to the highest bidder. The ability to stop and think about what it is you're actually doing is apparently a rare commodity in the tech business these days.
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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
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.
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!
And he's not wrong, though the examples don't really work for me. Why do I think liberal arts are important for CS majors? Because software has to be used by people who don't write software. Musicians need software for creating music. Artists need software for creating art. Writers need software for writing. Programmers who also understand those secondary fields are likely to be better at creating such software than programmers who don't.
And the same is true for other, non-liberal-arts fields; pretty much every science field has some sort of software for collecting data, visualizing data, simulating complex interactions like protein folding, etc. (And arguably, data visualization is an art unto itself, upon which all sciences depend to some degree.)
I think every computer programmer should have at least a minor in a non-tech field, if not a second major, whether in a liberal arts field or a science or something else entirely, if only because of the opportunities for specialization that such outside interests offer. Also, if computers get to the point where software writes itself, at least they'll have something to fall back on. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I agree, but this is about humanities, who is really the expert here? I am a human, I am every bit an expert as you or that person holding a degree.
Speaking as a physical object, I'm every bit an expert on physics as someone holding a degree.
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Yes, but that's not really pertinent to the discussion, now is it? Shanghai Bill said, "the author's probably some liberal arts major". I presented evidence that the author was in fact, a distinguished faculty member at some of the top engineering schools. That's it. You want to change the topic at hand, you are welcome to do so, but it might be more appropriate to start a new thread. Which is something you would have learned in a freshman composition course in a motherfucking liberal arts program
Absolutely. I invite you to examine the data for yourself. ShanghaiBill's been posting here for a good long time. His comment history is publicly available. I can say with a 98% confidence interval that if ShanghaiBill is known for anything, it's something that caused him to spend 90 days in a country jail somewhere in the Florida panhandle.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Jonathan Haidt gives a lot of references and examples, both of explicit mission statements and indicators (actually, he ranks a couple of hundred schools based on objective criteria):
He says it's somewhat analogous to how universities split along religious/secular lines a century ago.
I took an ethics class as part of my CS curriculum. There was a lot of psychology in it, and we weren't graded for approved opinion or how well we memorized the material. What the professor wanted to see was how well we understood what was being taught - and yes your participation is a good way of measuring that. It's like that because a good professor will understand that different opinions are to be expected - so long as you gave it sufficient thought, you're doing good. Not every student wants to do that. Some people just want to be told what the answer is so that they can commit it to memory and regurgitate it later - these are most in need of such classes.
Humanities asks questions. Engineering provides solutions. That's pretty much the difference right there.
Can you think of any fields in technology where you might find value in the study of Linguistics? How about Logic?
Fun fact: Within my lifetime, Ontology moved from being mostly a humanities field to being mostly an engineering discipline. It was very interesting to watch it happen, as computer science researchers raided 2500 years of philosophy and start to build things out of it.
It gave me a new respect for the humanities, and philosophy in particular. Philosophy is, in a sense, the primordial soup from which new academic disciplines arise. And once they take form, they often jump faculties surprisingly quickly.
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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.
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
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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Because I'm such an nerd I visited classes from other departments in my free time and also watched lectures online. I happen to know that those from the humanities learn about the scientific method. How to collect data and how important it is to disprove the null hypothesis if you process your statistical data. They learn to be aware of biases that THEY as the observer and processor of the data can bring into it and so forth.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?
People who use statistics in social sciences (including those that completely depend on it for their work) tend to learn about statistics and math in a very shallow way. There are exceptions of course, but most of these people were not very good at math in school and/or do not like math very much. So they learn things very superficially, here's a stats software package (e.g. SPSS), we do this test in this situation, that test in that situation, enter your data, click click, what's the p-value? Make a conclusion. A lot of the conclusions are just plain garbage. Reproducibility? Errr, right...
Then there is the completely unrelated issue that a lot of "humanities" today is just plain lightly dressed-up political activism (e.g. gender studies). Then this activism spreads to other fields which should be about objective (as much as possible) study, such as history and classics. That's a whole other topic.
Finally, there is the problem that a lot of liberal arts & humanities have closed onto themselves, and became arcane self-referential disciplines without a real or obvious connection to the outside world. Sure, the same happens in some fields of natural sciences, but people generally have an easier idea of how natural science and engineering affect the "real world". When it comes to post-modern literary criticism - not so much.
The bad wrap the liberal arts & humanities get is mostly the liberal arts' & humanities' fault. It's not they are not relevant, it's that over the past few decades they themselves have made their own fields look less relevant to the rest of society.
It's ShanghaiBill's quality critical thinking that gets him through the day.