
Humanities Paradox - pepys
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/01/analysis-considers-contradictions-high-school-and-college-students-interest
======
tomlock
I went to University in Australia initially planning to study Biology. I took
an introductory Philosophy course and I was hooked. I ended up completing my
Bachelors and doing some postgrad work. I committed all the way - I had no
other major or minor.

In my experience, that introductory course was key in convincing me to follow
that path.

Now I work in IT ;)

~~~
noobermin
I've heard this story more than once, but I'm curious is this is really all
that common. You obviously break the "humanities=future burger-flipper"
stereotype.

~~~
tomlock
I had a think about the people from Philosophy I kept track of and I can
honestly say they are now predominantly upper-middle, unless they stuck to
academia, which about 30% or so did, and obviously, are poor (as far as I
know), and somewhere on the road to a PhD.

There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side,
with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is
art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of
those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up
in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social
work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing
physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.

Obviously that's not a rule. When I left university, I worked in an industrial
site, and a magazine, and at a Salesforce implementation company, and then at
the industrial site again, teaching myself more and more programming at each.
I got promoted to the IT department of the industrial site, and continued to
learn, and then got a job doing ETL/Database/Automation stuff at a big telecom
in the marketing department. I've been lucky, and I've known the right people,
but I honestly would still be happy if I was working at that industrial site.
There was a Theology graduate who also worked there, driving a forklift.

If people ask me, do I recommend getting a philosophy degree, I say I don't.
That's like asking if I'd recommend that people get a tattoo. I'm very happy
with mine, but its a decision that needs to be made by an individual. Like a
tattoo, it reduces your job prospects, and there are no take-backsies.

Now comes my smug paragraph. Everyone in philosophy, and who even starts
philosophy, hears the same jokes. Pretty much nobody is saying its a good idea
to do a philosophy degree. To do philosophy, people have to overcome the
societal expectation that they will die in a ditch, poor and unable to do
anything "useful". To do philosophy, you really need to love that shit. I've
honestly never heard someone speak with regret about completing a philosophy
degree, whereas of the biologists, engineers and economists I know, some wish
they'd done something different. If you read philosophy, and you love it, do
what you love. Don't do something just because you think it'll make your life
safer.

I'd rather live a happy "burger flipper" than discover I don't love what I do
in 20 years.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side,
with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is
art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of
those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up
in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social
work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing
physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.

Ironically, I'm a comp-sci/math type person, and I regard continental
philosophy a bunch better than analytic. Continental philosophy usually
considers matters inside their social and historical context, so at least
sometimes, when they can be bothered to refer to the real world, they're
referring to it with a solid context.

Whereas analytic philosophy often seems to me to suffer from math-envy, and to
formalize too early and too often. The result is that analytic philosophers
spend a lot of time debating over _what they think_ are rigorous,
scientifically-grounded concepts _when in fact_ our best science says that
things just don't work that way or the theories aren't "done cooking".

(I'm thinking of a Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia page someone directed me
to last night on "reductionism", which was given three definitions, _none_ of
which matched what a working scientist would usually call reductionism. Or of
the very concept of supervenience, which needs less metaphysics and more
information theory. Or of the perennial debates over the "Hard Problem" of
consciousness.)

~~~
tomlock
Yeah, I feel like I'm totally on the same page as you. Analytic philosophy
always seemed like a bit of fun to me, but seemed to boil down to logic games
that have as much application to the real world (as a simulation and
explanation of it) as boolean, programmed representations of it do. Which is
to say, some.

That doesn't mean I don't have immense respect for analytic philosophers, but
I have the type of respect for them that I also have for fiction writers that
create immensely consistent and engaging fantasy worlds. Zing!

Continental seemed to me to more generally have the view that all debates and
philosophies were necessarily making ontological and epistemological claims.
That immensely appeals to me.

------
yakult
Alternative explanation for the spike in freshmen interest: the engineering/cs
classes are 95% men where I am. Liberal arts has more even mix.

Not only is stem widely considered harder and requires crazier time
commitments, it also exacts a toll on your sex life. These are young people at
the peak of their productive cycles and this is a very large consideration.

~~~
wfo
This idea can be extended beyond simple sexual desire: engineering as it is
taught in prestigious universities is an enormous time commitment which
dominates your entire life for the prime 19-23 4 years that maybe you should
be spending learning about the world and interacting with people. People see
this and reject it; they'd prefer to make friends and have fun than disappear
into a black hole for 4 years only to emerge as a creature which they suspect
will be allowed by the capitalist system to make money.

------
graycat
I went to a college of liberal arts and sciences. There was a big load of
required humanities courses, but the college had a relatively good physics
department and a terrific math department. And math and physics were my
interests: So, I majored in math and had nearly a major in physics.

For the humanities, they claimed to teach about people, but at the time I
couldn't see that they were doing at all well at that, and later I concluded
that actually the humanities are not at all good about teaching about people,
e.g., get as much that is wrong as right and, really, darned little good
insight, but that parts of clinical psychology could teach some important and
reasonably credible lessons about people.

I really liked music, and the record collection in the library was terrific,
but I never took a course in music -- later started violin and made some okay
progress eventually.

But for the humanities courses I took, i.e., was _force fed_ , I came to hate
as nonsense, misleading about people, and otherwise a waste of time.

E.g., history: I wanted to learn some about history, but the history course
was absurd, from some pompous, pretentious text with no overview and otherwise
nearly impenetrable. And the darned course took so much time before year 1
that it never got to the 20th or even the 19th centuries. Bummer. Finally I
learned some about history from some books and some relatively serious TV
documentaries, e.g., _Victory at Sea,_ _The Battle of Britain_. The courses?
Bummers.

In the history courses, I wanted to learn _why_ , that is, the causes or at
least the candidate causes -- metals, domesticated animals, open ocean
sailing, relatively productive crops, etc., but the courses essentially
ignored all concepts of causes. Bummer.

Overall, IMHO, the humanities are suffering from lack of good methodology. In
particular, their _results_ are open to a lot of individual _interpretation_
and definite _maybes_ , and it's tough to have the work be _cumulative_ in any
very useful sense.

------
AndrewKemendo
I feel like my undergrad in Economics was the perfect middle ground between
humanities and STEM. Also helps to do it at an engineering school with
engineering/math as the core curriculum.

------
danharaj
I still regret not double majoring in one of the humanities when I was in
college. There's lots of technical / science people on HN. Does anyone feel
the same way?

~~~
abritinthebay
See the "humanities is easy" comment below. Too many STEM-Lords in HN a lot of
the time sadly. It's a very immature view but a sadly common one in much of
tech.

~~~
justin_vanw
The humanities ARE easy.

This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math /
Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English
or Journalism.

Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage
a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in
Physics???? HA!

~~~
tomlock
Interesting assumption, but it could be that the humanities are more engaging
than STEM fields, so people are likely to convert to them, but not go the
other way. Maybe people are more likely to be unwillingly driven in STEM, but
more likely to actively choose the humanities. All those silly assumptions
explain the same behaviors. I'm sure that the situation is more complex than
that.

~~~
aidenn0
I'd like to clear up at least one place where you and justin_vanw are talking
past each other:

At many engineering schools, the humanities _are_ a joke.

They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get
accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.

Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at
the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what
you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see
nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this
perception.

I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly
related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will
allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks
notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.

I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering
schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal-
arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the
classes there was.

Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school,
in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.

~~~
tomlock
This makes a heap of sense! I think though that we are on the same page with
this, that there are a bunch of complexities that it is very tempting to
simplify away in explanations of the differences between the fields.

------
justin_vanw
Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of the
graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up to
not learn anything.

Then blame common core, because... too many tests?

And the sad, sad conclusion: Of course the answer is for professors to insist
that their institution force more students to take more humanities classes.

Because it would be a tragedy if you didn't make a future chemist sit through
a semester of Introduction to Shakespeare and force them to write 3 essays
that will be vaguely skimmed and returned. If they didn't have to do that,
well, I think we all know you can't be a well rounded person without having to
listen to a class discussion between a dozen borderline illiterate
communication / journalism / criminology majors, and taking notes as they try
to make a coherent point about Henry III.

~~~
tomlock
>>Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of
the graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up
to not learn anything.

The y-axis was explained in the text! Did you just give us all the perfect
opportunity to draw some snarky conclusions about the difference between STEM
and humanities students? :D

~~~
justin_vanw
Actually it's not really explained.

The second graph is especially weird, since it says 'number of college
students is going up' but the graph goes from 0 to 0.18. I assumed it meant
'percent of college students who expressed an interest'?

~~~
tomlock
I somehow comprehended it on the first go.

