When their real goal is to "tackle misinformation" they should abolish any thinking prevalent in the humanities.
If you want pure objective truth you need logic and evidence. Basically the tools that are employed by Math, Physics and Engineers. The concepts of Classical Positivism are over 100 years old and are still the best thing we got to find out the truth.
In order to "tackle misinformation" humanities have zero solutions to offer. Any mediocre engineer would be better.
A lot of the world's problems are just too complex and interconnected to have an accessible source of definitive truth. For example anything to do with pollution or major construction projects. You have to balance competing demands that are absurdly tangential, that should be a false dichotomy. But those are the choices that have to be made all the time and there is no analysis that can give you the answer.
Science and engineering strip out complexity to reach something simple enough to be modelled. It is naïve to believe that every problem can be treated like this.
> It is naïve to believe that every problem can be treated like this.
Is it really? I can make abstract models of all kinds of things and still get accurate predictions. The movement of single atoms in a gas is very "complex". Still thermodynamics can make precise prediction about pressure, temperature and volume of that gas.
Of course you always have to check if your model is accurate and if the abstraction does not take a very important part of reality in consideration.
A scientific predication is not enough to make a decision in these kind of cases.
For example, consider the building of a wind farm...
* The site is on the migration path of a species of endangered goose. You can model the number likely to be killed.
* Climate change is a problem. You can model the effect on the atmosphere of CO2 emissions.
* The turbines will be visible from a beauty spot and could effect tourism. You can model where the turbines are visible.
* People think that turbines are really ugly. You can quantity this with a questionnaire.
Lots of scientific predication and analysis going on here. But none of that tells you what you should actually do about these issues. It doesn't tell you how many geese you are allowed to kill to reduce CO2 Any more than science can be tell you what flavor of ice cream to eat. It is a question of morality, geography, asthetics, sociology and politics. Why wouldn't you want to understand those things?
If I know all of the above mentioned quantifiable objective variables with a reasonable accuracy I can make a much more informed decision.
Again, why do I need humanities for that decision?
What are the solutions they have to offer?
How can they do anything else than to say "You have to do it that way, because we say so"?
If they say "this solution is morally right, ascetically beautiful, sociologically correct and politically desirable" aren't they imposing their own subjective unverifiable "truths" onto others?
Just as having an in depth understanding of mathematics, physics, or engineering helps us to make more informed decisions, so too do the humanities. Fields of study such as philosophy, sociology, or aesthetics do not attempt to establish, as you put it, subjective unverifiable "truths" (to do so would be quite infeasible in the first place). Instead they allow for discussion and aggregation of information and reasoned opinions, so that a comprehensive understanding of the field and its many schools of thought may be reached.
Coming back to the wind farm, even once we have the objective variables, the decision we make will be based on factors of morality, geography, aesthetics, sociology and politics. By having a broad understanding of these fields and the various paradigms contained within them, we can produce a more informed decision than if these aspect were ignored completely.
In a problem that lacks definitive truth you have to apply subjective thinking. That is all you have left. And the wind farm is a good example of that. There is no scientific truth that means we have to care about threatened species, or the effect on tourism, or even climate change. Deciding to care about those things is a subjective decision. If you look at things from a higher level of abstraction the certainty just fades away.
I don't see the point in defending the humanities as some utilitarian tool. It is always a good idea to become more educated, and to try and understand the world a little beter from different perspectives.
> I can make abstract models of all kinds of things and still get accurate predictions.
If you think that's working for you in dealing with human emotions, well...
How many non-STEM people have you persuaded to change their lives for the better with that approach?
For that matter, how many STEM people's lives have you impacted meaningfully that way? I'd guess more, but still not very many.
> ...How are humanities helping me with that?
I studied humanities intensely until I reached college. I was a semi-pro flutist for several years after, a good enough pianist that I could have gotten into music programs, and I was (and am) a good reader, world-builder, and editor (mainly of fiction, but sometimes non-fiction as well).
All that was, in fact, spectacular training for software development, as it taught me several lessons that many programmers I have encountered do not seem to have learned:
- You cannot understand anything meaningful perfectly.
- Nothing complex can be perfectly rigorously formalized by the human mind. The closer you get, the smaller the percentage of humans that can and will understand it becomes.
- A well-trained intuition for metaphor and symbolism can be a spectacular workaround for the problems presented by the previous two points. Many great artists don't realize the full depth of the symbolism and metaphors they themselves have created until their sharpest audience members help them see it, and that richness can communicate things not even the author fully understands. As an acquaintance whose name is escaping me once said, "Poetry is fundamentally about those things which cannot be named."
- Technical skills like software development or structural engineering, while they take some time and a reductionist mindset to learn, are not the hard part. I had absolutely no native talent for software and while I'll never be world-class, I'm pretty useful in a lot of contexts now. You can just learn it, unless you have biological problems with your intellect.
What's hard is seeing the complexity in this world as it truly is, understanding how far beyond your grasp it is, seeing how blindingly, dizzyingly beatiful it is despite the broken shards strewn throughout reality's nature, and finding ways to actually, genuinely take care of other people, without doing more harm than good due to inattention, arrogance, excessive reductionism, or any of the thousand other failings that plague us.
Humanities, especially music, taught me that technique is not the hard part by showing me starkly that blisteringly difficult technical exercises are often stultifyingly boring. When a field's whole point is aesthetic effect, it's far easier to see the ways in which technique matters and the ways in which it doesn't.
...this little rant is poorly written and structured, for which I am sorry. I have small children, so the amount of time I have to indulge in the lesser-paying pursuits I love, such as writing reasonably coherently about the humanities, is sadly limited.
In fact, I considered just deleting my response, because it's not a very good piece for its intended audience, but maybe it gets a little or what's in my head across.
In summary: I heartily agree that tech could use more humanities influence, especially software. I suggest particularly to other humanities-type creatives that software is a field that is fundamentally creative but which is also lucrative, due to it taking some work to learn, and it therefore makes a great day job.
> In order to "tackle misinformation" humanities have zero solutions to offer. Any mediocre engineer would be better.
Engineers are just as prone to misinformation as any other field. They just have more trouble recognizing it, due to a lack of training, and a mistaken belief they are immune.
> Engineers are just as prone to misinformation as any other field.
I would argue that this is exactly not the case because they know how to employ the scientific method. If humanities make all kinds of bold claims without providing logic and evidence engineers won't listen for very long. That is probably true.
The problem is that "tackle misinformation" and "ethics" get conflated here. If you want to know the truth you have to employ the scientific method.
Ethics on the other hand only contain very few "truths" and are mostly social convention. E.g. In some places of the world it is ethically perfectly correct to kill you daughter if she commits adultery. However there are some eternal truths that are correct for all different ethics out there, like the prisoner dilemma, contract/game theory and the fact that might is always right.
The latter eternal truth is the one that are interesting and worth discussing. However the former parts of ethics are the ones discussed by humanities. Hence from the viewpoint of an engineer useless.
How do you know if your boss is mad at you? Or if someone is interested in you romantically? Or if a landscape is beautiful or ugly?
Not all knowledge is gained through empirical methods. We know that because people had knowledge, including sophisticated technology, before there was a scientific method, i.e. before the 16th century. Most of our knowledge is gain through interpretation of the world...basically, doing the various things our minds do to arrive at conclusions. In the humanities, we (I am a humanist though also a programmer) try to hone our interpretive ability. We have a bunch of fancy names for ways to do that, like hermeneutics and dialectic and rhetoric, but basically you do it through practice.
There's bad interpretive work, just like there's bad scientific work. But thinking empiricism is the be-all of knowledge is kind of silly. Do you use the scientific method to decide if you should kick a dog or pet it? Whether you beleive a politician's statement? Wheter a newspaper is trustworthy? No, you go through a process of modelling that other consciousness. That's interpretation.
Those three are in fact all partially or fully learned behavior. Anyone on the autistic spectrum who learned coping skills is acutely aware that those are observational given their "driver failure" calls for doing it manually. Standards of taste are learned and beauty does have mathematical elements like phi.
I knew someone was going to be like "That stuff is observational and therefore empirical!" If that's the case then the humanities is a science because we're doing empirical research on books. Often empirical research on individual sentences!
If you want pure objective truth you need logic and evidence. Basically the tools that are employed by Math, Physics and Engineers. The concepts of Classical Positivism are over 100 years old and are still the best thing we got to find out the truth.
In order to "tackle misinformation" humanities have zero solutions to offer. Any mediocre engineer would be better.