Humanities, Universities and the Absurd

The New York Review of Books has a piece bemoaning the death of the humanities. They seem to make two points. One is that more students are being pushed into education so as to get a job. Second, that the humanities enable students to work in the entertainment industry making new Netflix programs.

Point One: If you are dumping over $200,000 into a child's education, well would you not want them to be employed and off of your books! For most and education is the first step in getting a job, yes real work. That means you bring something to the table.

Point Two: Are you out of your mind! Humanities and Netflix, script writing! Perhaps the author did not notice but the preponderance of disoriented humanity is on these screens. That is not humanities.

The author notes:

The social value of the humanities will surely grow as Big Tech confronts its proliferating problems, from election meddling, data mining, and anti-competitive practices to the spread of hate speech, collaboration with the military, and hostility to labor unions. The heady early days of tech-utopianism seem a dim memory. Critical perspectives like John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood and Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor about the downfall of Theranos have alerted people to the moral mire into which biochemists, software engineers, and tech entrepreneurs can fall when cut off from people knowledgeable about ethics, psychology, and social history. The search for fixes in the tech world should create new openings for humanities graduates. In June 2018, for instance, Google announced a set of seven principles to guide it in developing artificial intelligence, and just last month it unveiled an external advisory board to monitor their application. But the board is top-heavy in computing specialists, and it includes the head of a company that collects and analyzes drone data (as well as the head of the Heritage Foundation). It is, says Mike Ananny, who teaches communication and journalism at the USC Annenberg School, “a fig-leaf exercise”—one that leaves the technologists and engineers in charge. It’s not enough for Facebook to hire a few dozen liberal arts grads to monitor its platforms for hate speech, he says; its owners and managers need to address the incentives that encourage people to use its platforms in this way in the first place.The technologists, Ananny warns, “are not going to willingly give up their power.” In the battle ahead, the crucial players will be those trained in how the humanities, social sciences, and technology intersect—what he calls the “missing middle.” 

The problem is not that the people have not had a humanities education, in today's world the humanities is an amalgam of political correctness and does not venture into any depth of ethics. After all that stuff is from those old guys who have nothing to tell us. The running of Silicon Valley companies is a reflection of the investor mindset in the Valley. Theranos was a problem of having not one person ask a question as to the viability of the services offered, not because they did not want to but because they "believed". If the author read the book the author would have noted that it was a few biochemists who asked what was going on, they left and ran for the hills.

As for the AI rant, all AI is just one solution after another tailored to meet a specific need, using some similar underlying techniques. AI is not some pervasive system that can be applied universally. It is truly a silo after silo approach to one issue after another.

The humanities provides a useful set of tools to understand. We need to have a grasp on other languages, I can stumble about in six, but that was because I needed it in specific environments. To understand the current arguments of socialists one needs to understand not just the current political theories but how we got there. That you will not learn at a university, you will just learn why socialism is good, whatever that means.

So should someone major in history? If you want a job, there are not many that require that skill. If you have a large trust fund, do whatever you want.