Tech Suffers From Lack of Humanities, Says Mozilla Head (theguardian.com) 472
The head of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, is warning that companies need to diversify their hiring practices to include more people from backgrounds in philosophy and psychology if they want to tackle the problem of misinformation online. He also "warned that hiring employees who mainly come from Stem -- science, technology, engineering and maths -- will produce a new generation of technologists with the same blindspots as those who are currently in charge, a move that will 'come back to bite us,'" reports the Guardian. From the report: "Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses, do a lot of reading and research on other topics.
Sure there are some workers from trade schools where that kind of thing is not as prevalent, but it seems like most tech workers I've run into have also been to college (and often not even for CS degrees so they have an even wider range of education). So I'm not sure if there really is the problem being claimed...
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I think the notion that college necessarily implies being well-versed in the humanities is kind of parochial. Lots and lots of college and university graduates have intense education but essentially minimal humanities exposure.
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I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses,
Really, forced to do humanities units? Is that common in the US?
As part of my CS degree, I chose to do a little psychology, but only because it topped off the points needed for my degree, without having to do any real work.
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Funny)
We had to take a humanities focus area (3 courses in one 'focus area') in addition to our regular humanities coursework.
Turns out every engineering student had run the same algorithm...best ratio. Hence the psych department had made themselves the only 'not eligible for humanities focus area' department.
Best not to stick your dick into crazy. (psych major==crazy). But we were kids, didn't know better.
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Insightful)
Same in Europe. Successfully, I might add, if only because those gender bullshit classes are usually free credits. Tests are easy, if your answer is something along the lines of "white men are to blame" you pass.
It's a bit like the Marxist/Leninist classes that were in the curriculum back in Soviet times. Also work in a similar way. And are about as useful as credit padding material, but little for anything else.
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses, do a lot of reading and research on other topics.
The psychology that you take in CS is entrance level. It is the scientific part, about perception and groupings and such.
There is another level when you fill an entire study with it. You can go the clinical path (two friends of mine did that) which is basically where doctors go. This part also is reasonably well understood and has a mostly sound scientific basis.
Or you can go the humanities path and then it becomes a wild mix of dogma and bullshit. There are extensive articles around (Google is your friend) about how most of the studies don't replicate, almost none of the studies replacate outside the lab, and how deeply ethics commissions and gender studies have applied a chokehold to necessary research.
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Insightful)
Lack of replication is often cited as evidence that science is bunk
Because, for replicatable studies, such so-called-science is indeed bunk. You can replicate psychological studies, and for any kind of treatments, you can have control groups, preferably blind. So that "behavioural therapy" of yours can be tested. And that it can but its proponents failed to do so is exactly why we call bullshit.
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Sure there are some workers from trade schools where that kind of thing is not as prevalent...
It can be difficult to keep them from dangerous accidents with the lathe if they're preoccupied with wondering "does existence precede essence?"
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:5, Insightful)
I seem to recall /. covering the problems with liberal arts majors not having to take real STEM courses while STEM students are forced to take the same liberal arts courses as liberal art majors.
Rants aside (I'm looking at you Mr. Hammer) soft sciences like psychology seem incapable of producing reproducible research. Why anyone would think they should have a bigger role in fields based on real reproducible science is beyond me.
Ethics will continue to be a problem in a culture where right and wrong continue to be treated as relative. I've taken numerous ethics courses. None of them would admit the existence of the concept of 'wrong' behavior or explain why, other than going to jail or getting sued one should not engage in it. As long as that paradigm exists ethics will be a problem.
Re:Thought most STEM workers went to college (Score:4, Informative)
> Leaving aside that many "hard" sciences have the same reproduction problem (e.g. climate science)
Yep, all this technology we have based on "Hard Science" only works randomly. It's like magic. The same magic that "Soft Sciences" rely upon.
Laughable.
Clearly. Clearly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Tech definitely needs more people with language skills when it comes to pasting the summary.
NO WE DO NOT! (Score:5, Insightful)
The very last thing Tech needs more of are gender studies majors.
Please stop trying to get intersectional loon-bags jobs where they can tell people what sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, blahblahblahblahblah pieces of shit they are and demanding they lower hiring standards to achieve a non-existent "perfect balance" of races, sexes and flat-out leftist-only ideology.
The humanities isn't just gender studies (Score:2)
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The fact that you are so profoundly ignorant of these issues demonstrates the need for people with an understanding of them.
He's NOT ignorant of them. He's pointing out how any observant person can see that marinating people in what has become the toxic absurdity of what now passes for a collegiate liberal arts program makes students, in fact, far less productive, civil, constructive and prosperous.
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Bingo!
I'm not saying there's NO place for people with Humanities degrees in tech.
Because there ARE.
However, the need for "more" is a HUGE over-simplification, and usually code-speak for "Inclusion, Equity & Diversity" people who "find" racism, sexism, etc-ism to justify their job and gerrymander how a company operates.
People in tech have better things to do than figure out the nicest way to lie and weasel-word their way around telling someone their code, device, or performance is shit. Sometimes you j
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And thus I retort.
https://www.brown.edu/academic... [brown.edu]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You were saying?
Diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
The head of theÂMozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, is warning that companies need to diversify
And that's where I stop reading. How about we just hire qualified people for a job and leave it at that? While I despise racists, mysoginists, etc. I've gotten to the point that any time I hear "diversity" I tune out because it's going to be bullshit. I also will not work for any company that has anyone with that word in their title. If that position is needed, then there's already something really wrong. Yes, there are some assholes in the world, but why would you want to force them to hire someone they are going to not want. I've had friends who were hired because of this kind of crap. And even though they were qualified, they were miserable. I know that Billy Bob Joe Jim's Klan Sheet company would lynch me on sight if they could, so I sure as hell don't want to work for him because he was forced to hire me. Do you think most white tech geeks would feel comfortable being hired to work in the ghetto because we need more white folks there? We need more fat old white men working as servers at Hooters too. There also aren't enough Asian rappers. And damnit, where are all of the quadraplegic trapeze artists.
Re:Diversity (Score:4, Informative)
She wasn't even supposed to have the job. She literally chased out the chosen next-in-line CEO Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript) by getting a bunch of her SJW staff to physically keep him out of the building and threaten him. Look it up *and note how a lot of news didn't cover it at all*. There's a personal account from him floating around too.
Here's hoping Brave development progresses to the point we can all just forget about FireFox and Mozilla at some point in the near future.
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And that's where I stop reading.
And you're the poorer for it, because you've missed Baker's entire point. A company that limits its talent pool to one type of person suffers from not just blind spots, but tunnel vision. Such a company tries to solve a problem that requires a full toolbox just by using a hammer.
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Humanities in recent decades *is* about tunnel vision. Everything has to serve a single political position. Any idea that could possibly serve an alternative political position is vilified, and anything that simply non-political is seen as a waste of time.
Bring more humanities majors into tech will give it more tunnel vision, not less.
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Mitchell is "her" not a "him" (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of false news, could we at least get a few details correct. More about Mitchell at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I expect Cowboy Neil to keep everything on Slashdot 100% true news you can use.
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Because when you bring gender into a debate, it becomes an asserted frame of reference. If it was important enough in the original assertion, it is therefore a valid frame of reference to bring up in a counterpoint.
Moving towards post-truth paradigms in hiring (Score:5, Insightful)
While Popper's Falsification rubric for determining what is scientific isn't particularly sophisticated, the idea that there can be a hypothetical experimental result that would disprove a hypothesis is at the core of STEM fields.
The problem in the recent humanities fields is that the core tenants of most disciplines are constructed in such a way as to be undisprovable. The moment you're learning things where it is impossible to construct a research project to disprove those things, you've moved into the realm of ideology.
While there's probably reasons why certain companies want their workers to unquestioningly accept whatever set of assumptions about the universe that the company wants to promote, the businesses that are ultimately successful are the ones that have workers that have functional bullshit detectors. And while science is far from perfect, the epistemological basis of science involves the eventual excision of bullshit hypotheses.
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The problem in the recent humanities fields is that the core tenants of most disciplines are constructed in such a way as to be undisprovable. The moment you're learning things where it is impossible to construct a research project to disprove those things, you've moved into the realm of ideology.
This also applies to any argument for the status quo, and yet people like you still make it. So why do you get to break your own rules?
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You are assuming that the only way to prove something is through "hard science methods" like reproduction and strictly controlled testing.
However, look at things like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Impossible to prove through reproduction because you can't reset someone's mind, yet it helps millions of people and is proven to work beyond any doubt. A lot of psychology is like that, proven to be effective or predictive on a large scale.
And it's a good thing too, because dismissing it as bunk would leave many
Re:Moving towards post-truth paradigms in hiring (Score:4, Informative)
Things like CBT, you don't evaluate as a single sample. You look at statistical bodies and meta studies of those "hard science" studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/).
It's efficacy is shown to have significance. In other words, it's not a sure fire cure, or working in even a majority of cases, but has an effect well above a lack of intervention of simple conversation.
So, it comes down to "It'll help some people in some circumstances". Which is fine. It's one tool in an arsenal of tools that should be tried, and discarded if it doesn't work in that case.
Where did you get your concept of it not working by reproducing, and that it's not able to be examined or evaluated by "hard science"? Because whatever source you got it from is provably wrong.
First world problems (Score:2)
You can't have everything. But you can certainly complain about not having everything.
Diversify to what? (Score:2)
That needs vert smart people who can code to a really great standard.
Better than their global competition so their US brand can get the best reviews.
How is stopping work to look for people who want to work with something to do with arts going to ensure long term competitiveness?
Smart nations with the best science, technology, engineering and maths are not slowing down to think about adding some arts and ethic
twice (Score:2)
It's so critical we have to say it twice.
I disagree. (Score:2, Interesting)
Tech needs executives who have a set of morals, and who listen to and trust their STEM people when they wave a red flag, rather than a bunch of sales guys who'd sell their grandmother for a quick buck.
Seen it too many times to count. "Just get it shipped" trumps all other concerns.
Dangerous and Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen and been involved in the thought processes and the implicit value hierarchies that underlie both types of thinking.
The utterances of Ms Baker need to be exposed and refuted immediately. They are dangerous and sociopathic.
The attack on science by the current marxist inspired SJWs threatens us with a return to the dark ages.
Read some history.
Read "A Canticle for Liebowitz"
For the love of science and our civilization, resist this.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
tech suffers (Score:2)
blind spots (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is an incomplete list of study fields with obvious blind spots:
Psychology - around half their studies do not replicate, still cannot explain basic phenomena of daily life, increasingly infused with politics, hindered by ethics (not a bad thing, but a fact) to conduct important research
Economics - reductionist approach to humans, has no concept of basic facts of human life (e.g. altruism), in the real world economists are as often wrong as they are right, mass blindness to black swans, has led us into the financial crisis
Gender studies and its relatives - has taken its own subject and turned it into a mixture of politics, bullshit bingo and sanctuary for rejects. Fundamentally flawed and unscientific to the core.
No, thanks. We don't need any of these people anywhere. Most of them are already doing enough damage as they are. "Diversity" is a bullshit term when it is enforced, because it is becoming the exact thing that it pretends to combat - exclusion. "sorry, we already have three black people, we need an asian person now". And the rallying cry of "needs more diversity" has become a synonym for "we are jealous that something in the real world actually works without us being involved".
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Software engineers are hardly free from the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" fallacy. I've seen a lot of attempts to fix flawed thinking and flawed processes through software fail miserably because it ignored the non-technological aspects or got lost trying to solve a technical problem that was rather irrelevant to the business problem.
There's lots of real psychology like confirmation bias, sunken cost fallacy etc. but they're easy to poke fun at, ask a psychologist what the tim
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On the surface, I'd agree with you. However, that isn't what "gender studies" does in practice. It burrows down into a "gender role" until it finds how that role is imstigated with malace aforethought by the "white patriarchy" to "prove" that that particular gender role is wrong .
Or maybe, as has been found by others, you will in
Or just hire moral people and give them time... (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience in the tech field is that companies constantly pressure their employees for more productivity, and that everyone can be moral. You don't need a degree in philosophy or psychology to be caring and aware of what is right/good...just as you don't need a computer science degree to program.
Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to punish people who are immoral. Just like it would help to do the same in politics.
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Cupcake bakeries need to hire more employees with degrees in astrophysics, bringing their much-needed understanding of electron degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs and pair-instability supernovae to the cupcake industry.
Afternoon child daycare centers need to hire more trained welding technicians, who understand when to use arc or gas welders depending on the material used and the appropriate flux needed for strong joints in compressive or tensile loads in bridges, skyscrapers and submarines. This is vital for the children's well-being.
Most importantly, symphony orchestras (whether public or privately-managed) need to get on the bandwagon (as it were) and hire more software engineers adept in low-level microcontroller coding in assembly language, supplemented with theory-oriented CS graduates who can develop better sorting algorithms for the violin section.
Market Share (Score:2)
Under Mitchell Baker's expert direction Mozilla share of the Market has gone from around 30% to around 5%. When considering her advice I would assess it against this historical backdrop. This is not a track record of success.
Of course she could simply be blowing her own trumpet, as her qualifications would appear to be very light on "STEM" and of course you need more non-technical people.
More from the report: (Score:2, Funny)
"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionall
Absolutely agree (Score:2)
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MBAs (Score:2)
Does your company have a bunch of MBAs near the top? Do you think that's a STEM degree?
Hidden Talents (Score:3)
flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving
Well, maybe basket weavers would be excellent at the creation of multi-threaded code?
It's not like they could be any worse than the people who are supposed to know computers.
If I had my way I'd cave all of their skulls in with a hammer
I'm sure to non-programmers that sounds violent but it's just the natural reaction to working on an old code base. Even (especially?) one you wrote...
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flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving
Well, maybe basket weavers would be excellent at the creation of multi-threaded code?
Maybe. But it would still be a basket case.
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Look, I deal with all that dumb technical debt you do, but you're still an idiot incapable of recognizing that software requires good designers. We don't get good designers, and think that beyond that, we don't get good designers who can design for social science, heading off or making less violent the kind of legislation or policy that comes in later.
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None of this computes because you are ignoring the for-a-fact evidence on the table.
Re: Hidden Talents (Score:2)
That was still just code. Imagine to have to code around bad hardware designs.
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If I had my way I'd cave all of their skulls in with a hammer and the world would be a better place.
Which is exactly what all the other worthless mentally defective autistic errors of nature like yourself will flood this thread with.
No manners, no social skills, no politeness or diplomacy, no empathy, no compassion. Pure sociopathy. You lot may be intellectually gifted, but from a human perspective, you are abominations who cause sorrow, pain, suffering and bloodshed wherever you go.
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... I advocate violence against the worthless leeches of the world! It's the right thing to do!
Yeah, you and Pol Pot. Kill everyone who wears glasses!
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What the world needs is more "Humanities" flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving and feminist studies degrees
People who graduate with a 4-year humanities degree are basically just as employable and just as happy with their jobs as those with STEM degrees. [insidehighered.com]
The other thing about getting yourself a humanities degree is that you aren't as easily socially engineered as someone who spends all his time with technical stuff and doesn't learn anything about people. The biggest suckers are those who are arrogant in their ignorance. I'm looking at you Gerald.
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Thanks for making it abundantly clear that you're a loud-mouthed fascist piece of shit.
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Oh the humanities!
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What the world needs is more "Humanities" flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving and feminist studies degrees running shit.
The fact that people can't be mature about this shows there definitely is a problem. If your education and experience can't save you from making really stupid strawmen (just to get mod points), then you just proved them right.
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(spoken in a dramatic voice) Oh, the humanities!
Re:Riiiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
That list reads like a catalogue of personal failings
"I have no social skills so can't see the value of even thinking about social issues.
I have no no management skills so can't understand the need to manage projects and enterprises.
I'm post-truth so think all politics are a waste of time."
Of course history isn't worth studying, there is nothing we can learn from the past, right?
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I love how the people arguing against this are demonstrating the exact problem in their posts...
Re:Riiiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of those fields are critical. Psychology for one is HUGE.
In college, psychology is a dumping ground for people that can't figure out what else to major in. The most common job for psychology majors a year after graduation is "Uber driver". I don't think these people should be our guiding lights.
The premise of TFA is silly:
1. STEM degrees require a lot of humanities courses.
2. There is no objective evidence that STEM people are less ethical or empathic than humanities majors.
3. Many of the decisions TFA talks about aren't made by the engineering department.
That the leader of Mozilla is focusing on crap like this explains much about the state of their software.
You're thinking teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla is hurting because browsers are incredibly complex beasts and they don't have nearly as much money as they used to. As a techy you'd think you'd know this.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Mozilla is hurting because browsers are incredibly complex beasts and they don't have nearly as much money as they used to.
They have less money because they have less market share. They have less market share because they have an inferior product. They have an inferior product because they spent too much effort on virtue-signalling.
Mozilla hurting is a result of their self-politicising, them virtue-signalling is not a result of their low market share, it's a cause of their low market-share.
They're still doubling down on the madness with their Rust language. Companies (like Mozilla, and others) will probably learn only very la
Re:Riiiight. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the tech people that are the problem. It's the fuckwit sociopaths in management that have forced thing to be the way they are.
Hate to break this to you, but some of those "fuckwit sociopaths" have STEM degrees.
You need technical skills to develop technology. And you need human skills to convey what you have developed to other humans. Including management.
Re:Riiiight. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem for those guys isn't the STEM degree - they were probably OK people when they were younger. Then they got MBAs.
Re: (Score:2)
They got degrees in applied Taylorism [britannica.com].
It isn't difficult to figure out the term for the 'evil' essence of an MBA degree, but few people use it to describe them.
BS (Score:2)
Most of them have business degrees, with a smattering of STEM exposure.
VERY few of them are actually particularly technical.
They wave that flag around a lot, but no, they are almost always business/management majors.
Re: Riiiight. (Score:2)
Like making sure that Trump was elected.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's quite clear that your AC parent has The Patience of Job compared to Gerald Butler (the OP) who called for mass genocide of people who major in "Sociology, Psychology, Management, HR, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, [and] History."
Of the two of them, you tell me who deserves to be voted off the island.
[Disclosure: I'm a STEM major. PhD in physics.]
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Hey, now, we don't need genocide. We just need an arc ...
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Gerald Butler (the OP) who called for mass genocide of people who major in "Sociology, Psychology, Management, HR, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, [and] History
They'll just be killed off by the crushing weight of their student loans (I'm looking at psychology, philosophy, and history here specifically). Those majors should at least somehow require people to learn how to spend their money better. One of the RAs from the dorms I was in was a history major and she's always talking about how she's going to be paying her loans for the next 30-40 years. She also only pays the minimum amount, even though she can afford more. And then she decided to go back to further
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Now let's compare all STEM chemistry grads against all humanities musical grads. The stats don't look nearly as sweet for your point.
Re:Riiiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd. And killing all the lawyers never solves anything - not saying don't do it, just that we'll inevitably need a new crop of them.
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"Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd."
There's probably a problem in the capitalist way future graduates are allowed to sign in instead of their intellectual requirements: you are too idiot for an engineering? you still can enroll on Psychology or History, so no wonder the average Psychologist or Historian ends up being too stupid... for anything of real value.
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Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd. And killing all the lawyers never solves anything - not saying don't do it, just that we'll inevitably need a new crop of them.
That's where corporate America took a hard turn. When insurance companies decided to stop paying for mental health visits, or revising co-pays to make using insurance for psychology services expensive, an entire industry got turned on its head and psychologists were out of work. They turned their target on corporate America and made a compelling case for why their behavioral analysis abilities would be a force multiplier to increasing the success rate of successful hiring, and boom - HR departments became
Re: It explains what's wrong with Mozilla (Score:2)
I don't need the live bookmarks, but the search function is needed often.
I'd prefer if they remove the built in pdf reader instead and just stick with an external.
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It's pretty funky when you're reading Greek and it looks like a math equation
Re: Companies with money to waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't know where you work, but my company has people with humanities degrees who picked up technical skills after they graduated.
Humanities majors can learn to perform well at technical skills. I see no reason why STEM majors can't do the reverse.
To get a degree of any kind, you must learn how to think and how to self-educate. That sets you up for success across many fields.
Re: Companies with money to waste (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
And yet Humanities majors can excel at technical roles.
What was your point?
Re: Companies with money to waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditional humanities majors can. Gender studies majors can't
There's a big difference between a rational proto-science (heck, logic originated from philosophy!), quasi-science or even a sane description of something inherently non-scientific (like literature) -- and Orvellian doublethink that teaches people something contrary to obvious observation.
The former group teaches students a way of thinking. The latter group is religion.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
The translation is there's a balance - you don't want your engineers to be incapable of empathy or ignorant of history, in the sense of not caring about hurting people.
Re: Translation (Score:2)
After which you get a new set of problems instead. A lot of people from the 'humanities' sector takes pride in not understanding technical issues and look down on tech knowing people. Especially if they are artistic designers.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean those unicorn riding ivory tower dwellers?
That disdain is mutual, ya know...
Re: (Score:2)
I embrace the utter demise of this country. The sooner it happens the better.
So the single unhappy little truth buried in all that nonsense is that you are a traitor to your country. Thanks for making that clear.
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"We had to destroy the village in order to save it"? Really? That's all you can come up with?
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You do realise that citing Breitbart automatically loses the argument, don't you?
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You do realise that you can do your own research, right?
E.g. some other resources that discussed the topic:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/q... [forbes.com]
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/... [wired.com]
https://brendaneich.com/2014/0... [brendaneich.com]
But there wasn't an argument to lose, merely an insight into a potential factor behind Mozilla's reduction in relevance.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice strawman. I never knew the guy and he's dead now.
Re:The Humanities are OVERWHELMINGLY left (Score:4, Insightful)
The humanities are overwhelmingly liberal, as they should be. Free speech, free inquiry, and opposition to the supposed divine right of kings and popes is anathema.
"Liberal" is only the same as "left" if you're in the Estates General. Similarly, "libertarian" is not "conservative" is not "fascist".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You havnt been looking around you at the current youth who call themselves 'Liberals' have you.
You know, the ones violently 'opposing' other views, screaming down anyone not in their groupthink, and accusing anyone not virtue signaling strongly enough of being racist, sexist, and any other ist they can think up today - while trying to 'save' the smallest and loudest minority they can find, thinking that increases their personal worth.
I think you will find its THOSE kinds of 'liberals' who are causing others
Re: (Score:3)
There are a lot of people who call themselves "liberal" and "conservative" who aren't.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a lot of people who call other people 'liberal' or 'conservative' who don't have a fucking clue.
Re: (Score:3)
How 'bout _neither_.
If someone constructs a false dichotomy between Stalin and Hitler, just kick HIM in the balls.
The real problem is 'Stalin' isn't as socially unacceptable as 'Hitler'. He should be. Young Communists _should_ be treated just like young Nazis. WTF is wrong in that family to start.
Finally the comparison should be between the crazed, bad shot, Bernie bro with an rifle at a softball game vs. the Nazi 'playing death race'. Your comparison is fairly called cherry picking.
Re: (Score:3)
Who do you think is defending those old slave-era statues? You pretty much repeated Trump's defense of the neo-nazi wing of the GOP. "Some good people there". It would be a joke if it wasn't so serious. Those are really, really bad apples. They've been vocally defended by the guy in the Oval office, by most of the GOP, and now by you. You degrade yourself defending those people.
Proceed to tear down any statue that offends you or anyone else.
Then burn history books, works of art, buildings, bridges, and anything else that you think must be purged.
Just remember, it always ends badly.
Re: (Score:3)
Free speech which does not allow hate speech is not free speech, freedom of association which does not allow discrimination is not freedom of association.
Language evolves, to use liberal without a modern or classical qualifier in this day and age is obtuse or naive. The educators in the humanities are overwhelmingly modern liberals.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Erh... out of curiosity, because in this administration it's hard to see, but which of the four (dignity, justice, beauty or truth) can be gotten from the right again?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
After whatnow?