# Should the "Humanities" subjects exist?



## Medicated (Oct 28, 2018)

I just find the idea of "sociology" or "social sciences" to be such a broad complex subject, that it makes no sense.  At least in the way it exists now.

Because it's virtually trying to encapsulate so many disciplines. Because you are explaining the behavior of humans.  Involving, neurology, biology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, ancient and modern human history, statistics, and adding in some parts of philosophy.  At least for a start.

If anything, I'd say you'd have to study all the disciplines above before you could even consider yourself something akin to a social scientist.   Something like "Social Scientist" as a title should be worthy of respect.

But it seems to me social scientist, has come to mean, "Arm chair psychologist and philosopher"

This is just my thoughts though, what do you think?


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## Trasha Pay That A$$ (Oct 28, 2018)

It is better than Woman's Studies.


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## OG 666 (Oct 28, 2018)

Hmm, I think Sociology could be less of a meme if it focused more on evidence-based research and less on ideologically-influenced "theories" about society. Like, I think there's actually some value to having quantifiable research of human behavior as it relates to society: demographic makeup, crime patterns, socioeconomic class patterns, other behaviors that can be measured on a mass scale. 

As it currently stands, Sociology is a blow-off class that you're required to take when you're a college freshman, and it's almost always taught through a heavily politicized lens.


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## YourMommasBackstory (Oct 28, 2018)

Trasha Pay That A$$ said:


> It is better than Gender Studies.


FIFY


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## Trasha Pay That A$$ (Oct 28, 2018)

YourMommasBackstory said:


> FIFY



Thanks, boo. I'm feeling a little retro today apparently.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 28, 2018)

The humanities range from subjects that are very scientifically valuable but approached in such an unscientific way as to render the field useless, to things that would be fine for an interesting hobby but are absurd to require students to become massively indebted to learn.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

The humanities used to be good. Then modernism and postmodernism happened, and any semblance of logical, rational thought was snuffed out. 95% of modern literature is garbage, especially the stuff they teach in schools. I don't give a fuck what woman or black people think about life, I want arguments about human nature or how to run society. Oedipus Rex, Dostoevsky, Machiavelli, etc.
There's so much emphasis on understanding "how the author creates their argument," bullshit like diction syntax and symbolism. I don't care how they make their point, I just want to know what their fucking point is so I can debate it.
Ugh this topic gets me unnecessarily mad. Literary analysis is complete garbage these days.


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## CatParty (Oct 28, 2018)

Lol calm down


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## IV 445 (Oct 28, 2018)

I think Philosophy is a good subject, but it’s simply not something you can make a career out of.

Unless you absolutely love philosophy and teaching, then you will never work a day in your life. And who knows you could actually be remembered one day as an important thinker.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Hortator said:


> I think Philosophy is a good subject, but it’s simply not something you can make a career out of.
> 
> Unless you absolutely love philosophy and teaching, then you will never work a day in your life. And who knows you could actually be remembered one day as an important thinker.


I think the issue is more with the way current society is structured. People need to work for a living— it seriously bogs down any sort of progress that requires extensive time. Ancient Greece and Rome, they had slaves to feed people, meaning the aristocracy could afford to spend decades of their life working on things with long-term benefits that aren't otherwise sustainable. There's a reason so many great ideas came from those eras.


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## IV 445 (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> I think the issue is more with the way current society is structured. People need to work for a living— it seriously bogs down any sort of progress that requires extensive time. Ancient Greece and Rome, they had slaves to feed people, meaning the aristocracy could afford to spend decades of their life working on things with long-term benefits that aren't otherwise sustainable. There's a reason so many great ideas came from those eras.


Ok let’s bring back slavery


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## User names must be unique (Oct 28, 2018)

Applied sociology and clinical sociology will destroy sociology and humanity courses imho, because applied sociology takes the theories from the other two and tries to put them into practice that can't be done without fundamental changing the theories.


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## AJ 447 (Oct 28, 2018)

Medicated said:


> I just find the idea of "sociology" or "social sciences" to be such a broad complex subject


These terms are not interchangeable.


Medicated said:


> Because it's virtually trying to encapsulate so many disciplines. Because you are explaining the behavior of humans. Involving, neurology, biology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, ancient and modern human history, statistics, and adding in some parts of philosophy. At least for a start.


Humanities: philosophy 
Social sciences: sociology, psychology
Natural sciences: neurology, biology
Formal science: statistics
Interdisciplinary: anthropology and history, between social sciences and humanities, and psychiatry between social and natural sciences

This is simplified, of course, because many research topics cross over into different areas of study, but this is a good outline, from an academic standpoint.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Hortator said:


> Ok let’s bring back slavery


Say what you will about its morality, it allows the people who benefit from it the time and resources to make massive leaps forward. People are not equal. A 200 IQ hard-working aristocrat contributes infinitely more than a 70 IQ lazy autistic NEET.


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## ES 148 (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> 200 IQ hard-working aristocrat


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## Ahffline (Oct 28, 2018)

Of course. The Humanities are more than just Gender Studies. They encompass Art, History, Language, Classics, Philosophy, etc. They study those subjects that help define us culturally. The best education would be one grounded in both Science and the Humanities, as it would give the student access to the broadest spectrum of subject matter.

Some of the Humanities, such as Languages, are fundamental to modern society.


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## Y2K Baby (Oct 28, 2018)

They should be mini-degrees like bite-sized M&M's.


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## cecograph (Oct 28, 2018)

With few exceptions, I'm sceptical of any field that puts "science" in its name, and social science is one I am particularly sceptical about. There's a lot of drek that I reckon shouldn't exist.

That's not the humanities though. People in humanities departments don't pretend to be scientists. They'd call themselves "scholars", and like reading books and maintaining a cultural elite. Those folks are generally cool with me.


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## HiddenFist (Oct 28, 2018)

They have a genuine right to exist. The problem lies in the fact that they were infected with postmodernism, social justice, and identity politics decades ago. Not to mention the overall low pay for the majority of subjects as a career choice.


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## Draza (Oct 28, 2018)

Too bad it's been effected with cultural Marxism and social justice ideology.


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## drtoboggan (Oct 28, 2018)

Hortator said:


> Ok let’s bring back slavery


Blacks would finally be useful.


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## Jerry_ smith56 (Oct 28, 2018)

Why of course it should. If people choose to study humanities then that's their choice and who are we to try to stop them. Humanities like many other college subjects does need to remove some partisanship from its textsbooks and teachers, but the people who sign up usually know exactly what they are paying/signing up for.


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## wateryketchup (Oct 28, 2018)

Hell yeah those are easy A's


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> I think the issue is more with the way current society is structured. People need to work for a living— it seriously bogs down any sort of progress that requires extensive time. Ancient Greece and Rome, they had slaves to feed people, meaning the aristocracy could afford to spend decades of their life working on things with long-term benefits that aren't otherwise sustainable. There's a reason so many great ideas came from those eras.


Most of their ideas were shit. Plato's world of forms was bullshit and his concept of philospher kings getting enshrined stealthily into Catholic dogma held back the west for centuries.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Your Weird Fetish said:


> Most of their ideas were shit. Plato's world of forms was bullshit and his concept of philospher kings getting enshrined stealthily into Catholic dogma held back the west for centuries.


Can't get diamonds without digging through tons of worthless rock, and even running close to a magma vein or two.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 28, 2018)

OfflineCyberBully said:


> Of course. The Humanities are more than just Gender Studies. They encompass Art, History, Language, Classics, Philosophy, etc. They study those subjects that help define us culturally. The best education would be one grounded in both Science and the Humanities, as it would give the student access to the broadest spectrum of subject matter.
> 
> Some of the Humanities, such as Languages, are fundamental to modern society.


There's too much knowledge for this to work anymore. Specialization beats generalization, and if anything is a necessity if you want people that can actually do anything but be pompous pricks that think they're renaissance men because they know a tiny bit about a lot of things. You know, like me.


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## CrunkLord420 (Oct 28, 2018)

Student loans/scholarships should not be available for degrees without a real career path and viable job market.


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## GreenJacket (Oct 28, 2018)

Archaeology counts as humanities, and there's nothing pozzed about archaeology.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

Literature is good, and foreign languages are good, but the bullshit 'writing my grad thesis about Marvel movies' needs to stop. The field of humanities would be improved if they severely reduced the amount of graduate students they accepted. All these dumb kids are getting PhDs and thinking they're gonna be professors, and then they wind up adjuncting for 22k a year and writing whiny articles on Medium about how they've been lied to.

I don't think getting a humanities bachelor's degree is a bad idea as long as you're smart about it. Lots of jobs want someone with good writing abilities. Get internships and network and take technical writing classes, and you'll be fine.


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## Rand /pol/ (Oct 28, 2018)

Humanities is gay which is why I failed it in Highschool.


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## ⋖ cørdion ⋗ (Oct 28, 2018)

I mean.. HR and PR, both very viable fields, are categorized under humanities. Especially PR, which indeed currently is an intern handling a social media page, has huge potential. 

Absolutely every monkey could be considered a programmer; rarely is the actual efficiency hereof brought up. Likewise you can be an absolute asshat at running a corporate Twitter, or be the next Wendy's.

I'm on the last few semesters of a humanities degree, and it has been confusing as fuck. Instead of checking off theory as you would in STEM, you learn a tidbit of the hundreds of fields humanities touch upon, effectively leaving you with a few basic concepts and a paper qualifying you for a specific level of office work.

I can see why people discredit social and cultural science, but the production of culture, such as art, music, drawing, could be considered equally useless if you're gonna be angsty about it. There's far worse degrees being wasted resources on.

Basically, mix up some shit for the future; organisational culture/management, how to deal with robots/AI, and the emerging importance of internet relations. Shovel classical humanities into the bin with history and gender studies. Half the negativity surrounding this topic comes from those who swear by wage tables and suits. 

If you don't wanna deal with people, why belittle those who does it for you?


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 28, 2018)

English lit is a hobby, not something you can or should teach. Education should be vocational, self-study with CLEP-like tests for certs, or both.

Gen ed requirements are ghastly wastes.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

The Man From G.R.I.D.S. said:


> English lit is a hobby, not something you can or should teach. Education should be vocational, self-study with CLEP-like tests for certs, or both.
> 
> Gen ed requirements are ghastly wastes.


What about English lit in combination with education as a major? Because we've decided as a society that teenagers need to read classic books. It's been like that in Western culture for hundreds of years, so I don't think that'll be changing anytime soon.


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## The Lizard Queen (Oct 28, 2018)

I think humanities need to be elective classes, like pottery, and photography.


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> What about English lit in combination with education as a major? Because we've decided as a society that teenagers need to read classic books. It's been like that in Western culture for hundreds of years, so I don't think that'll be changing anytime soon.


Education is a field in itself, but there's an easy solution. Require certs for the relevant field (english + linguistics) plus education training and practicum. You could learn the info to pass certs at a library and discuss with others online or in local cert study groups.

As you can guess I have a very low opinion of universities and want them made obsolete asap.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

The Man From G.R.I.D.S. said:


> Education is a field in itself, but there's an easy solution. Require certs for the relevant field (english + linguistics) plus education training and practicum. You could learn the info to pass certs at a library and discuss with others online or in local cert study groups.
> 
> As you can guess I have a very low opinion of universities and want them made obsolete asap.


So I guess you think the only courses that should be offered at higher education are ones for careers requiring licensure? Architecture, accounting, law, etc.


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> So I guess you think the only courses that should be offered at higher education are ones for careers requiring licensure? Architecture, accounting, law, etc.


At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.

Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.

Law is very easily simplified if iq tests are allowed to weed out applicants. You could have a knowledge test required for entry to cut need for a bachelors. After that its best run imo as a part time apprenticeship/classroom program with tiers as you progress in what you can competently handle.

If you want to learn yoga accupunture by all means do so, just don't expect the public to pay for it. Skilled things like acting, dance, painting, belong in apprenticeships run by their respective industries.

Soft sciences have some utility but again are best used in highly practical domains like marketing. Again, they should have knowledge certs/tests required for admission to apprentice programs, and these should be run by private research firms.

Chemistry, math, biology, some geology programs, and engineering are the only ones that are best taught as they currently are, just without gen ed bullshit. Post-grad research and teaching should be done at private research firms. Lets dispense with the illusion that public research unis are anything but research farms run by tenured assholes.

My field (comp sci) is a clusterfuck in universities. Nuke the entire thing, reduce it to certs and vocational ed at community colleges with post bach stuff in private firms. In many places you have better instruction at community colleges than unis.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

The Man From G.R.I.D.S. said:


> At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.
> 
> Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.
> 
> ...


The issue is that you have too many universities. Not everyone should be going to college, not even most people. Leave it for the top 20,30% of people to test into, and then pay for their education. This includes mandatory research on something useful. You don't write a senior thesis (literature analysis doesn't count), you don't get a degree, and have to pay back all that money. So you better be damn sure you're smart enough to do college and motivated enough to use it.
High school is fucked up too, but thats a completely different story.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

The Man From G.R.I.D.S. said:


> At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.
> 
> Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.
> 
> ...


I don't entirely agree with you, but I do think there has been too much of a focus on university and not enough on apprenticeships--because companies don't want to train people anymore. The US used to have Supreme Court Justices who'd never been to law school, they'd just had an apprenticeship. 

On the other hand, I've seen a lot of comp sci people say they think the self taught software developers with lots of certs types aren't as good as people who've been to college. 

The problem with law school in the US is there's no regulations on it. There's laws about how many doctors there can be, but not lawyers, so shady schools will open up law programs (since it doesn't require equipment it's cheap), enroll lots of students and make tons of money, and then throw them out into the world to flounder.


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## Gorillagorillagorilla (Oct 28, 2018)

I'm doing anthropology. I can confirm that there's a big leftist culture but the professors and my fellow students are pretty nice. I'm hoping to graduate and then learn about wildlife conservation and the like


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## This+ (Oct 28, 2018)

Yes because I don't want to starve.

Serious: Philosophy covers logical analysis/application which is important for law. You'll find that quite a few politicians and legal professionals had History as their undergrad major. History teaches you how to structure an argument as well as how to incorporate evidence into a coherent narrative on top of history being just very interesting.

The biggest problem with Humanities is that a lot of the disciplines are funneled into "teaching" majors (only careers with viable pay are related to teaching) as the world is pushing further and further into STEM.


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> The issue is that you have too many universities. Not everyone should be going to college, not even most people. Leave it for the top 20,30% of people to test into, and then pay for their education. This includes mandatory research on something useful. You don't write a senior thesis (literature analysis doesn't count), you don't get a degree, and have to pay back all that money. So you better be damn sure you're smart enough to do college and motivated enough to use it.
> High school is fucked up too, but thats a completely different story.





Crunchy Leaf said:


> I don't entirely agree with you, but I do think there has been too much of a focus on university and not enough on apprenticeships--because companies don't want to train people anymore. The US used to have Supreme Court Justices who'd never been to law school, they'd just had an apprenticeship.
> 
> On the other hand, I've seen a lot of comp sci people say they think the self taught software developers with lots of certs types aren't as good as people who've been to college.
> 
> The problem with law school in the US is there's no regulations on it. There's laws about how many doctors there can be, but not lawyers, so shady schools will open up law programs (since it doesn't require equipment it's cheap), enroll lots of students and make tons of money, and then throw them out into the world to flounder.


Apprenticeships force companies to share the risk with the public, and makes them responsible for the quality of the lawyers/dancers/plumbers they produce. Also reduces waste, you only learn what is needed, saving years of your life and a lot of money.

Comp sci requires tiers of certs. From basic code monkey (python, scripting, vb.net, no theory, game modding, high school) to software engineer (oop, practical theory, vocational and apprenticeships) to computer scientist (lots of math and theory, basically a subset of a math degree and taught at uni).

You also need to break the field up laterally. Certs for:
* operating systems dev - c, some theory relevant to oses, some compilers instruction, operating systems practicum
* embedded systems dev - c, asm, vhdl, reverse enginnering, basic electrical stuff (no clue)
* database design - itself should have tiers from admin to dev
* info systems which spans both hardware and software

I think unis should exist only as entities supported by industries and states to produce workers that require lots of investment. Everything else you can learn online, in a library. Apprenticeships for the remaining fields. This way a motivated guy could teach himself practical stuff until a uni or company decides to take a risk on him and pay to learn higher tiers or an apprenticeship.

K-12 is a shitshow, basically babysitting. Should be grouped together based on abilities and inclinations, not age. More like 1 through 9, then you try a bunch of 2 week long mini-apprenticeships in 10th, then choose one in 11th and keep at it in 12th.

Thus you get a shallow intro knowledge of a lot of a few fields, and you take steps towards mastery in one. 

Those so inclined and gifted start training for intro uni tests (literally college prep for a change) in 11th and 12th, and once they pass they can start uni.

Simple and cheaper than the existing system.


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## Audit (Oct 28, 2018)

I know this is a crazy thought but hear me out. What if the problem with the university system is that people have forgotten what the point of the whole thing was in the first place. At this time, getting a college degree has been viewed as a rite of passage for the middle class instead of a pathway to higher learning for our best and brightest. We've got a serious problem right now where classrooms are getting filled up with people bound for careers that never should have required a college degree. The university system should by no means be used as a second high school. We've got the community colleges for that and they do a wonderful job teaching the basics without charging a fortune in tuition. Hell, any good community college also teaches blue collar jobs like welding and trucking. There's just no excuse for sending kids away to a college to rack up massive debts when there's a nearby community college that can teach them everything they need to know at 10% of the cost.

If it were up to me, I'd leave university education only for those who wish to become scientists, doctors, lawyers, or scholars. Because these fields demand only the most intelligent members of our country, we'd need to insert strict recruitment standards but once a student is accepted they should be given a living stipend. This is because right now the university system is segregated into the poor, middle class, and rich schools, a system that can leave promising talent lingering in the worst schools because of financial limitations. It is important to consider the university system a breeding ground for the future leaders and innovators of our country rather than as just a work training program. Affirmative action and other systems that judge candidates on a cosmetic or subjective basis have no place in decided who is most likely to work hard and make the country stronger. After all, under this model, the university is meant to train people for high level government, private, and corporate leadership. 

Back to the humanities, there absolutely no reason to get rid of them. The world needs philosophers, anthropologists, and even gender studies majors to perform research that will go into deciding the best way to approach any given problem. E.g. gender studies can be useful when it comes to deciding the best way to reach out to victims of domestic abuse so that they'll respond. The larger problem is that the purpose of these fields has been warped and distorted by the whims of the faculty that teach them. The university professors are trying to play god and invent problems that they can fix instead of just trying to fix extant problems. That's why there are no jobs available for some of these people. No one wants someone that can tell you why you're guilty of oppressing the Palestinians just because you're from Israel; they want someone that can design anti-radicalization programs to fight Hamas. In essence, the humanities aren't letting a lack of demand keep them from offering a supply. Don't get rid of the humanities, get rid of professors who would never be able to get a job outside of the university system.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Audit_The_Autist said:


> If it were up to me, I'd leave university education only for those who wish to become scientists, doctors, lawyers, or scholars. Because these fields demand only the most intelligent members of our country, we'd need to insert strict recruitment standards but once a student is accepted they should be given a living stipend. This is because right now the university system is segregated into the poor, middle class, and rich schools, a system that can leave promising talent lingering in the worst schools because of financial limitations. It is important to consider the university system a breeding ground for the future leaders and innovators of our country rather than as just a work training program. Affirmative action and other systems that judge candidates on a cosmetic or subjective basis have no place in decided who is most likely to work hard and make the country stronger. After all, under this model, the university is meant to train people for high level government, private, and corporate leadership.


@Audit_The_Autist for president. Please, I will give you all my money if you can make this a reality.
I don't think I can even emphasize enough how insightful your entire post is.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

This+ said:


> Yes because I don't want to starve.
> 
> Serious: Philosophy covers logical analysis/application which is important for law. You'll find that quite a few politicians and legal professionals had History as their undergrad major. History teaches you how to structure an argument as well as how to incorporate evidence into a coherent narrative on top of history being just very interesting.
> 
> The biggest problem with Humanities is that a lot of the disciplines are funneled into "teaching" majors (only careers with viable pay are related to teaching) as the world is pushing further and further into STEM.


I don't buy that the world is pushing further and further into STEM. How many pure math majors are getting jobs in pure math? I've heard tons of people with biology degrees say they're stuck doing immensely shitty lab work for low pay unless they go to grad school. It's certain fields of STEM only.

If I were in charge, my first action would be to ban for profit schools. This would be way easier than totally reforming our higher education system, but still have an important effect. If you look at all the statistics on loan defaulting and stuff, a really high percentage is for profit students. And they get tons of taxpayer money in the form of GI Bills and Pell Grants.

Also, the worst field, worse than gender studies, are people who want to major in game design. There are so many video-game-lovers who want to be game designers without knowing how hard it is to make money off of and how much skill is required, and many of them are attending these for-profit institutions. Computer-based art has a really high percentage of people who majored in it and now can't find a job, and I think that's because one, there's a perception that it leads to money so everyone is doing it, and two, no standards--traditional fine arts programs (e.g. painting) require portfolios, whereas there's lots of scammy computer art programs now that don't.


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## This+ (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> I don't buy that the world is pushing further and further into STEM. How many pure math majors are getting jobs in pure math? I've heard tons of people with biology degrees say they're stuck doing immensely shitty lab work for low pay unless they go to grad school. It's certain fields of STEM only.



Sorry, that was worded badly. I meant there's more preference and emphasis for STEM-related majors, and by STEM it's mostly engineering/CS.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

This+ said:


> Sorry, that was worded badly. I meant there's more preference and emphasis for STEM-related majors, and by STEM it's mostly engineering/CS.


Oh, yeah, definitely. 
I think we're going to start seeing issues there too, though. There's already issues with loads and loads of terrible Indian coders who don't know what they're doing but thought coding was the way to get out of their shitty village, and what with all the 'coding bootcamps', the bottom of the CS field will become saturated with more dumb people. And in the past, you only majored in CS if you were into it; now smart people are picking it because they think it'll make money, and so there'll be more saturation of talent, too. This will also mean more normies with good social skills in the field, bad for the stereotypical programmer autist.


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## Audit (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> Oh, yeah, definitely.
> I think we're going to start seeing issues there too, though. There's already issues with loads and loads of terrible Indian coders who don't know what they're doing but thought coding was the way to get out of their shitty village, and what with all the 'coding bootcamps', the bottom of the CS field will become saturated with more dumb people. And in the past, you only majored in CS if you were into it; now smart people are picking it because they think it'll make money, and so there'll be more saturation of talent, too. This will also mean more normies with good social skills in the field, bad for the stereotypical programmer autist.



These Indian/South East Asian coders are going to become a massive problem in the near future. A lot of the trade deals that the US wants to sign with those nations allow companies to offload programing work to them. If you talk to Marvin, he'll tell you all about how working with international code monkeys is a nightmare.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

Audit_The_Autist said:


> These Indian/South East Asian coders are going to become a massive problem in the near future. A lot of the trade deals that the US wants to sign with those nations allow companies to offload programing work to them. If you talk to Marvin, he'll tell you all about how working with international code monkeys is a nightmare.


This seems like a bad idea on the part of the companies. Of course having a factory worker in Bangladesh make a sweater is going to be worse than an American and companies still do that, but the difference I see is that consumers are willing to buy lower quality goods if it costs less, whereas large corporations buying software are more likely to be able to afford good American produced software. And the potential problems from bad code are way higher and worse than the potential problems from bad sweaters.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> I don't buy that the world is pushing further and further into STEM. How many pure math majors are getting jobs in pure math? I've heard tons of people with biology degrees say they're stuck doing immensely shitty lab work for low pay unless they go to grad school. It's certain fields of STEM only.





This+ said:


> Sorry, that was worded badly. I meant there's more preference and emphasis for STEM-related majors, and by STEM it's mostly engineering/CS.



Also take note that STEM, which has mostly been a bulwark against postmodern bullshit, is starting to crack open. My bio teacher was talking about the difference between gender and sex. It's starting to legitimately scare me.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> Also take note that STEM, which has mostly been a bulwark against postmodern bullshit, is starting to crack open. My bio teacher was talking about the difference between gender and sex. It's starting to legitimately scare me.


That's because only women major in bio.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> That's because only women major in bio.


Massive push for "women in STEM." Bio is just the beginning of the end. Rate me optimistic because I really do sincerely hope I'm wrong.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> Massive push for "women in STEM." Bio is just the beginning of the end. Rate my optimistic because I really do sincerely hope I'm wrong.


Well, most people going to college in the US are women. Outside of engineering (except biomedical), programming, and physics (and maybe shit that involves rocks?), I perceive every science as being either gender equal or female dominated and the men that are there are probably gay or at least a little soy-ishe, at the undergraduate level. Men want to be carpenters and roofers and shit like that.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> Well, most people going to college in the US are women. Outside of engineering (except biomedical), programming, and physics (and maybe shit that involves rocks?), I perceive every science as being either gender equal or female dominated and the men that are there are probably gay or at least a little soy-ishe, at the undergraduate level. Men want to be carpenters and roofers and shit like that.


Men tend to be more logical/rational and women emotional (gender roles and stereotypes are rooted in evolutionary psychology), so I still think that men are more attracted to STEM. Watched a really interesting video that cited a study showing dominant behaviors increase testosterone levels (causatory), so the increased push for feminine "equality" (ie superiority) and women in STEM is causing them to have higher testosterone and be more masculine, and on the reverse side the efforts to shut down men are making them more feminine. It helps explain the reversals in college gender ratios, and things like soyboys.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> Men tend to be more logical/rational and women emotional (gender roles and stereotypes are rooted in evolutionary psychology), so I still think that men are more attracted to STEM. Watched a really interesting video that cited a study showing dominant behaviors increase testosterone levels (causatory), so the increased push for feminine "equality" (ie superiority) and women in STEM is causing them to have higher testosterone and be more masculine, and on the reverse side the efforts to shut down men are making them more feminine. It helps explain the reversals in college gender ratios, and things like soyboys.


No, I disagree. I think women who are already masculine are more likely to be interested in STEM. I've seen so many bitchy posts from girls who love makeup and heels who are in engineering complaining about how everyone thinks they're weird/should act less girly/whatever, and it's like...if some burly bro was majoring in interior design, everyone would be super confused by that, y'know? I'm majoring in economics which to me is a very feminine subject, but my school's business program is very hard to get into so there's a lot of failed business bros in my classes.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> No, I disagree. I think women who are already masculine are more likely to be interested in STEM. I've seen so many bitchy posts from girls who love makeup and heels who are in engineering complaining about how everyone thinks they're weird/should act less girly/whatever, and it's like...if some burly bro was majoring in interior design, everyone would be super confused by that, y'know? I'm majoring in economics which to me is a very feminine subject, but my school's business program is very hard to get into so there's a lot of failed business bros in my classes.


I don't necessarily see how that's a disagreement? Maybe my post is worded poorly, but my thoughts are that masculinity is attracted to STEM. Historically that was mostly men (for obvious reasons), but now with (((current age))) its switching to a lot more masculine females in STEM. 
I'm confused by your point on feminine girls in STEM, given your first sentence on masculine women being more interested in STEM. Are they just outliers, or do they make up a significant population in your school (sorry I'm not in college so I can't speak to anything anecdotally)?


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> I don't necessarily see how that's a disagreement? Maybe my post is worded poorly, but my thoughts are that masculinity is attracted to STEM. Historically that was mostly men (for obvious reasons), but now with (((current age))) its switching to a lot more masculine females in STEM.
> I'm confused by your point on feminine girls in STEM, given your first sentence on masculine women being more interested in STEM. Are they just outliers, or do they make up a significant population in your school (sorry I'm not in college so I can't speak to anything anecdotally)?


No, I thought you were arguing that women majoring in STEM makes them more masculine, as opposed to that being their pre-existing state. I'm not in STEM so I don't know, that's mostly my observations from people complaining on the internet. One of my friends goes to a women's college with an engineering program and she said there's a ton of girls majoring in engineering/math/comp sci and, well, you know what they say about women's colleges, so there's that.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> No, I thought you were arguing that women majoring in STEM makes them more masculine, as opposed to that being their pre-existing state. I'm not in STEM so I don't know, that's mostly my observations from people complaining on the internet. One of my friends goes to a women's college with an engineering program and she said there's a ton of girls majoring in engineering/math/comp sci and, well, you know what they say about women's colleges, so there's that.


Probably both are factors tbh, masculine woman are attracted to STEM and the intense competitive environment serves to make them more masculine (masculine dominance behaviors increase testosterone levels in women, I can link a study if you want?).
The question then becomes what to do to fix this, because a bunch of masculine women and feminine men means society dies out in a generation or two.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> Probably both are factors tbh, masculine woman are attracted to STEM and the intense competitive environment serves to make them more masculine (masculine dominance behaviors increase testosterone levels in women, I can link a study if you want?).
> The question then becomes what to do to fix this, because a bunch of masculine women and feminine men means society dies out in a generation or two.


See, I don't know, in the 70s women were actually choosing to become lesbians for political reasons, and yet society continued on having babies. Most people aren't homosexuals and never will be. You probably live in a very specific upper middle class world where everyone goes to college and people are very pro-feminism, and this really is not descriptive of the majority of the US.

Anecdotal, of course, but my grandma got a degree in physics in 1934, and she still had seven kids.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> See, I don't know, in the 70s women were actually choosing to become lesbians for political reasons, and yet society continued on having babies. Most people aren't homosexuals and never will be. You probably live in a very specific upper middle class world where everyone goes to college and people are very pro-feminism, and this really is not descriptive of the majority of the US.
> 
> Anecdotal, of course, but my grandma got a degree in physics in 1934, and she still had seven kids.


Political lesbians always were and will be a radical minority (if this ever changes I think exterminatus may be the only solution). When it starts affecting larger percents of the population (females in STEM is pretty significant), you can start getting subtle, and eventually not-so-subtle, repercussions culturally and biologically. You can be in STEM and feminine, just like you can be an artist and masculine, but when you start getting emasculated men and masculinized women (of which the weird ratios of gender in college is a symptom), theres cause to worry.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> Political lesbians always were and will be a radical minority (if this ever changes I think exterminatus may be the only solution). When it starts affecting larger percents of the population (females in STEM is pretty significant), you can start getting subtle, and eventually not-so-subtle, repercussions culturally and biologically. You can be in STEM and feminine, just like you can be an artist and masculine, but when you start getting emasculated men and masculinized women (of which the weird ratios of gender in college is a symptom), theres cause to worry.


The weird ratios of gender in college are because men want to do trades instead of fraffling around with the book learning--men are mostly the same level of masculine, women are just less feminine.


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## wylfım (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> The weird ratios of gender in college are because men want to do trades instead of fraffling around with the book learning--men are mostly the same level of masculine, women are just less feminine.


I disagree with that. Here's the video I was talking about, pretty decently made. And here is a link to a study that found that testosterone levels have dropped significantly even accounting for the factors we know affect it (like reduced exercise), in the past 30-40 years alone.


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## Audit (Oct 28, 2018)

As someone who's in STEM, you don't get too many extremely feminine girls in the non-life science disciplines. The girls who wear heels to school and talk about twitter aren't going into physics or mechanical engineering. Maybe you'll find them in biology or med school, but topics like heat transfer through turbulent fluids really kill off those individuals academically. From my experience, the freshman and sophomore years will have a few women who don't fit in culturally with the degree but they tend to get weeded out by graduation time. Any respectable university is pretty good at eliminating soft-skinned people who can't take criticism or handle 60 hour work weeks. Some bad students always slip through to the end with C/B grades but they're in the minority. I'm not concerned with women taking over the stems. I'm only concerned with men getting looked over for funding and positions because women are being prioritized.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

wylfım said:


> I disagree with that. Here's the video I was talking about, pretty decently made. And here is a link to a study that found that testosterone levels have dropped significantly even accounting for the factors we know affect it (like reduced exercise), in the past 30-40 years alone.


This is My Personal Pet Peeve, but I don't see soy boys and effeminate men as equivalent. Effeminate men have good grooming standards, often have some sort of artistic talent, and appreciate culture...soy boys have terrible beards and wear cargo shorts all the time and do nothing but play video games. They're failed straight guys, not straight guys who act gay. 


Audit_The_Autist said:


> As someone who's in STEM, you don't get too many extremely feminine girls in the non-life science disciplines. The girls who wear heels to school and talk about twitter aren't going into physics or mechanical engineering. Maybe you'll find them in biology or med school, but topics like heat transfer through turbulent fluids really kill off those individuals academically. From my experience, the freshman and sophomore years will have a few women who don't fit in culturally with the degree but they tend to get weeded out by graduation time. Any respectable university is pretty good at eliminating soft-skinned people who can't take criticism or handle 60 hour work weeks. Some bad students always slip through to the end with C/B grades but they're in the minority. I'm not concerned with women taking over the stems. I'm only concerned with men getting looked over for funding and positions because women are being prioritized.


And then they consider trannies as women, and everyone loses.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 28, 2018)

This+ said:


> Yes because I don't want to starve.
> 
> Serious: Philosophy covers logical analysis/application which is important for law. You'll find that quite a few politicians and legal professionals had History as their undergrad major. History teaches you how to structure an argument as well as how to incorporate evidence into a coherent narrative on top of history being just very interesting.
> 
> The biggest problem with Humanities is that a lot of the disciplines are funneled into "teaching" majors (only careers with viable pay are related to teaching) as the world is pushing further and further into STEM.


History _should_ be viewed as the lab of politics and economics but it's so hard to get an objective read of it.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

Your Weird Fetish said:


> History _should_ be viewed as the lab of politics and economics but it's so hard to get an objective read of it.


The way we teach history in the US is really bad, and I blame No Child Left Behind for it getting worse, since history was shoved to the side in favor of more math and ELA.


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## Audit (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> The way we teach history in the US is really bad, and I blame No Child Left Behind for it getting worse, since history was shoved to the side in favor of more math and ELA.


I completely agree with you on this. The only reason I got a good education in history was because I got taught by an old conservative professor who specialized in Western Civilization and used his course as a platform against revisionist historians and those who wanted to deemphasize academic rigour in the classroom. Imo, history is the perfect course for teaching critical thinking and writing skills so it's bewildering to see it take a backseat in our high schools. 

Don't get me started on English, I never had a good English professor.


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

Audit_The_Autist said:


> I completely agree with you on this. The only reason I got a good education in history was because I got taught by an old conservative professor who specialized in Western Civilization and used his course as a platform against revisionist historians and those who wanted to deemphasize academic rigour in the classroom. Imo, history is the perfect course for teaching critical thinking and writing skills so it's bewildering to see it take a backseat in our high schools.
> 
> Don't get me started on English, I never had a good English professor.


Well, speaking of western civilization, everyone in the US should take Latin and Greek. Good for the soul, I say! 
The problem I see with English is the coupling of literature and writing, but I'm not really sure how you'd go about splitting them, or even if it would actually be a good idea to do so.


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## Audit (Oct 28, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> Well, speaking of western civilization, everyone in the US should take Latin and Greek. Good for the soul, I say!
> The problem I see with English is the coupling of literature and writing, but I'm not really sure how you'd go about splitting them, or even if it would actually be a good idea to do so.


I only took Latin myself. Never got around to Greek. 

I'd like to see more Philosophy on the high school level as well. I find that not enough people ask themselves the simple questions "Why are we doing this?" and "What should we be doing?"


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## Crunchy Leaf (Oct 28, 2018)

Audit_The_Autist said:


> I only took Latin myself. Never got around to Greek.
> 
> I'd like to see more Philosophy on the high school level as well. I find that not enough people ask themselves the simple questions "Why are we doing this?" and "What should we be doing?"


I'm not inherently opposed to Philosophy, but if history is badly taught in the US schools, there's no way philosophy will be taught better.


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## Corbin Dallas Multipass (Oct 29, 2018)

You guys are insane.  "Who needs math, kids should be taught more dead languages!"

There are lots of lessons in history, but they're completely malleable.  They could use the same history to teach the opposite lesson (And they have, and do).  The history they teach is cherry picked and based on what some other person randomly decided to study.  Which ones are important, which ones aren't?

Philosophy should NOT be taught in schools, the teachers barely have the brainpower to go through a textbook with the kids, nevermind any kind of deep consideration.  Teachers need to teach things that have a right answer, otherwise they're just pushing their viewpoint down kids' throats.  

Straightforward logic would be good, I think, but it's probably too offensive for most teachers now.


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## wylfım (Oct 30, 2018)

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:


> You guys are insane.  "Who needs math, kids should be taught more dead languages!"
> 
> There are lots of lessons in history, but they're completely malleable.  They could use the same history to teach the opposite lesson (And they have, and do).  The history they teach is cherry picked and based on what some other person randomly decided to study.  Which ones are important, which ones aren't?
> 
> ...


If you learn the "dead" languages you can then go directly to source material to study history on your own, bypassing a lot of the bias.
Besides its not like current math education is worth anything. People are failing left and right and "common core" only made it infinitely worse.


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## Corbin Dallas Multipass (Oct 30, 2018)

wylfım said:


> If you learn the "dead" languages you can then go directly to source material to study history on your own, bypassing a lot of the bias.
> Besides its not like current math education is worth anything. People are failing left and right and "common core" only made it infinitely worse.


I mean, sure, if you intend to be a historian on a related subject it may well be a good idea to learn them.  But that's like 0.01% of people at best, right? Why teach everyone that?

I don't get the common core stuff, some of it just seems like making things harder for no reason. Still, at the end of the day math is math, and there's a right answer, and anything else is wrong.  That's good, even just to say "Yes, there are objectively true statement and objectively false statements. Not everything is based on feelings".  That's the same reason I'd like to see logic taught in schools.  Just basic propositional logic, teach the difference between "Saying a bunch of stuff" and "Making an argument".  But then... a lot of their propaganda probably goes against that.


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## cecograph (Oct 30, 2018)

Crunchy Leaf said:


> On the other hand, I've seen a lot of comp sci people say they think the self taught software developers with lots of certs types aren't as good as people who've been to college.


While on the theme that universities are there to train professionals: what you teach at universities is _theory_, stuff you learn with paper and pen that you don't learn on the job. That's a metric fuck ton of case law if you're training in law, it's stuff like physiology if you're training in medicine, and it's stuff like statics if you're training in engineering. It's absolutely essential in these professions, even though it is purely theoretical. It's necessary grounding when you get out there into the messy real world. Your years as an intern in a hospital are going to be very different from your studies, but the two are complementary.

Computer science doesn't have this. The only working theory in computer science puts it as a branch of pure mathematics. It's certainly not engineering. Most computer programmers are fucking terrified by mathematics. Notable exceptions are game's engine programmers, who are all awesome.



Crunchy Leaf said:


> This seems like a bad idea on the part of the companies. Of course having a factory worker in Bangladesh make a sweater is going to be worse than an American and companies still do that, but the difference I see is that consumers are willing to buy lower quality goods if it costs less, whereas large corporations buying software are more likely to be able to afford good American produced software. And the potential problems from bad code are way higher and worse than the potential problems from bad sweaters.


Nah. All software today is garbage. That's what "hacking" is. It's someone exploiting the fact that a piece of software is garbage. And when your software inevitably crashes, you shrug and say "that's what software does." And when hackers exploit some incompetent's bug in a piece of software and release millions of personal records, you shrug and say "that's hackers for you."

No litigation. Please wake me in a few hundred years when Intel faces a class action lawsuit for their recent fuckups with Spectre.

If civil engineering were software engineering, you'd see a bridge in your town collapse every other day and shrug "pfftt...that's what a light breeze does to bridges."

Incompetent Indians aren't going to make this problem much worse than it already is.


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## Corbin Dallas Multipass (Oct 30, 2018)

Well.... they run production lines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour when they're not running on PLCs, and you know what? For all the incompetence of software engineers, the software based PLCs are used over electro-mechanical relay banks in every production factory I've ever known of.  

The private market says software is worthwhile, and not so shitty as you say, otherwise the market wouldn't depend on it.  

Software engineering is just not very defined, so the quality varies extremely widely.  But yeah, people know how to write reliable and dependable software when its needed. We use it to get shit where it's going in space. Hell, they use "garbage software" to engineer the goddamn bridge you're so proud of.


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## cecograph (Oct 30, 2018)

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:


> Well.... they run production lines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour when they're not running on PLCs, and you know what? For all the incompetence of software engineers, the software based PLCs are used over electro-mechanical relay banks in every production factory I've ever known of.


Yeah, a lot of the embedded folk are off the hook, but a lot of them have degrees in "electrical engineering" not bullshit degrees in "software engineering." I know a bit about how the code is written in your 747's, and that stuff is rock-solid. Stuff falling out of the sky and machines in shops grinding themselves to bits costs real money and has real litigious consequence. The average website on the internet crashing and spilling your personal info, not so much, but all the money in software right now is going to webdev and so you might as well make do with a script kiddie.


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 30, 2018)

Something else: you should be allowed to work ahead in any level of schooling. This gets the smart people on their way, rewards motivation, and frees up resources for people that need it.


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## Hellbound Hellhound (Oct 30, 2018)

I think most of the problems with the humanities can be related back to a larger problem of how higher education in the developed world has become so heavily politicized.

This is true not only in terms of the prevailing culture on university campuses (as evidenced by the various ideological agendas transparently championed by both the faculty and the student organizations), but it is also true, in a wider context, of the very assumptions about what the function of a degree should be in the first place.

In short, a degree has gone from merely being a certificate of higher education to being a political and economic status symbol to which everyone now feels entitled. Any suggestion that going to university is "not for everyone" has become a political (and increasingly, in this job market, an economic) taboo, so what are the people who are not cut out for the STEM fields going to do? Simple answer: get a degree in the humanities.

How long this farce can go on for I do not know, but I do know that with rising tuition costs being the way they are, something's got to give eventually.


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## The Man From G.R.I.D.S. (Oct 30, 2018)

Hellbound Hellhound said:


> I think most of the problems with the humanities can be related back to a larger problem of how higher education in the developed world has become so heavily politicized.
> 
> This is true not only in terms of the prevailing culture on university campuses (as evidenced by the various ideological agendas transparently championed by both the faculty and the student organizations), but it is also true, in a wider context, of the very assumptions about what the function of a degree should be in the first place.
> 
> ...


Yet this grew from the earlier era of liberal arts, a relic of the arts that a noblemans son - basically a warlord - needed to rule. We now have reams of people trained to lead, to subvert, to critique in the jewish tradition, but for what? Subversion for its own sake?

Our civilization reels under the weight of regulation, decadence, and waste. We can't sustain this level of complexity. The overhead - the resource cost to manage complexity - is too much.

Besides that, going back won't work because the systems of the past led us here. It is better to reduce the complexity of our civilization because this reduces the attack surfaces available for social parasites.

Being a leftist means giving gov't jobs to all your buddies, so they support your ambitions. Being a nationalist/populist means simplifying things so normal people can get on with their lives without losing 1/3 or more of their paychecks to a government beauracracy that loathes them.

Its actually superior to being a Nazi because the end result is the same (no social parasites), but the optics are better.

We shouldn't do the exact thing that leftists do. I don't want to create Nazi phrenology departments from the corpse of sociology departments, because that is still buying into the modernist idolatry of centralization. Instead I want to bypass their power centers altogether.

Or to put it another way - more neutral - a big complex thing is easy to game because it has many seams which you can exploit. It is fragile - in the long run it will become overburdened with parasites, lose sight of its mission, and collapse, taking part of society out with it.

Something distributed, made up of many small simple systems is robust. It doesn't matter if huge chunks of it fail beause the risks are small and distributed across the whole. Periodic failures that clean out the weakest actors make the system anti-fragile - it will grow stronger by removing them, just as a herd of deer is healthier when wolves prey on those most prone to sickness.

Our education system is a huge fucking risk because jew bankers like Goldman Sachs package student loans and sell them like they did sub-prime mortgages. For this reason we can't forgive student loans en masse without crashing our economy like in 2008. We are literally forcing kids to delay having kids so some inbred cousin of Harvey Weinstein can make money without working.

TL;DR

Cut the Gordian Knot, idealogy is a trap, deport the bankers


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## Mrs Paul (Oct 30, 2018)

Considering the number stupid people there are out there now, I shudder to think of how much worse it would be if we did away with the humanities.  All these ignorant SJWs would just get that much worse -- no knowledge of _actual_ history, or philosophy, or how the world actually works.

You'd hear less "SO AND SO IS A NAZI!!!" maybe if people knew something about the Weimar Republic.  Or WHY the War on Drugs is such a fucking failure (look at Prohibition). Plato's hardly the only philosopher out there. 
Education isn't just about getting a job.  It's also so we don't have a bunch of dumbasses running around.


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## Meat Poultry Veg (Oct 30, 2018)

Speaking as a scientist, the entire scientific field owes its existence to the humanities. 
They should stay. The bullshit "disciplines" that emerged only after the 50's should definitely go.


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## *extremely mom voice* (Oct 30, 2018)

Meat Poultry Veg said:


> Speaking as a scientist, the entire scientific field owes its existence to the humanities.
> They should stay. The bullshit "disciplines" that emerged only after the 50's should definitely go.



Eh. Vonnegut said “During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” 

So we should leave the new discipline humanities people where they are, and let them spin in their own world. No harm, no foul.

Humanities (history, philosophy, etc) should be taught in schools, otherwise you end up with a nation full of people who've gotten all their cultural and historical awareness from frantically-animated YouTube edutainment videos. Fuck if I'm going to learn Latin though.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 31, 2018)

wylfım said:


> If you learn the "dead" languages you can then go directly to source material to study history on your own, bypassing a lot of the bias.


Bias wasn't invented in the 20th century. The main primary source on the Peloponnesian Wars was a man exiled by one side for utter incompetence.

History needs more archaeology.



*extremely mom voice* said:


> Humanities (history, philosophy, etc) should be taught in schools, otherwise you end up with a nation full of people who've gotten all their cultural and historical awareness from frantically-animated YouTube edutainment videos. Fuck if I'm going to learn Latin though.


The humanities are taught in schools and that's still what we ended up with.


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## Corbin Dallas Multipass (Oct 31, 2018)

School teachers are not mentally equipped to teach philosophy.  It's so heavily based on your own views and interpretations. But logic would be good because it forms the roots of actual philosophy, with a good foundation of logic you can figure the rest of the shit out.  And logic isn't open to interpretation, no matter how biased the teacher.

I remember any philosophy touched on in school was completely based on the teacher. Different teacher, entirely different take.  They were just pushing their own ideologies.


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## Slap47 (Oct 31, 2018)

Your Weird Fetish said:


> History _should_ be viewed as the lab of politics and economics but it's so hard to get an objective read of it.



Because that's impossible.


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## wylfım (Oct 31, 2018)

Your Weird Fetish said:


> Bias wasn't invented in the 20th century. The main primary source on the Peloponnesian Wars was a man exiled by one side for utter incompetence.
> 
> History needs more archaeology.


Eh, I can see that.
Still, the bias gets a lot worse if you're cycling through multiple people. At least with only one person you can somewhat account for the bias because you know what direction they're going to lean. If you have to deal with the bias of translators and interpretations of the translations, it becomes a lot harder to know in which direction to adjust your view.


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## Your Weird Fetish (Oct 31, 2018)

BigRuler said:


> should they exist? yes - as niche hobbies for rich snobs with too much time and money, like opera houses.
> should they be a mandatory part of higher education and get state funding? definitely not.


Depends on the part of the Humanities. They're pretty broad. I think any citizen ought to have a firm grounding in civics and at least a cursory knowledge of the history of their nation.


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## Lysenko (Nov 1, 2018)

Well maybe we just shouldn't charge people 100k and a kidney for a degree in them.


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## *extremely mom voice* (Nov 1, 2018)

Lysenko said:


> Well maybe we just shouldn't charge people 100k and a kidney for a degree in them.


I'd say "found the socialist" but there's a literal hammer and sickle in your avatar so yeah


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## Your Weird Fetish (Nov 1, 2018)

Higher education in the US isn't exactly a laissez faire kind of industry.



Lysenko said:


> Well maybe we just shouldn't charge people 100k and a kidney for a degree in them.


Should charge them what they're worth. About three fiddy.


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## Corbin Dallas Multipass (Nov 1, 2018)

Maybe we should stop telling people they need to have the skills that a 19th century relative of a noble needed to seem interesting at dinner parties to succeed in the workplace.

I don't understand why higher education is "Job training plus a million random other things unrelated to real life".  I mean... I do understand why the institutions want that, a quote I heard from a teacher in high school was "The important part of college isn't learning the lessons, it's learning how to think" and I think that really exposes what it's all about.  It's still about that class distinction. You need to know all this random art stuff so everyone knows you're not a filthy worker.


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## Medicated (Nov 1, 2018)

So what I'm reading from the thread is "yes the humanities and the like should exist, but we should scrap everything and restart from the 50's"  and "anything outside of the STEM fields should require apprenticeships as part of its degree"

Am I reading right?


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## Mrs Paul (Nov 3, 2018)

Good luck getting through law or med school without learning "dead languages".


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## Autopsy (Nov 3, 2018)

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:


> But logic would be good because it forms the roots of actual philosophy, with a good foundation of logic you can figure the rest of the shit out.  And logic isn't open to interpretation, no matter how biased the teacher.


It's absolutely fucking criminal how completely *THE WELL BALANCED AND GENERAL PURPOSE CURRICULUM* bypasses formal logic of any kind, which are the only mechanism by which you can argue a well-developed truth. You learn math absent its meaning and science absent its soul.
Platonic knee-jerk hatred for anything with Aristotle's name on it also seems to be responsible for a modern education failing to effectively deliver rhetoric and the elements of circumstances (who, what, where, when, why, and how) to young audiences. These things seem to me to be the single means by which an unclever person can teach themself to be clever, but now we have a generation of wildly intelligent people with the mental agility of a crippled hippo and people sit and wonder why the modern man doesn't seem nearly so clever as the old.
The Greeks are a case study in this, since they in all likelihood were *not* magical superhumans with a bajillion IQ, but instead that it was every bit as under-par and poorly-fed as the rest of the planet was at the time. I would argue that their significant head-start was because they stumbled on a bunch of tools that could prepare and engage their brain in meaningful ways, ways that could help bypass the intrinsic biological limitations of their epigenetically underdeveloped brains more thoroughly than the tools of their contemporaries.

edit: Also the answer was no, we don't have shit as simple as the universe figured out, how the fuck are we going to karyotype an absolute monster like culture? It's a waste of good minds and good money that has consistently fought against QOL gains made by Capitalism, been abused by particularly malicious sorts to push agendas, or otherwise left everyone involved in shambles because of overly ambitious predictions and conclusions. That's not to say it has done no good, but rather that the small fractions of that branch of science that do good are so thoroughly outnumbered by the ones that do no good at all.
The human race survived the 20th century desperately fighting off "central planning for the sake of central planning" and the human race should have thought better than to try making a science of "central planning for the sake of central planning" after all that.


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