Gifs are often a poor form of communication
For much the same reason Weebs are shocked to find out that there is no Hopes & Dreams visa category in Japan. Societies expect people to contribute to actual ability. Knowledge on its own if not put into practice or shared with others isn’t considered of value and not all knowledge even adds overall value to a society and can best be considered trivia.
The sheer negativity hurts.
For sure I agree your wealth or prosperity doesn’t equal worth. Everyone has more or less equal worth as a person. But let’s be real, one has to get a job, produce “work” of some sort, and get money so they can afford the basics, and if some left over, some Boba Fett figures and t-shirts.
Yep, and the government does fund some of those things. But the resources for this are small and the number of people they can actually employ to do field related work is small. I’ve worked for two museums as operations - doing the day to day stuff. The number of people who did actual “work” with artifacts or fact gathering was a handful.
But hey, per our conversation of machines putting most of us out of a job, there may be a paradigm shift were people get a base income, and it will free people up to be historians and archaeologists and writers and artists etc. That is partly how the Renaissance happened. People were afforded enough wealth through their families that they could spend all day doing pursuits of knowledge. Some of it was a complete waste of time, such as Issac Newtons alchemy research.
Not really. I guess if you write it down in a book it is to a degree. But knowledge by itself doesn’t produce a tangible object one could find buried in the future. Which is why so much of how people did things is lost to us.
Anyway, like I said, the reason some things like STEM gets more funding for pure research is the return on the investment, money wise, is higher.
It isn’t that it doesn’t matter. I am just looking at it pragmatically. I think it’s awesome you can do what you do. But how many history majors does your school produce per year? How many of them can find jobs in that field after school? When will you retire? Probably decades from now, right? Simply put, the numbers just aren’t there.
Your point that the world should have different priorities I not only empathize with but agree with, but until one of us is president and can increase the national museum funds 10x, we have to work with what we have. 
You don’t realize how many words have an X in them until you can 't use it.
That is absolutely false.
First name that came to mind was Christa McAuliffe. I was just a kid, but I think we lost a real bridge there.
well played
They (STEM/LA) teach about the exact same world from two different sides, the subjective and the objective.
And if you learn that one matters more than the other, that’s on your teacher or maybe your ears, not on reality itself.
I realize it may have sounded like I was playing for some sort of irony, but I was not. Scientific pursuits handle ambiguity, interpretation, and nuance with great frequency and care. Especially practicing, research science - science as a collection of cool neat fun facts which you should occasionally remember in order to quip out in conversation, or boring but Super Important facts which you should memorize for a test, these do seem a lot less about critical thought than some folks conceive of the liberal arts. Of course, one can also study the liberal arts in an extremely superficial fashion. Sloth is the mother invention, and we won’t be rid of it any time soon - and certainly no one academic division can claim a monopoly on lazy thinking.
But a sensitivity to nuance is quite misplaced if it makes you think everything is nuanced. Some things are just plain false. For example, what MalevolentPixie just said.
I’ll also throw in the subjective/objective dichotomy probably does more harm than good as a heuristic.
it’s not a dichotomy, that’s my point. They’re sides of a thing, not enemies of each other. Depends on where you read from, subjectively speaking.
I am not saying one matters more than the other: I no more want to see a world without STEM than I do a world without Liberal Arts. As I said, our best STEM thinkers had a strong LA grounding as well.
But I stand by my observations. As the line from Jurassic Park noted: Your scientists were so focused on whether they could, they never considered whether they should. Ethics, philosophy… The more we think of Arts as useless disciplines, the more we head down a very dark road. It’s already playing out politically. If there wasn’t a simultaneous war on science (and it’s really only on inconvenient science that says we can’t keep doing things the way we are), it wouldn’t be even commented on.
I know what you’re saying, however I don’t think either ONE is the foundation. An imbalance of either in the foundation would lead to problems. Too little science is just as bad as too much. Politics is purely subjective, doesn’t mean it’s always reality based - but the system it operates under here at least tries to be (with its census and demographics and quantitations, etc).
Qualitative/Quantitative ‘stuff’ exit in both wings of the academy. It doesn’t spring from one or the other though - that’s from us observers, and STEM isn’t some ideal human-free concept. Science and ‘a science degree’ aren;t the same thing. They’re always mixed up, can’t be pure in application, but its a matter of which side of the balance you want to put (or find yourself already having out) your thumb realtive to a goal.
I went to college for a hard science degree. Nobody made me but I tool a lot of Comparative Lit, Philosophy, History, Economics.
Engineering student don’t seem to have time to take ANY humanities. I only did by overloading. And humanities majors are usually required just one science class in 8 semesters. That’s not going to lead to a well rounded individual, but sometimes we need sharp tools. It’s okay to not be well rounded, it’s a choice.
Thanks for the thoughts, I’m not trying to convince, just probe and understand.
Actually, what you are saying and what I am saying is pretty close to the same. But we’ve gone a long way down the STEM is best path (generations down it) and it’s going to take an effort to get back in balance.
Agreed (and I expanded my thoughts above, and yes, aren’t we just on the same page)
Well said (typo aside). I’ll always remember one of my science profs discussing the importance of a tolerance for ambiguity in his field. Anecdotally, I credit a lot of my success over 20+ years in the technology industry to my liberal arts education, which went through grad school right into my first career in journalism. I’d argue that I’ve made some money over the years “selling” history to my clients.
Phone keyboards lean towards typos. 
Should we tell that to the people who do a large amount of unpaid labor? House wives for example? What does “productive” work mean, especially as our economy is based ever more on services that we seem to be struggling to know how to make a living off of? Why is some dude write shitty apps in silicon valley worth more than say some dude working an assembly line in a car plant in TN or GA? Because that is where we’re putting our emphasis? I mean, Blue Apron (I think that company is called) just went public and that’s a company that delivers ingredients and fucking directions to your house so you can make dinner. This is something that WHO actually needs? But someone is making a mint off that shit and I can’t help but think it’s going to collapse in on itself. At what point is snapchap or Uber going to do that, because they don’t actually produce much and in the case of Uber have all sorts of problems? But somehow, the people running those companies and making those apps deserve more $$$ for their Boba Fett characters than the guy who is building part of your car?
This is part of the reason we have governments… to fund things that aren’t “profitable.” This is why we pay taxes. It’s hard to monetize a road - outside of toll roads, and is that really the world we want to live in, where we have to pony up to get across town? Or would you rather pay some taxes and be able to get across town for free?
Yet there are still people who did this, yes? And think about all the museums across the country, funded by the federal, local, or state government. Aren’t those worth having?
My doubts about a UBI in the current neo-liberal environment are very real. I doubt that it would come without strings attached or that it would be enough to really live in any manner where these things can get done. I’m sure it would be a situation where people living primarily on a UBI would be in subsistence mode, with little opportunities to explore those things and get them to a level where that knowledge can be shared. That might happen in the future, but you still need institutions to get this stuff done. Even independent scholars work through various kinds of institutions (publishers, getting grants to conduct research, being members of professional organizations like the AHA to share their work with the rest of us, etc).
The rich today have no interest in patronizing the arts and humanities for their own sake, as they didn’t in the Renaissance, either. People worked to order, not out of the joy of the work itself. Most elites who did this work themselves also reflected their own class interests, for the most part. Having a way for those of us who didn’t come from wealth to do this kind of work has an important leveling effect and brings in a new perspective. We only got things like post-colonial, minority, and women’s studies because the academy opened up to new voices in the 60s and allowed people to speak with their own voices instead of having someone else dictate what our lives was like to us.
But it still matters and needs to be produced.
I think money is a bad central reason to fund research of any kind.
Honestly, so am I. It’s a pragmatic consideration to have historically minded, critically thoughtful citizens in a democracy. Understanding art, perspective, literature, and how people in the past lived is part of being human. Eliminating that because there are no “tangible” results is just shooting ourselves in the foot and giving away our future.
There has got to be a cheap one you can pick up somewhere, yeah?
I don’t think its as clear as that, nor do I see a hard dichotomy as useful.
I am quite familiar with science teaching me about ambiguity. Science may TRY to categorize and name and predict - but we know we can’t, really. I was once fishing with 6 high level salmonid scientists off the CA coast. We caught a fish. Three opinions as to the species, of salmon. The do look more alike in their ocean phase - but when the sciences OR the humanities get into deconstruction mode - the processes of understanding through observing, describing, and comparing (a plant, or a paramecium or a work by Blake, or that painting) aren’t all that different, but the methods are different because the subjects are different.
I also know Philosophy taught me me about certainty and formal logic and ethics. Math is logic based, all of it.
One field of study is certainly more physically reductive than the other, but they both allow nuance, because they’re both human activities. Different ways to say the same thing.
We may well need more people better versed in science, but we can get there through the humanities, just fine. It’s always seemed like a turf war to me among academics because it’s literally food on their table or not, the funding of these priorities. From my perspective as an alum and working scientist, I think everyone should be taking ethics and logic classes. Everyone. We need more of BOTH styles of education, more education for everyone!
I think you misread me. I don’t see a hard dichotomy, and tend to agree with your comment. Unfortunately, there are people who do see some personal benefit in keeping “The Two Cultures” separate and sometimes at odds, and that’s before you get to the myopic fools who know the price of everything (esp. on the “free” market) and the value of nothing.
I must have accidentally put that on you, was not my intent. Much of that was towards the @MalevolentPixy part you agreed with. I find all the opinions fascinating, and don’t mean to claim primacy of my own (beyond the ends of these fingertips, at least).
Also, I professionally merge history with science. I have to document the property history to find problems. And I am aware that my work will be read, maybe, a long time from now and might be useful if well written! I get to pore over primary sources from as far back as the 19th century sometimes, old city records of what was where, and when. And those people knew how to take notes. Old maps made of layers of pasted on corrections and updates. All kinds of stuff, none of it focused on who was there, all of it focused on what happened when.
People able to stay at home and take care of kids (which I did for 5 years) usually are able to do so because they can pay for the things they need via their spouse. They still provide not just a service, but, you know, help to raise and nurture the child (which one can’t put a price tag on). And if they had to go work instead of stay home, they would have to pay for child care (depending what they do, that might end up being a wash, so may as well stay home until they are in school.)
Your other complaints about people being over paid and companies being over valued are valid, but at the same time, what are you going to do? Just like another article on BB, if you convince people that your magical Goop is going to make them live longer or look better, you’re going to make money. Is that really fair or right or productive? No, but the world isn’t fair, so. I dunno. Pretty sure most of us feel like we should make more.
Well roads are a bad example because they facilitate commerce and trade, which is the life blood of any economy, which is where the government gets its taxes. But yes, government has the ability to fund projects that aren’t necessarily monetarily profitable, but still provide some service or value. So if you’re asking if I support paying taxes to support arts and research and historical preservation, of course I say yes.
Absolutely. I don’t think I’ve said otherwise.
I really can’t say how we will handle things in 30 or 40 years, but I think it will look much different than now.
Eh - not sure this is a fair statement. There are a ton of foundations and private sponsors for things like PBS, the arts, scholarship for student entering a variety of fields, art patronage, etc. For sure its not all of them, and for some they have overlapping self interests.
OK, but what is the motivation to do it other wise? Certainly there will be a certain percentage of people who just want to “find out” something. But the funds for that is limited. And while I support government grants and funding, their funds are limited too. You got to find some way to make they system self sustaining.
Looking for a new drug or a new building material or a new algorithm to process data etc with the promise it might result in a marketable item is what gets more investors to invest (as you said, some of the rich aren’t into investing in that just for the sake of knowledge.)
And the government does fund stuff like this at a loss of money. The disease I have, Neurofibro Mitosis, is actually being looked at most closely by the US Army Medical Corp (think thats the name). The GPS system had its roots in moving troops around the globe, but they opened it up for all and it has changed the way we travel.
I am not suggesting we eliminate them at all! And I encourage everyone to partake in that sort of learning if they get the opportunity. Or like in my case, continue to try to learn more even after your formal education. I am just saying that for most people, the options to make it a career are pretty limited. If you can make it work, more power to you.
Its on a lap top. yeah I could probably find one on ebay to swap it out. It works some times, makes me think its a mechanical issue. I keep blowing it out and it will work for a bit then stop.
Yeah, but when it comes to outreach, I feel like STEM needs it more. I mean, when was the last time you saw a film with a mad composer as the villain? Or saw a parable about the dangers of writing sonnets too quickly? Or saw someone predicting that revisionist history would open up a black hole that would end the world?
People may not respect the humanities very much, but the humanities rarely have to do outreach to convince people that they aren’t actively going to be harmful.
