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I went to University in Australia initially planning to study Biology. I took an introductory Philosophy course and I was hooked. I ended up completing my Bachelors and doing some postgrad work. I committed all the way - I had no other major or minor.
In my experience, that introductory course was key in convincing me to follow that path.
Now I work in IT ;)
I took a similar route though I majored in Government as well. I knew from day 1 of PHIL 1010 that I was going to major in it. I often felt that it was the most "math-like" of all of the pure humanities in that you are frequently dealing with reason, proofs, and theories with a high attention to detail. Now I'm doing programming. Metaphysics as a thought process apparently transfers well into writing code. Go figure.
Unfortunately I'm a filthy continental philosopher :D Cheers! Loved classical logic though.
I've heard this story more than once, but I'm curious is this is really all that common. You obviously break the "humanities=future burger-flipper" stereotype.
It's very common. 99% of tech jobs aren't that hard, much easier than understanding philosophy. Anyone who can do philosophy can do it very well given some training/experience.
I had a think about the people from Philosophy I kept track of and I can honestly say they are now predominantly upper-middle, unless they stuck to academia, which about 30% or so did, and obviously, are poor (as far as I know), and somewhere on the road to a PhD.
There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side, with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.
Obviously that's not a rule. When I left university, I worked in an industrial site, and a magazine, and at a Salesforce implementation company, and then at the industrial site again, teaching myself more and more programming at each. I got promoted to the IT department of the industrial site, and continued to learn, and then got a job doing ETL/Database/Automation stuff at a big telecom in the marketing department. I've been lucky, and I've known the right people, but I honestly would still be happy if I was working at that industrial site. There was a Theology graduate who also worked there, driving a forklift.
If people ask me, do I recommend getting a philosophy degree, I say I don't. That's like asking if I'd recommend that people get a tattoo. I'm very happy with mine, but its a decision that needs to be made by an individual. Like a tattoo, it reduces your job prospects, and there are no take-backsies.
Now comes my smug paragraph. Everyone in philosophy, and who even starts philosophy, hears the same jokes. Pretty much nobody is saying its a good idea to do a philosophy degree. To do philosophy, people have to overcome the societal expectation that they will die in a ditch, poor and unable to do anything "useful". To do philosophy, you really need to love that shit. I've honestly never heard someone speak with regret about completing a philosophy degree, whereas of the biologists, engineers and economists I know, some wish they'd done something different. If you read philosophy, and you love it, do what you love. Don't do something just because you think it'll make your life safer.
I'd rather live a happy "burger flipper" than discover I don't love what I do in 20 years.
>There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side, with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.
Ironically, I'm a comp-sci/math type person, and I regard continental philosophy a bunch better than analytic. Continental philosophy usually considers matters inside their social and historical context, so at least sometimes, when they can be bothered to refer to the real world, they're referring to it with a solid context.
Whereas analytic philosophy often seems to me to suffer from math-envy, and to formalize too early and too often. The result is that analytic philosophers spend a lot of time debating over what they think are rigorous, scientifically-grounded concepts when in fact our best science says that things just don't work that way or the theories aren't "done cooking".
(I'm thinking of a Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia page someone directed me to last night on "reductionism", which was given three definitions, none of which matched what a working scientist would usually call reductionism. Or of the very concept of supervenience, which needs less metaphysics and more information theory. Or of the perennial debates over the "Hard Problem" of consciousness.)
Yeah, I feel like I'm totally on the same page as you. Analytic philosophy always seemed like a bit of fun to me, but seemed to boil down to logic games that have as much application to the real world (as a simulation and explanation of it) as boolean, programmed representations of it do. Which is to say, some.
That doesn't mean I don't have immense respect for analytic philosophers, but I have the type of respect for them that I also have for fiction writers that create immensely consistent and engaging fantasy worlds. Zing!
Continental seemed to me to more generally have the view that all debates and philosophies were necessarily making ontological and epistemological claims. That immensely appeals to me.
Thank you for your reply. I was downvoted perhaps because people read my identification of the stereotype and thought that was my emphasis, but I honestly was curious. I myself am a physics type but I'm an armchair (or kiddie chair, really) philosopher. I specifically love philosophy of math and science because it's closest I can get to it without feeling too guilty with wasting free time on something other than grad school (cough). My two favorite non-physics courses in undergrad were humanities types, a "Presidential Leadership" (history writing) course, and a general ed philosophy course. I would say that the philosophy course was one of the most important classes for I took in my five years in undergrad.
The reason I asked about whether it was a rule or even common is I hear about it often that I wanted to believe it was true, so I wanted others' experience. Philosophy, hell, history is hard, at least it was for me, so I don't doubt people who think about such things are really intelligent...and that intelligence can't translate well to something like hacking of mathematics. It's good to hear it in your case it worked in your favor.
No worries, I appreciated the question! I think it got downvoted because it is a question or thought that is posed quite a lot.
bool question = toBe || !toBe;
I went to a college of liberal
arts and sciences. There was a
big load of required humanities
courses, but the college had a
relatively good physics department
and a terrific math department.
And math and physics were my interests:
So, I majored in math and had nearly
a major in physics.
For the humanities, they claimed to teach about people, but at the time I couldn't see that they were doing at all well at that, and later I concluded that actually the humanities are not at all good about teaching about people, e.g., get as much that is wrong as right and, really, darned little good insight, but that parts of clinical psychology could teach some important and reasonably credible lessons about people.
I really liked music, and the record collection in the library was terrific, but I never took a course in music -- later started violin and made some okay progress eventually.
But for the humanities courses I took, i.e., was force fed, I came to hate as nonsense, misleading about people, and otherwise a waste of time.
E.g., history: I wanted to learn some about history, but the history course was absurd, from some pompous, pretentious text with no overview and otherwise nearly impenetrable. And the darned course took so much time before year 1 that it never got to the 20th or even the 19th centuries. Bummer. Finally I learned some about history from some books and some relatively serious TV documentaries, e.g., Victory at Sea, The Battle of Britain. The courses? Bummers.
In the history courses, I wanted to learn why, that is, the causes or at least the candidate causes -- metals, domesticated animals, open ocean sailing, relatively productive crops, etc., but the courses essentially ignored all concepts of causes. Bummer.
Overall, IMHO, the humanities are suffering from lack of good methodology. In particular, their results are open to a lot of individual interpretation and definite maybes, and it's tough to have the work be cumulative in any very useful sense.
Alternative explanation for the spike in freshmen interest: the engineering/cs classes are 95% men where I am. Liberal arts has more even mix.
Not only is stem widely considered harder and requires crazier time commitments, it also exacts a toll on your sex life. These are young people at the peak of their productive cycles and this is a very large consideration.
This idea can be extended beyond simple sexual desire: engineering as it is taught in prestigious universities is an enormous time commitment which dominates your entire life for the prime 19-23 4 years that maybe you should be spending learning about the world and interacting with people. People see this and reject it; they'd prefer to make friends and have fun than disappear into a black hole for 4 years only to emerge as a creature which they suspect will be allowed by the capitalist system to make money.
I feel like my undergrad in Economics was the perfect middle ground between humanities and STEM. Also helps to do it at an engineering school with engineering/math as the core curriculum.
I still regret not double majoring in one of the humanities when I was in college. There's lots of technical / science people on HN. Does anyone feel the same way?
As with any good question, my answer is "yes and no". I feel that the humanities are too easy and too hard. I took the required ones but they were not very deep. There was a lot of memorization or assertion of some truth that I was expected to absorb. It wasn't until much later that I read things like Guns Germs and Steel that I started learning about "why things are". A Short History of Nearly Everything really got me hooked on the history of science and western culture. Nothing I read in college did that.
The other challenge of deep humanities like philosophy is that college students simply don't have enough life experience to see value in what it provides. As a 40yr old adult (yesterday) I now understand the value, but no longer have the time for learning it all.
Do I wish I had double majored in college? No, simply because my own Computer Science degree was already way to much to complete in four years and I was eager to go build something. Now that I'm an adult and dad and have no time to read, I really wish I knew those things.
Mixed bag. In the end there's far more to learn than you can in a single lifetime.
See the "humanities is easy" comment below. Too many STEM-Lords in HN a lot of the time sadly. It's a very immature view but a sadly common one in much of tech.
I think that both sides are doing the current situation a disservice. The STEM-Lords[1] are acting like everything without a clearly defined profitable career track is a complete waste of time. The guidance counselors are still living in the 90s, where any college degree could get you a job without question.
The reality is in the middle - majoring in a humanities subject can still work out just fine, but you have be a lot more careful about what you do in college and what skills you develop. This scares the shit out of the STEM folks, as their idea of "be careful about what they do in college" mostly appears to be "Oh, so I need to do an okay internship or two over the summer." The humanities kids have to do a lot more research and a lot more gumshoeing to figure out where they're going to go after they graduate.
Unfortunately, most kids aren't like that. They're going to college because Mommy and Daddy told them to do so, and they're majoring in History because it "sounded cool," not because it was their passion or because they decided that a History degree was the correct decision for achieving their goals in life. If you expect this apathetic kid to go out and look for himself to figure out exactly how his History degree can get him a job, you've got another thing coming. That's where we get the "barista with a master's degree" stereotype.
Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing.
> The guidance counselors are still living in the 90s, where any college degree could get you a job without question.
That wasn't true in the 90s. The guidance counselors still pretended it was, in the 90s.
>>Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing.
I think this slippery-slope outcome of this is that children are funneled into early tutoring, academic kindergartens, etc. It seems absurd to do everything in life just to optimize for profit. Bye bye holidays???
I'm not sure if we should call it a slippery slope so much as a water-slide: when you present the extreme version of this scenario people tend to eat the bullet and endorse it as virtuous/prudent/praiseworthy rather than rethink the assumptions.
>(This includes biology, incidentally)
It actually includes most of the pure natural sciences, and mathematics. Engineering is the track with the careers.
The "pure natural sciences" and mathematics are as much engineering as Computer Science is (or, perhaps more accurately, computer science is as little engineering as those other things), however much working programmers like to call themselves "Software Engineers".
Computer Science is a weird academic department. There is very much such a thing as the pure, non-engineering formal science of computing. However, most Comp Sci departments justify their budgets and existence by recourse to teaching undergraduates a minimal foundation in actual computer-science, and a substantial amount of software engineering, which is actually a separate field.
Personally, I like pure computer science and CS academia, but most of the undergrads taking CS degrees are trying to learn software engineering, and will object loudly if asked to take, for instance, type theory, topology, computability and automata theory, statistical learning theory (ML courses have massive drop rates), computational complexity, Kolmogorov complexity theory, how to build an operating system, compilers and optimization, abstract interpretation for static analysis, mathematical logic, etc.
It's not that the humanities are too easy. The subject matter is impossibly convoluted. Unfortunately, this leads to a situation where the fields taken as a whole are incredibly not-rigorous. Very few of the conclusions seem to be justified, and few of the practitioners seem to be able to know how tell the difference.
In my opinion, the humanities, despite being around for longer than STEM, are still nascent. The tools and models and perspectives we use today are still too inexpressive to solve problems beyond special cases, and we still have a hard time figuring out the boundaries of these special cases themselves. The systems that the humanities investigate are much more non-linear and complex than the systems STEM investigates, and so the conclusions are much less reliable.
The humanities ARE easy.
This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math / Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English or Journalism.
Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in Physics???? HA!
I knew someone who majored in Physics, let it go to their head, and took an introductory Linguistics course, dismissively saying it would be an easy A. They flunked the class, admittedly with no shortage of schadenfreude on my part. I also knew plenty of programmers who gravitated to CS in large part _because_ they wouldn't have to do much writing. People who were great at taming the computer but could barely string coherent sentences together, let alone meaningfully exploring the human condition. Something that turns out to be incredibly relevant when building software that, in some form or another, responds to and shapes that condition. If anything, tech as we know it is demonstrably suffering from a lack of exposure to the humanities.
What might look to you like "giving up" often more closely resembles "finding one's strengths". Not everyone is good at STEM, true, but then again that's not the problem with your attitude. It's the implication that having an aptitude outside of STEM entails some kind of intellectual deficit.
No, but I know very few STEMy people who can discuss human culture with any depth or nuance beyond the rudiments of modern liberalism or some undeveloped intuition for Enlightenment ideals. One of them is a programmer who got a degree in English. Go figure?
I avoided doubling up in a humanities precisely because the course load seemed like it would be too much. Give me a differential equation or Lie algebra any day. Engaging human beings in complex arguments is exhausting. Mathematics studies concepts simple enough to compress to a few pages of symbols. The difference is, I am as in love with mathematics as I am with English, or history, or philosophy. I can imagine manifold ways for a person to be duped into a STEM program at first (most of them being kin to the threat of economic uncertainty without a highly paid professional job) only to abandon it when they could not engage with the work enough to do it well.
Interesting assumption, but it could be that the humanities are more engaging than STEM fields, so people are likely to convert to them, but not go the other way. Maybe people are more likely to be unwillingly driven in STEM, but more likely to actively choose the humanities. All those silly assumptions explain the same behaviors. I'm sure that the situation is more complex than that.
I'd like to clear up at least one place where you and justin_vanw are talking past each other:
At many engineering schools, the humanities are a joke.
They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.
Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this perception.
I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.
I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal-arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the classes there was.
Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school, in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.
This makes a heap of sense! I think though that we are on the same page with this, that there are a bunch of complexities that it is very tempting to simplify away in explanations of the differences between the fields.
It's not complex at all. There is a large group of people that try to major in STEM but find it too hard, or can't pass the math classes. This is often because they can't pass the tests. This is often despite substantial tutoring and serious effort, and multiple attempts to pass the class. The same person breezes through whichever humanities curriculum, and the 'Physics for Poets' class they have to take to satisfy their 'Quantitative Reasoning' requirement.
I can't say because I haven't seen the numbers on this. Even though I've got a philosophy degree I really need some solid quantification before I'll believe claims like that. For instance, do engineering graduates that do philosophy courses on average perform better in them than philosophy graduates?
edit: Also what's your take on why Freshmen have diverged from high-school students in recent years? What changed?
Anecdote N=1
I majored in comp. sci. minored in phil. I spent the majority of my time working through the technical classes, I kind of mailed it in for the philosophy classes, and got B's. I would have liked to spend more time 'trying' in the philosophy classes, but I really just didn't have it to spend. Some of them were really quite interesting.
I guess this doesn't really answer your question, because I know people got A's in the classes I got B's in, but it might provide perspective into why an engineering major didn't ace all their 400 level phil. classes.
The sciences ARE easy. You don't have to learn how to write. (many, MANY science/engineering students end up picking this path because they cannot write). You don't have to read ANYTHING complicated. Every single thing you read has been tailor-fit to be as easy to understand as possible. Notation has been invented to make it easier for you to understand things. Everything that's explained to you in your entire academic career is god's truth with no room for error; you never have to doubt or think or reconsider.
>Every single thing you read has been tailor-fit to be as easy to understand as possible. Notation has been invented to make it easier for you to understand things.
Where in the hell did you go to school? I've never heard of science teaching being designed to make the subject easy.
It's not about the way it's taught, it's about the way it is. Mathematics is designed with the purpose of being the simplest way for humans to understand particular abstract concepts, some of which are necessary to understand natural phenomena. Most research is, in some sense or another, inventing tools or notation that make things easier to understand or calculate. Once they are easy enough to understand that all mathematicians can understand them, that's called a proof and becomes the language you use to understand science. So the very language is designed to be user-friendly for humans; there's an entire discipline and tradition spanning thousands of years of human history dedicated to it.
Interest in humanities is going down among high school students because their parents and high school teachers rightfully advise them against it. Then they get to college realize their freedom get drunk and realize that hard majors are hard. Their interest in the humanities then goes up. This is not a paradox.
I did double major in the humanities and I would never go back and do it differently for any reason. I think the value I got out of my humanities major eclipses my technical major in what it's done for me in general. I think technical things are FAR easier to learn outside of university, so the experience you get doing humanities is invaluable and irreplaceable.
I attended a liberal arts college which encouraged exploration of the humanities. I majored in biochem and was one course away from a minor in philosophy upon graduation. I stopped because philosophy as it was taught at my institution was frankly a waste of time. I pursued the courses because I wanted to engage in meaningful debate about concepts and come away with actionable insight on how to best live my life. Instead there was no real debate; I was lectured to about my professors' academic interpretation of works with no attempt at translation, and was then expected to mindlessly regurgitate their interpretation in essays. This continued up into the seminar level. It was also readily clear that many of my classmates were just there to coast through college, so that didn't help. Granted I went to a tier 2 school, so it's certainly possible that people might have vastly different experiences at top institutions.
I really loved the engaged debate and discussion I got in undergraduate philosophy. Sounds like you didn't have the same experience :(
Absolutely yes. I with I'd doubled, or at least minored, in English literature. I was Physics/Math.
Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of the graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up to not learn anything.
Then blame common core, because... too many tests?
And the sad, sad conclusion: Of course the answer is for professors to insist that their institution force more students to take more humanities classes.
Because it would be a tragedy if you didn't make a future chemist sit through a semester of Introduction to Shakespeare and force them to write 3 essays that will be vaguely skimmed and returned. If they didn't have to do that, well, I think we all know you can't be a well rounded person without having to listen to a class discussion between a dozen borderline illiterate communication / journalism / criminology majors, and taking notes as they try to make a coherent point about Henry III.
>>Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of the graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up to not learn anything.
The y-axis was explained in the text! Did you just give us all the perfect opportunity to draw some snarky conclusions about the difference between STEM and humanities students? :D
Actually it's not really explained.
The second graph is especially weird, since it says 'number of college students is going up' but the graph goes from 0 to 0.18. I assumed it meant 'percent of college students who expressed an interest'?
I somehow comprehended it on the first go.