Can the reading selections be announced to free subscribers? I can’t accommodate the zoom meets in my schedule anyway, but I’d like to read along on my own time.
I just finished reading Philip Roth's _I Married a Communist_. It's a novel about political ideology, its temptations and pitfalls.
But then about 2/3 of the way in, Zuckerman (narrator) encounters a college professor who disabuses him of the belief that art is political. It's a great soliloquy about the" purpose of art is art, period." I encourage people to read it and the book. It's what Sam is saying here.
But that it comes from a professor, ostensibly 75 years ago, suggests the recommendation to remove liberal arts from the colleges is ill starred. Colleges are the best institutions we have for resisting instant gratification and market pressure. They definitely need a makeover, to get in touch with what they value instead of chasing the market , rankings etc. I suggest changing demographic targets. Get older students who have already seen how pure careerism drains life of purpose. But starting from scratch, with brand new organizations, and without bringing in the teachers who've been doing this their whole lives, is a heavy lift.
You've helped explain why I never read a book that was assigned in a class with as much enthusiasm and focus and depth of engagement as one I decided to read on my own. 40 years after graduating from college (UCSC) with a degree in humanities, I continue to read more books on a wider range of subjects (lots of biographies and US history these days) at a deeper level with more genuine curiosity than ever. This increasingly includes books I download from the local library to listen to with the Libby app while walking, with or without the dog.
One small but difficult step forward would be for colleges and universities to require that graduates are able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs with acceptable, if not perfect, punctuation. If students use AI to do so, they may still learn the concepts.
Agree, but I’m going to add something from a vy different direction. Want to save the humanities? Have children. I think there’s a backdrop to this that obviously involves technology, but also involves several social problems, including declining numbers of children & young ppl. For one thing, this means that many small liberal arts colleges, which often have been bastions of humanities teaching, will close (has already started to happen). They’re in no position to require students to write complete sentences; they can’t even fill their classrooms. Other institutions from large state universities down to elementary schools will compete harder to fill seats, which means they will be less likely to mk unpopular demands like “read the Symposium & write a paper abt it, using complete sentences and paragraph structure, preferably w/o using AI,” and more likely to pander to student demands, like “give me a degree that gets me a job asap, and I just want to get my papers out of the way as fast as possible.” They also will be under pressure to cut their humanities departments. With fewer young people, we have less support for schools and universities, less ability to mk learning demands on students, and a narrower base for exchanging and inventing new ideas. I 100% agree with suggestions in this article and also with your suggestion, but I also think a society that increasingly becomes aging people reading books will be less likely to support the humanities in schools by any approach at all.
The Humanities have evolved a great deal over the centuries and will continue to evolve and even thrive, because they are the oldest and deepest expressions of what make us human, from the first cave paintings and primitive flutes to the latest digital graphics, installations and sonic experiments. I'm not crazy about the rather harsh name "Intellectual Bootcamp" for this new enterprise, but I applaud it's goals. If it succeeds it could bring about a needed cultural change in the U.S. that might trigger a demand for more humanities courses in the universities and a restoring of the balance between science and the humanities.
It seems more likely to me that studying the humanities is in fact better for learning how to think but that employers don't want that and would rather just have people who do what they're told without asking too many questions.
The claims that the humanities are a link to how other people think is just as dubious as any of the others dismissed here - humanities people don't ever seem to understand people who don't come from their literary perspective. Whether that's us science and tech people, or people who don't spend much time on written text.
Anyways, when i see something of this sort and you include something by Neal Stephenson or Vernor Vinge, them maybe the downward spiral will be nearing its end.
In the meantime I'll enjoy reading the old literary books that involve genuinely uncommon prospectives by modern standards, and mostly ignore whatever contemporary crap that will likely be forgotten in a decade.
A structural risk of AI goes often underappreciated: models are trained to minimize prediction error across data distributions, creating an architectural bias toward the mean. The result is homogenization — formally known as model collapse. If you want to protect the humanities from this inherent AI risk, the answer is simple: be more original and innovative. This bootcamp is likely a good counter measure (so it's not easy for me to judge, being a physicist).
Maybe students are rejecting the humanities programs because of the decline in diversity of political thought among the professoriate? Studies show that conservative professors are almost extinct at many top universities. Who would voluntarily sign up for a re-education camp?
It's because our cultural priorities are whack. We prioritize profit and endless optimization. We don't prioritize humans. Humans need connection with people, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter. There isn't a single politician who ever talks about prioritizing the people of the country. This is why the humanities are shrinking - we don't give a shit about humans. (Or the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants for that matter.)
This is exactly what I have been looking for. Unfortunately, I am one of those poor writers, not Skidrow but living on SSA retirement. If you could entertain splitting the $80 into halves or even quarters, I'd be all in. Please consider this. Tolstoy would approve.
'Persuasion,' in claiming that books, etc. 'represent continuity with the past—whatever else'the digital era and AI .... seem extremely unlikely to help us genuinely access minds that existed in a pre-digital world,' is wrong. Artificial Intelligence includes that pre-digital world among its sources. You don't have to depend upon AI to think clearly, but you cannot ignore its capabilities.
Effectively ceding the humanities (and the liberal arts) to universities seems to me the proximate cause of their decline. These institutions have not been good stewards of these disciplines, and I don’t think they can recover so long as the universities survive in their current form.
Because I’m a dork and enjoy seeing opinion data and cross-tabs on controversial takes like this (eg, “Nothing of value would be lost if the four-year residential university model disappeared tomorrow”) I built an interactive survey app to measure how groups compare on these debates across a variety of dimensions at https://votto.app
Answer questions and explore if you enjoy interesting cross tabs and cool charts like I do!
Can the reading selections be announced to free subscribers? I can’t accommodate the zoom meets in my schedule anyway, but I’d like to read along on my own time.
I just finished reading Philip Roth's _I Married a Communist_. It's a novel about political ideology, its temptations and pitfalls.
But then about 2/3 of the way in, Zuckerman (narrator) encounters a college professor who disabuses him of the belief that art is political. It's a great soliloquy about the" purpose of art is art, period." I encourage people to read it and the book. It's what Sam is saying here.
But that it comes from a professor, ostensibly 75 years ago, suggests the recommendation to remove liberal arts from the colleges is ill starred. Colleges are the best institutions we have for resisting instant gratification and market pressure. They definitely need a makeover, to get in touch with what they value instead of chasing the market , rankings etc. I suggest changing demographic targets. Get older students who have already seen how pure careerism drains life of purpose. But starting from scratch, with brand new organizations, and without bringing in the teachers who've been doing this their whole lives, is a heavy lift.
Fortunately for us all, the existence of literature is in no way dependent on the existence of professors of literature.
You've helped explain why I never read a book that was assigned in a class with as much enthusiasm and focus and depth of engagement as one I decided to read on my own. 40 years after graduating from college (UCSC) with a degree in humanities, I continue to read more books on a wider range of subjects (lots of biographies and US history these days) at a deeper level with more genuine curiosity than ever. This increasingly includes books I download from the local library to listen to with the Libby app while walking, with or without the dog.
One small but difficult step forward would be for colleges and universities to require that graduates are able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs with acceptable, if not perfect, punctuation. If students use AI to do so, they may still learn the concepts.
Agree, but I’m going to add something from a vy different direction. Want to save the humanities? Have children. I think there’s a backdrop to this that obviously involves technology, but also involves several social problems, including declining numbers of children & young ppl. For one thing, this means that many small liberal arts colleges, which often have been bastions of humanities teaching, will close (has already started to happen). They’re in no position to require students to write complete sentences; they can’t even fill their classrooms. Other institutions from large state universities down to elementary schools will compete harder to fill seats, which means they will be less likely to mk unpopular demands like “read the Symposium & write a paper abt it, using complete sentences and paragraph structure, preferably w/o using AI,” and more likely to pander to student demands, like “give me a degree that gets me a job asap, and I just want to get my papers out of the way as fast as possible.” They also will be under pressure to cut their humanities departments. With fewer young people, we have less support for schools and universities, less ability to mk learning demands on students, and a narrower base for exchanging and inventing new ideas. I 100% agree with suggestions in this article and also with your suggestion, but I also think a society that increasingly becomes aging people reading books will be less likely to support the humanities in schools by any approach at all.
The Humanities have evolved a great deal over the centuries and will continue to evolve and even thrive, because they are the oldest and deepest expressions of what make us human, from the first cave paintings and primitive flutes to the latest digital graphics, installations and sonic experiments. I'm not crazy about the rather harsh name "Intellectual Bootcamp" for this new enterprise, but I applaud it's goals. If it succeeds it could bring about a needed cultural change in the U.S. that might trigger a demand for more humanities courses in the universities and a restoring of the balance between science and the humanities.
It seems more likely to me that studying the humanities is in fact better for learning how to think but that employers don't want that and would rather just have people who do what they're told without asking too many questions.
The claims that the humanities are a link to how other people think is just as dubious as any of the others dismissed here - humanities people don't ever seem to understand people who don't come from their literary perspective. Whether that's us science and tech people, or people who don't spend much time on written text.
Anyways, when i see something of this sort and you include something by Neal Stephenson or Vernor Vinge, them maybe the downward spiral will be nearing its end.
In the meantime I'll enjoy reading the old literary books that involve genuinely uncommon prospectives by modern standards, and mostly ignore whatever contemporary crap that will likely be forgotten in a decade.
A structural risk of AI goes often underappreciated: models are trained to minimize prediction error across data distributions, creating an architectural bias toward the mean. The result is homogenization — formally known as model collapse. If you want to protect the humanities from this inherent AI risk, the answer is simple: be more original and innovative. This bootcamp is likely a good counter measure (so it's not easy for me to judge, being a physicist).
Maybe students are rejecting the humanities programs because of the decline in diversity of political thought among the professoriate? Studies show that conservative professors are almost extinct at many top universities. Who would voluntarily sign up for a re-education camp?
It's because our cultural priorities are whack. We prioritize profit and endless optimization. We don't prioritize humans. Humans need connection with people, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter. There isn't a single politician who ever talks about prioritizing the people of the country. This is why the humanities are shrinking - we don't give a shit about humans. (Or the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants for that matter.)
This is exactly what I have been looking for. Unfortunately, I am one of those poor writers, not Skidrow but living on SSA retirement. If you could entertain splitting the $80 into halves or even quarters, I'd be all in. Please consider this. Tolstoy would approve.
'Persuasion,' in claiming that books, etc. 'represent continuity with the past—whatever else'the digital era and AI .... seem extremely unlikely to help us genuinely access minds that existed in a pre-digital world,' is wrong. Artificial Intelligence includes that pre-digital world among its sources. You don't have to depend upon AI to think clearly, but you cannot ignore its capabilities.
Looking forward to it. I hope May Day Strong doesn’t reduce the interest in the first meeting.
Effectively ceding the humanities (and the liberal arts) to universities seems to me the proximate cause of their decline. These institutions have not been good stewards of these disciplines, and I don’t think they can recover so long as the universities survive in their current form.
Because I’m a dork and enjoy seeing opinion data and cross-tabs on controversial takes like this (eg, “Nothing of value would be lost if the four-year residential university model disappeared tomorrow”) I built an interactive survey app to measure how groups compare on these debates across a variety of dimensions at https://votto.app
Answer questions and explore if you enjoy interesting cross tabs and cool charts like I do!