Comment by tekla
9 months ago
It's really only on HN that I find that people reject the liberal arts so ardently.
Liberal arts was a fairly decent chunk of my engineering courses, and maybe I was annoyed while in school since I was trying to not flunk out, but after some time I came to appreciate them as some of the best education I've ever had.
Old-School scientists were called natural philosophers for a reason.
The liberal arts provide empathy and guideposts for those dealing with the kind of people HN attracts.
Liberal Arts is simply a subset of engineering, specifically information theory. Shakespeare, Monet, Banksy, etc. are all humans who produced algorithms expressed with primitive technology. But now we have enough computing power to essentially run an emulation layer on them. And shocker, in a world with ASI it's not unthinkable computers will produce high quality works of Shakespeare in the coming years.
When that happens this field is going to have an existential problem on its hands.
I'm not saying Liberal Arts will go extinct, but if they cannot keep up with the technology they will fall behind. Realistically at some point the field will be rolled under information theory as computers prove that most of it can be broken down into numbers, algorithms, etc.
hubris is more than just a word, evidently. here's a word for you to learn, friend: techne. it's Greek for "hand".
clothed talking apes shouldn't presume to reduce the world to their own limited understanding of it.
it's like thinking you are actually squeezing the sunset when you pinch it in a photo.
ah yes, bonkers subsumed everything he didn't understand and called it macaroni.