Comment by holowoodman
2 hours ago
No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.
Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.
Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.
No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.
Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.
In addition to these points we also have a handful of weaker-than-arithmetic but provably-decidable theories, which jointly encompass almost everything done on a finite computer.
> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.
Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.
So, you accuse me of being uninformed and having an unbalanced understanding.
But where are your arguments, and where is your evidence? Or should I derive from this that all arguments in the humanities boil down to name-calling?
Its disingenuous to discard the contribution of humanities. To name a few of the top of my mind:
Chomsky hierarchy is an important concept in programming languages and could be considered as originating from linguistics
Philosophy (which is counted in humanities) has had massive contributions to Logic and formal methods in computer science.
There's even more examples of humanities contribution in HCI and AI safety.
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.
Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.
If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.
Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.
Hi, have you heard of philosophy?
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Rigor is not enough to build durability and sustainability. You learn that when you learn to build structures. It's not even metaphorical.
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So far the entire field of "AI safety" is one big grift that has never produced anything of value. The people who work in that field have vivid imaginations but lack the practical writing skills to become published sci-fi authors.