Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..)
Quite the hubris to make that assumption!
"Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.)
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?
We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?"
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[0] - You'll note that the weirdest, most nonsense things in physics happen in places that are furthest from any experimental verification.
Also, no, it's a really bad analogy, for the reasons stated.
Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences. For example, peer review in CS seems to be highly random, often biased (depending on reviewer and author rather than the paper) and only weakly correlated with quality and impact. Moreover, there seems to be a problem with reproducibility (as well as data accuracy) of many published results in the biological sciences, medicine, and psychology. And "not reproducible" in science may very well mean "not true," and can have harmful consequences such as prescription drugs that don't work.
I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling and usually requires an unimaginable amount of reading (in multiple languages, usually) as well as writing a massive and highly detailed book for a very limited audience. It requires committing yourself to years of intense and often solitary effort for minimal reward and low pay, so I think you have to have remarkable dedication and "grit" as well as a passion or affinity for the discipline. Moreover, actually getting hired into a humanities faculty position is an astonishing achievement in itself.
Will the skills of physicists transfer trivially to the humanities? Perhaps, but I think it would be an interesting study to see how well both sides do switching disciplines.
to what extent? surely it's significantly less than that of math and "hard sciences"
>I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling
working in a sweatshop is grueling work. when you're in a factory for 12 hours a day what's being worked is your obedience, your self-control. not necessarily strength or intelligence.
There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually,in lower-to-middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it.
The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE.
> Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up...
> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
(And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)
There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing.
And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. Hardly skeptics. In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.
There are a host of other skills that are worthwhile and desirable and whatever else, but why pretend that they are the same thing as intelligence?
I’m not sure I understand the relevance of your skeptics comment.
Edit: you added this since I wrote my reply:
> In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.
I’m afraid you now just sound like you have a chip on your shoulder.
It's also predicated on an imprecise and singular use of the term "reason". Do you mean calculation? Or do you mean analogical thinking (the construction of metaphors, "grasping concepts"), for instance, both of which could be called forms of reason but both of which are very different.
It's a totally inane question.
Claims like Paul's are just the intellectual equivalent of chest puffing. Don't get roped into the stupidity. This kind of attitude causes divisions and turns you into a prideful douche. It's indicative most of all that the author takes an extreme pride in whatever he takes to be his "intellect." Goliaths' waiting for their Davids.
As for the skeptics, what I mean is that working scientists usually can't engage in radical questioning--this is left to mathematicians (in the pure sense) and philosophers. They need to have faith, just like everyone else, that their systems work. While the application of reason provides probabilistic assurances around certainty you leave the realm of complete, inviolable certainty as soon as you exit the heaven of pure theory and turn it into practice.
Do you not see yourself in this paragraph?
Anyway, I’m sure French literature is a noble pursuit.
This is of course true. But if you think this is an any way unique to the hard sciences, I have some humanities departments full of people I'd love to introduce you to.
So for example, you can't say that physicists are on the whole clearly working with more intellectual horsepower than literature majors. You also can't say that STEM folks tend to be some of the most blindly religious (though not about "religion") and closed-minded folks in the academy, with some of the most strongly held unexamined beliefs at the core of their epistemology and personal identity. Despite being unsayable, both these things are true.
Skepticism, self-awareness and self-doubt, leading to contemplation, thoughtful uncertainty, wisdom or enlightenment... it may be just as possible to find all these things through pure mathematics or physics as through comparative religion, literature, or philosophy, but it surely isn't as common. Regardless, wherever you look, they will be rare.
Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?
Also, Twitter does not have 4,000 total employees let alone software engineers. It’s core software was initially built by a tiny team, with the company only growing to 130 people in total after two years.
I think Paul may be falling prey to a correlation issue here.
If you are an autodidact and a polymath, are you more likely to end up as a scientist or engineer, or as a professor of French Literature?
Very few people in the CS program understood why I was contemplating 300 level French classes (I placed out of 4 semesters of french, and that left 2-3 200 level classes and then you were into the hard stuff). A lot of them could not have 'suffered' through twelve semesters of French, no matter how much you bet them.
Polymaths are physicists does not even mean that physicists are polymaths.
The very attitude itself shows that what someone has in specialized knowlegde they clearly lack in wisdom, which makes it highly unlikely that such a person is actually capable of their prideful delusions of grandeur. He has a point about the sokal hoax but the proper conclusion from that is that there are issues with the academic system and structure around work in the humanities—not that physicists are “smarter”—we’re talking about a system thats largely free-form vs one that’s inherently rigorous—theres no reasonable way to derive any strong claims about general intelligence based on this. The only reason physicists wouldnt get tripped up by hoax is because theres a centuries long system of rigor around what they do that makes it very hard fr them to let anything bogus slip in—its proceedure—they have a way better instrument backing them up, it has nothing to do with the intelligence of individuals, only learned behavior and functioning within prescribed systems.
It’s hubris that’s a product of our age. Technologists, even more so than scientists at this point, are supossed to be the priestly class capable of miracles (while in reality the vast majority of them, even the brightest, have at best a passing knowledge of the humanities just like humanists have scant expertise in the sceinces! In fact such a reality is practically deterministic due to the hyperspecialization of knowledge)
Paul Graham’s writings, at least what I’ve read, annoy me. No matter how much studying he may have actually done in reality, he always comes off as an individual that assumed he could play at philosophy and cultural critique just fine while maintaining a total disregard for the tradition and without ever having engaged with it in a deep way. Makes for literature that sounds very self-assured and pompous with little to back it up. Kind of like reading the incredibly naive thoughts of a cocky teenager with slightly more life experience. This essay for example, covers subject matter (moral relativism, bleeding into relativism in general, as well as the engine of history) that has been examined to death in the history of philosophy, yet paul graham doesn’t cite one person from that tradition. Why? Because, at the time, he was totally oblivious and had a superiority complex that wasn’t at all critical, self-reflective, or intelligent, which probably kept him from engaging with people that might’ve pointed outthe vast history of exploration into the topic that he handles as though man discovered history yesterday. Of course this doesn’t actually matter, because his target audience is totally oblivious too (people who, through no fault of their own, have been pushed into a very narrow specialized sphere of life—note this isn’t a sufficient condition for “smartness”), and we’ll all remain blind and blundering until we really introduce some cross-disciplinary study back into schooling and life itself.