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Comment by an9n | Hacker News Reader

> Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone.

> Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience.

This strikes me as highly ironic given the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses over recent years. Try seriously challenging the doctrine and one is liable to be cancelled, reprimanded, chucked off a course - even physically attacked.

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Please don't start flame-war topics on HN. This is way out of scope for the article. The GP was simply saying that when you study the humanities, you read a lot of different POVs, and those help you to understand that your way of thinking might not always be perfect, or the best, but that there are many angles to looking at a problem. Thanks!

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

> Please don't start flame-war topics on HN.

This is a disingenuous attempt to dismiss a valid criticism by categorising it as a flame-war topic.

The humanities today, in general, are by no means either tolerant or open (at least in the English speaking portion of the globe).

You're painting things with too broad of a brush. Not only do things vary by professor and institution, the issues you raise aren't particularly relevant ir prominent to a course on Shakespeare's Tragedies, Ancient Rome, most of the field of linguistics... I could go on.

Critics in this area have latched on to a few prominent outliers or bad actors and used that to create a false narrative about the entire system.

You are right. What is happening in the major universities is not representative of the majority of universities. Therefore I agree that, depending on where you look and how you look at it, the state of the humanities is largely intact.

I think, though it is a leap, that the current <insert-dogma-of-the-day> will extend downstream but who knows...

It’s probably a bigger argument than I can articulate in the time I have available at the moment, but I’ve long believed that this phenomenon, among many other crises, is driven by the rise to dominance of a constellation of philosophical worldviews which center around positivism (and which extends to various failed attempts to overcome it).

The categories of thought which underpin a humanistic education are denied (a priori), except insofar as they are immediately useful to material well-being. The importance of contemplation of the truth is relativized downwards, and thought must justify itself in terms of action: social change, market value, “impact”, etc., which is all another way of saying that truth is made an instrument power[0]. We are living the consequences.

In this light, it becomes apparent that the crisis crosses contested political boundaries (although it is admittedly progressives who currently have the upper hand). The main beneficiaries are, as one might expect, the powerful.

[0]: some may reply that truth has always been a socially constructed instrument if power, and that announcing it as such is simply a reduction in hypocrisy. This criticism must be reversed upon the critic: the proposition is itself a construct only believable in a social idiom which made it so.

> It’s probably a bigger argument than I can articulate in the time I have available at the moment, but I’ve long believed that this phenomenon, among many other crises, is driven by the rise to dominance of a constellation of philosophical worldviews which center around positivism (and which extends to various failed attempts to overcome it).

I don't think this is right at all. First, positivism is dead. Michael Polanyi killed it (I forget the name of the book at the moment).

Second, when people complain about "the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses", they don't mean that only positivist voices are allowed. And those doing the narrowing aren't doing so from a positivist position at all. They're doin so from a position that regards positivism as an attempt by a power structure to assert dominance (and probably racist besides).

Let me clarify:

I like Polanyi, but positivism is still very much alive. I mentioned in my post various failed attempts to surpass it, in which I would include Pragmatism, continuations of Marxism, the critical school (excluding some late works by Horkheimer), and postmodernism, all of which retain positivism’s negations.

EDIT: to supply some evidence, in Book III of Science, Faith, and Society, Polanyi argues that unchecked Positivism would result in a society not fundamentally dissimilar from the Soviet society which had prompted him to write the book in the first place. I encourage you to read it and compare it against your experience, asking whether Polanyi secured victory, or whether crucial aspects of his thought went unheeded.

Three problems (at least) with positivism:

1. Polanyi's criticism: Human observers are not objective. They start with their own biases. That means that any observations of events cannot be 100% trusted as a source of truth.

2. Francis Schaeffer's criticism: Within the structure of positivism, there is no way to know that what you observe is actually data. It has no basis for saying that it should be data.

3. Greg Koukl's criticism: Since positivism is a set of statements in epistemology, and not either direct observation or true by pure logic, positivism says that you can't know that positivism is true. It is self-inconsistent.

Positivism "alive" only by inertia. The position doesn't need to be "surpassed" by something, it only needs to be refuted in a way that can't really be answered - and it has been.

Anyway, none of that was my main point. My main point was that it's not positivism that is driving the closing of minds and narrowing of discourse on campuses.

> In this light, it becomes apparent that the crisis crosses contested political boundaries (although it is admittedly progressives who currently have the upper hand)

Is it? At least in the US, I'm not sure what progressive political victories compare with, say, the long-lasting effects of the Trump administration, especially in the judicial area. More broadly, many progressive causes have been getting weaker in US politics for decades. How many of the places that enacted strong rent control decades ago would be able to do so today, for instance, vs those where it's been weakened?

Following the mod’s advice above, I would like to avoid taking this into traditional flame war territory.

Perhaps we might agree that progressivism as a political movement has not succeeded in separating economic from social liberalism?

not succeeded in separating economic from social liberalism

At the same time that conservatism (in the US) evolved from being more focused on economic conservatism to a mixture, and sometimes a focus on, social conservatism.

although it is admittedly progressives who currently have the upper hand

I'm not sure this is true. Opposition to this sort of thing has given the world leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. In the case of Trump, even losing the election was extremely close and the political movement he catalyzed continues unabated and, perhaps, more entrenched.

But I could be wrong: in general it is hard to make an accurate assessment here when the most accessible views into either side are the more extreme outliers that bubble up into the front pages or morning news shows of different news outlets, or pluck the right chord of anger/indignation to trend in social media.

The good/bad implementation of instruction by any one professor or institution is irrelevant to the point made by the GP, especially when they didn't stipulate study at a college level. There are more ways to learn than in a classroom.

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