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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's the basic idea of the liberal arts curriculum and the institutions teaching it.

In recent years, there has been a lot of opposition against the idea. "Learn to code!" or anything "STEM" are the two most popular slogans in that regard.

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Understanding code is a necessity in a technocratic society because as more and more things are automated understanding code becomes a necessity just like literacy. It's gotten to the point now that most people carry supercomputers in their pockets but instead of utilizing those computers to augment their intelligence for navigating the world people are absorbed in mindless consumption of algorithmic entertainment. This is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Keeping masses entertained has been an important feature of holding power in most past civilisations. It distracts them from taxation and elite corruption.

Which is why I said it's not sustainable. Sustaining democracies requires a citizenry who are more than just puppets controlled by the powerful. An obvious example is Twitter and social media in general. It's downright depressing to see so many people addicted to applications that have turned human interactions into engagement games just so the companies operating those interaction sandboxes can present ads for commercial activities to as many people as possible. The whole setup is outright anti-democratic and it wouldn't have happened if more people understood how computers worked and how they could utilize them to express themselves in less restricted ways.

You have it opaque. Technology is for people not people for technology. We want minimal, simple & easily understandable law. But the more law is created the more middleman control and bloat it. The more technocrats you will have the more inhumane technocracy will become. Nobody needs to understand code. The only entities that needs it are machines. When you use a printer you need to know where to push print button not how printing was implemented.

You can't expect humanity to adjust to technology by force, especially knowing natural limitation of this. Next decade you will side with sterilisation of unfitting "modern civilization".

GDP flows & spreads in economy on all jobs shaping salaries. If humanity do makes technological progress it means GDP do grows and so people with lowest salaries should gain buying power. If they don't it's not their fault, it means something goes wrong with the progress that we all blindly assume is happening. But since 1970 there is no progress on West. There is a centralisation of global wealth scheme going on & we don't get natural replacement of those generations of civilization and progress builders as before. Middle class is literally being eradicated.

Mindless consumption is 99% of what people do in shops. Healthy human species proper diet food is 1% of products in shops. Most of stuff around is toxic & fake.

We don't need augmenting human intelligence. We need to build civilization for everyone & for humans.

Society is a pyramid. Bottom produces top and achievements of top are co-owned by bottom from where they originate.

I agree fully with algoentertainment. But making whole society into mindless efficient machines will be the other extreme to go to.

Coding in itself is not normal natural human activity and the optimum for humans is what they evolved for in nature in their natural environment. Not observing matrix code.

Fixing eyes & natural vision, not augmenting it first. Starting with true human food not replacing it. Making humans drug free before drugging them for specific performance.

What people do is shaped by their (re)education, parenting, quality of their sources of information, choices surrounding them, their understanding of what a civilized human behaviour & ethics standard is, what their subjective self-assessment & habits let them become.

Big part of it is infosphere around them which they never consciously chosen to be exposed to. Human don't even have a free will so how can he be fully responsible for "own" choices?

A physical ratcage in overcrowded concrete labirynth seems far from humane thing.

Digital escapism is like wrapping shit up in shiny paper of a magic pill to avoid facing true colours of modern reality & degredation of civilization.

We made enough progress to start reverting millennia long unnatural changes & mistakes, reinventing our optimal human state with technology & push the technology evolution in direction serving human true self.

Processing this basic truth gives a profound insights.

Ideally it should be both.

Everyone doing liberal arts means nobody has the skills to run the modern technologies that power our society. Nobody wants to pay for a vague qualification

Teach arts as part of a rounded education sure, but also teach STEM so we can actually get things done and people can get paid for doing something that organisations actually want done.

Over-optimisation towards one or the other leads to either arts qualified young adults who can't do much for work, or highly literal engineering types who only see value as utility.

The S and M from STEM are liberal arts. It's simply a term to distinguish fields like physics, anthropology, etc from "vocational training"-type programs like med schools [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...

…and math is among the “liberal arts”.

While we do enjoy roman and egyptian art, it’s usually the quality of their engineering that makes us look in wonder.

You shouldn't overgeneralize your own perspectives to the broader population

I would disagree this is just a perspective with no objective element to it.

The thing about art is that assessing it is an inherently culturally-bound and personal taste bound endeavour.

Which is the better piece of art:

1. The Mona Lisa

2. The Great Wave off Kanagawa

This will inherently be subjective as there will be so many biases that come into how we assess these things.

However, which is the better piece of engineering:

1. The first plane built by the Wright Brothers

2. A modern 737

By any reasonable analysis it is the 737. It is objectively more complex and indicates a far greater achievement both in its own creation as well as the civilisation that was sophisticated enough to build it.

Engineering has an objective standard you can compare things across, art doesn't. This isn't to say art has no value, life would be so much poorer without it. And they can certainly intersect in something like an iPhone which is both beautiful and amazing engineering.

However, there is an objective point where we have to ask: does this grant the civilisation that built it a greater control over its environment and its capacity to solve problems and this objective standard is what makes a lot of engineering so impressive.

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