To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low, just like STEM as developed by humans will be in the future. I think universities may play a role in the future, but more as something people do for fun as a hobby, and not mainly for its superior teaching capability, but for the social experience.

    > To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low,

Oh it's pretty high, especially when people fail to realize the meaning of tariffs, what's inflation, how the government works and the role of due process.

The bill usually comes due when we faithfully recreate failures of the past while failing to learn from others' experiences in the present.

There are two types of people in the world; those who can understand the humanities without the help of an instructor, and those who are incapable of putting such abstract knowledge to good use. Zero overlap.

The discussion in almost every post on HN that's about humanities topics reminds me how much they do, most of all to those who think they don't.

Don't matter for what: thinking, aesthetic appreciation, insights on humanity, knowledge of what came before, understanding current events, questioning the status quo, what is it that they don't matter for?

It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking. This stream of essays by humanities profs isn't a good advert for their own thinking abilities, let alone their ability to teach it. In fairness this specific article isn't too hard on the phones, but the essay could have been shrunk to one sentence: we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study. That the entire explanation needed. Everything else is just flavour.

So if they're all about teaching how to think, where are the brilliantly thought out ideas for tackling their problem? Surely that's where their own skills should be valuable?

> It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking.

Philosophy is an obvious counter to that claim. It's hard to see how anyone could major in a humanities and not think, even with LLMs. But perhaps the problem is thinking that requiring everyone to take a sampling of intro humanities courses will force them to think instead of just getting by.

> we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study.

But that wasn't the issue previously for a majority of this professor's 30 years teaching, it's something that changed recently.

How is that your takeaway??

I pulled out trend lines of capability and made projections from this, and easily avoided the red meat of testing and humanities.

They don’t have a solution, because it’s a system level issue - well beyond what teachers, who are already underfunded, can do.

This is the alarm bell being rung.

If coming up with systems-level solutions to systems-level problems isn't what learning how to think means, then what does it mean?

If you’re saying humanities don’t matter because you can’t learn them on YouTube or via ai slop then that’s a very sad point of view.