Humanities can’t stem the tech tide: on the limits of literature in the world of technology. From the editorial:

People in the humanities … insist that their disciplines can fix those problems by helping STEM majors learn to be broader and more sensitive thinkers. STEM graduates may build better mousetraps, the idea goes, but humanities classes can help them solve the ethics of which mice to trap. Without that context, many argue, it’s no surprise that STEM keeps producing ethical horrors….

Yet arguments that the humanities will save STEM from itself are untenably thin. Trusting academic humanities to save technologists both misses the real problem and sets the humanities up for failure. As a National Academies report put it, despite “abundant narrative and anecdotal evidence” about the benefits of integrating STEM and humanities education, “causal evidence on the impact of integration … is limited.” Scholars did find evidence of improved critical thinking and retention, but there was nothing about behaving more ethically….

But reading the “Nicomachean Ethics” won’t actually make anyone more ethical. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, has a Harvard BA in history and literature, and yet her company’s algorithms promote political radicalization…. If mere contact with the humanities made us better critical thinkers, these men [like Peter Thiel and Mencius Moldbug]  would, presumably, have already solved our problems instead of exacerbating them.

Moreover, to suggest that the cure for what “ails” these people is simply more exposure to the humanities runs perilously close to claiming that such courses aren’t education so much as re-education — the stamping out of deviant beliefs. That notion is, or should be, alien to what defenders of the humanities want. The purpose of humanistic education in a free society isn’t to indoctrinate everyone into the same beliefs. Rather, it’s to give students the tools and background they need to observe, or participate in, debates that endure because they are not easily solved….

Asking the humanities to save STEM is a variant of “educationism” — the fallacy that getting our school curriculums right will fix our society. Education matters, but it’s not the only thing that shapes behavior….

The humanities should be saved — and required, and funded — but not because they will help the C-suite develop better products or stop executives from making disastrous ones. They should be saved and required because the alternative is a world without the humanities — one that would be cut off from its own past.

For other posts on humanities education and technology, see here.

h/t Rob Townsend (@rbthisted)