The practical value of the humanities

Dr. N. Ángel Pinillos defends the humanities, perhaps in the only way that really matters:

You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write a response that is firm without being inflammatory, and recognize when an administrator is performing concern rather than offering it. You will need to talk to a doctor about a parent’s care, or your own, and follow an argument about risk and tradeoff that the doctor is making quickly and imperfectly, and ask the question that exposes the assumption the doctor has not examined. You will need to understand the context of someone who grew up in a place very different from you, with radically different values and experiences. You will need to read a contract. You will need to read a ballot measure. You will need to argue, in public or in private, for the candidate or the policy you believe in, and you will need to do this against people who are themselves trained, motivated and may not have your best interest at heart.

These are not the higher reaches of the soul. They are not transcendental encounters with truth and beauty. They are ordinary citizenship and ordinary parenthood and ordinary adulthood, and they have material consequences — for your kid, for your parent, for your community, for the decisions that get made about you when you are not in the room. The humanities prepare you for this. Not uniquely, not perfectly, but better than anything else in the curriculum does.

His points about the use of AI are, I think, spot on. Years ago, when Google was still something new, a cultivated understanding of how to find things in Google was something like a super-power. Knowing how to tune a search string, add booleans, or otherwise narrow the scope made all the difference between endless pages of clutter or the exact thing you were looking for. Thanks to SEO, this has become something a lost art, like scrimshaw.

Careful engagement with an LLM feels like a similar sort of thing now, except more so.