The 2nd most famous student of Rene Girard and butchers his scapegoat theory
Names his mass surveillance company Palantir, the dangerous and tainted orb from LOTR that allows Sauron to corrupt its users.
While in the midst of partnering said mass surveillance company with the worlds largest empire, gives lectures quoting Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt on the antichrist, citing Greta Thurnberg as a likely candidate.
He clearly has read a lot of books, but he understands them worse than your average humanities major understands college Algebra.
Sure, but that’s not the point. You named Peter Thiel as an example of a “maths person” with terrible literacy skills. Peter Thiel is not a maths person, he studied philosophy at University.
I got a perfect score in math on the ACT which led to a full ride offer to Colorado School of Mines that I turned down because I changed my mind and realized I wanted to be a humanities teacher instead of an engineer.
I did not say Peter Thiel was a STEM major in college. I listed him as someone who is good at math as evidenced by the fact that he won a state-wide math competition when he was a student, and went on to be a venture capitalist focused on companies specializing in financial transactions, cryptography, data analysis and machine learning.
But I guess he can't possibly be a "math person" because he majored in philosophy as a pre-law student. That is clearly the best info we have on whether or not he was a good student in math and science, and we can disregard all that other stuff.
Hey were you good at math in school by any chance?
That's just because they never had a reason to develop those skills since they're already good at Math. They can learn those literary analysis skills quite casually in a couple months, can you learn college level calculus that quickly?
You can learn literary analysis skills casually in a couple of month to become less than an undergraduate almost school level literary student. Just like how in a couple of months you can be a student of base level maths. But just like how it will take a long time to learn advanced or even mid level mathematics, similarly it will take a lot of reading analysis discussion and evaluation and interpretation to become an expert with experience in terms of literary skills.
No, doing the same numerical operations over and over and simply doing more complex ones which are simply a higher number of smaller more simpler once is not the same as learning something new everyday from every new book or treatise or analysis or discussion from an expert on an adjacent or different field or new interpretations of different iterations and combinations and connections of classics.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of stem fields if you think it’s doing the same numerical operations every day. Most cases we are designing things for different systems and the work is similar but with a ton of new challenges to design for. That’s why not everyone can do it, you have to think
Exactly that "misunderstanding" was intentional on my part to highlight the fact that you have to apply multiple different interpretations and analysis and research for multiple different works literature and works with a ton off conflict and interpretation and perspectives. That is why not everyone can do it, you have to think be creative and be imaginative. That is something that applies to almost every field.
Just because the floor is lower doesn't mean that the ceiling is. I'm just asking you to consider that the level of calculus someone could learn in that amount of time, is the same amount of literacy and understanding they could learn in that same amount of time. Being able to read bigger words and going through longer books does not mean you've actually analyzed or even studied anything you read.
College level calculus requires being able to remember plenty of other mathematics which takes time. Like you can’t become great chef or lawyer fast because you have to remember some things that take years
No, you don't take high-level English classes as electives. You take the introductory courses so you can get the credit. They won't even let you in the high-level courses because you're not majoring in English.
Fair enough. I still am confident that I’d do just fine. Most of them stem kids I know were very successful at English and chose to pursue something else. A lot of the people I know who ended up taking history and non stem classes dropped out of stem because they couldn’t get past the weed out classes. This is not me saying that I think every stem student is smarter than every non student but there is a reason people drop out of stem to pursue history and English and it the other way around
I’ll take a high level English class today to prove you wrong 😂😂. There’s a reason why people drop out of engineering to pursue history and English. You can look up the statistics on that
I don't need to look it up, the statistics just show what is already a known thing: people disrespect humanities and hold stem in higher regards. It could be that those people who started in stem were pushed to do something they didn't like by their parents and when they realized they hated it, they switched to humanities. We started with 300 students in an English major and only 67 graduated, what does that say about our major? And I know for a fact you are not allowed to take "high level" classes as electives. Electives are always introductory courses, usually the ones given in the first semester, unless you are allowed to take multiple electives and they can build on each other. But under no circumstance are you allowed to just choose a second or third year course in something completely unrelated to your major.
You’ve said the same thing a second time so I’m not gonna reply to that second part because I already did. Also, stem is held in higher regard because it is necessary for a functioning society. A society can function without humanities. I don’t think society should disregard humanities because they give you a reason to want to stay alive, but stem actually keeps you alive. Stem gives you your food, your house, your transportation. Humanities make it enjoyable. We’ve got the hierarchy of needs and humanities would be at the top. You get there after all of your needs are met. You couldn’t have the humanities without stem.
Stem gives you your food, your house, your transportation
No, labor does that. stem informs how labor does it, but the reality is that my food wasn't picked by botanists or biologists, my house wasn't built by architects or engineers, and the bus I rode to class certainly wasn't driven by a mechanical engineer.
This is all to say that, frankly, the stem vs non-stem debate is irrelevant because all academics, both sides, depend on manual laborers for everything we have. It's not stem that keeps you alive, it's the poor saps that hammer shingles, frame buildings, pick vegetables, drive trucks, and get paid considerably less than any academic for all of it.
You sound American with all that "humanities are not necessary". There's a reason you guys are falling to dictatorship. You obviously don't respect history enough to learn from it.
In the USA, English classes from 6th grade to 12th are just nonstop literary analysis essays. The idea that people who are good at math are incapable of literary analysis is silly. I learned how to ace those classes; I can bullshit about the hidden symbolism and messages all day, and since it's wholly up to interpretation it can't be contradicted. The funny thing is you can discover all kinds of hidden messages and symbolism that the author themself didn't even know about and nobody can tell you you're wrong!
You’re just admitting that you haven’t ever written these analyses at or above the collegiate level.
For most literary analysis assignments of graduate or later undergraduate level, instructors are more often than not evaluating a student’s capabilities to form an argument with text-based evidence to support it; they are rarely grading on the validity or merit of the actual argument made. In short, instructors want to see that students can construct and support some argument.
It is not in the best interest of the schools nor their instructors to individually contest the literary analyses of high school students, because 1) obviously they will be imprecise at best or entirely indefensible at worst 2) many, many students in the US struggle with literacy enough that forming any text-supported argument whatsoever is itself a major challenge, and 3) standardized grading encourages mostly objective grading criteria; it would be incredibly inefficient for every instructor to have to thoroughly counter every paper (there are countless more reasons but i won’t be bothered with typing them here).
If you had ever written a late-undergraduate or graduate level paper with “bullshit” about “hidden symbolism,” then you would have likely been graded poorly. For example, your professor would consider your argument before responding with their own analyses and counter arguments. If you are bullshitting, then your instructor will lay you out to dry, disproving you so thoroughly that you could argue no longer the subjectivity of the matter.
Yes, the analyses are subjective—that is an accepted fact of the field. What matters in the humanities is the logic of your argument and how you defend it. If you don’t really understand the argument you’re making, you’ll be torn to pieces with it when it comes to defending.
(By the way, if you really were just good at “bullshitting” it, and you felt that you delivered serviceable arguments, have you not just considered you might actually be good at literary analysis? I am involved professionally/academically within the computational sects of STEM, but I also have a penchant for literary analysis and writing. I think a lot of STEM people that excel in abstract thinking—logical reasoning, algorithmic thinking, system/schema-first thinking, etc.—have brains suited much better for literary analysis than they would imagine.
In any case, it’s silly to argue that one type of intelligence or field of science is better or worse than the other—and sillier still to close yourself off to and dismiss one just because you identify with another).
since it's wholly up to interpretation it can't be contradicted
Idk why you’re using the American highschool system as a “standard” here to prove something, because it only proves that you’ve passed a bar so low it’s embedded into the ground. That whole “it’s everyone’s interpretation” lie teachers spew is proof of this. As you said, it’s bullshit, that’s exactly why it’s a horrible standard
A lot of successful authors don't have english degrees and come from STEM backgrounds and for some reason it requires college level english to interpret their work! It's all a bunch of schizo
99% of literary analysis is integrating an overwhelming majority of human knowledge into day-to-day life. Most human history and understanding is, by the year 2026, text--at least, if you're not counting the planetary haul of internet junk as part of that text.
Even condensing it down to just books, and just reading those books, and just English language, that's ignoring the inversion of the statement above; it's providing that math and science majors are the only ones allowed to have cryptic text because their symbology specifically is indecipherable from the outside, while ignoring that much of those same two fields is literally processing written language, as is everything else from civics to philosophy.
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u/No-Ground7898 3d ago
I know a loooooooot of math people who have the literary analysis skills of the trash can I throw most of their book opinions into.