The issue is, I don't think that university humanities courses generally contribute much to a person's moral development, and if they do, it's not always necessarily in a positive way (as anybody who has taken enough university humanities courses can tell you). Interest in the humanities is something that should be cultivated much earlier in life to really have an effect; if your first serious encounter with philosophy is in senior-year philosophy gen ed classes, it's probably not going to do much good, and might actually do harm (e.g. the person who takes psychology 101 and starts over-confidently diagnosing all their friends and family with obscure mental illnesses, the person who takes ethics 101 and decides that 20th century utilitarianism is a perfect system with no downsides, not to even mention the culture war stuff which is the not-so-subtle elephant in the room).

I loved probably 2/3rds of my gen ed courses back during my college years, but this was entirely due to an existing appreciation for the topics (history, literature, physical sciences), and around 1/3rd of them were worse than useless (I cannot remember a single positive lesson I took from them other than a sense of nihilism about the university's faculty hiring standards).

If the goal is moral development, few things will develop a person's morals than actually living and struggling in the real world, and college is NOT the real world. I have some half baked opinions about the degree to which university education produces a lot of adult children with arrested development due to an extended adolescence. If on the other hand, the goal is a classical liberal arts education, which I am quite sympathetic towards (at least in theory), I am skeptical that taking a handful of university humanities courses is the ideal way to accomplish this.

It’s not only about not doing evil. Humanities train your brain in ways hard sciences usually don’t.

But I do agree ethics is a big one.

I studied maths & CS but my favourite course at uni was a politics course, so not a real humanity but it opened my eyes.

The course was a seminar on the 20th Century Politics of Japan with ~10 students.

Lots of great questions around the fall of imperial Japan and about what democracy means in Japan for example what would a socialist or communist Japan look like?

It was a wonderful course: great professor and a really fun small group learning and discussions.

For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless. However, the tech portion of your job is only a small minority of what you will be doing. You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, explaining why your vision is better, understanding why they think their vision is better, and then trying to figure out, which set of compromises is best.

And that just assumes that you remain in a tech career. Many people move their career over life. There is a lot of needed management and if you can do all of that there's a decent paycheck in it and some of you will prefer that. There are a number of other jobs that are not directly management, but are not tech-focused either and need to be managed.

And that's just your career. There's the rest of your life. Well, I certainly hope you're not working your entire life to death, but you find things outside of work to do.

Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap if they cared to understand technology.

If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.

Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.

If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.

It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.

It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".

would you rather be provided the solution, or work on it collaboratively?

only one of these really considers the humanities aspect.

put more bluntly, recognizing the problem does not equate to having the solution. but it’s a fun problem to work on.

I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)

“Engineer’s disease” and all that.

I've yet to see any strong evidence that powerful people with humanities degrees do anything useful either.

> and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.

They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.

I don't think a humanities class is gonna change that.

Peter Thiel studied philosophy. That didn't help.

What they're missing is ethics, not education.