Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Puchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, in this episode, we'll be talking about the increasingly embattled position of humanities departments and universities. So that includes literature and literature, theory, classics, history, philosophy, languages and the arts. Enrolment in those department has been steadily falling and a lot of universities have been slashing their humanities budgets. And in some cases, the humanities departments have actually been cut altogether.

And that's what happened at SUNY Albany State University of New York at Albany last fall, the president decided to cut the departments of Classics Theatre, French, Russian and Italian. And so there's been a lot of debate.

I know. I know. I can see you're livid.

So the public debate in the media and on the blogs and so on about the what should be done about the crisis in the humanities.

It's a lot of it has centred around how to justify the role of the humanities in in the modern university. And the humanities are in a relatively unique position in terms of justifying their place at universities, arguably, at least Musoma. I suppose you could disagree with me if you like. But either way, I would describe the situation is that science departments can point to technologies or discoveries that that are generated thanks to them that are clearly useful to society in the world.

And then you have these more practical applied departments like like finance or law or the premed classes. And those are clearly useful to the students themselves in terms of helping them find a job that they want, whereas the humanities departments can't necessarily point to either of those benefits.

So so the situation's a little bit more complicated.

So we're going to talk about the crisis facing the humanities and then also the debate over their place in higher education.

Sounds good now, as possibly some people remember, this debate used to go the other way around. That is, it used to be until shortly after World War Two that the humanities were the dominant departments and universities in the sciences were kind of, you know, in the underdog position. So hard to picture.

I know it is hard to picture, but you have to remember that that modern science, especially in modern big science, you know, grain research grants and all that sort of stuff, really started after World War two. The National Science Foundation did not exist before World War Two. So we're talking only about the last several few decades. So couple of years ago and 2009 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of a very important essay by Snow entitled The Two Cultures.

And Snow was actually somebody who started out his career as a scientist and then moved into the literature department. He studied, became a novelist. And he wrote this essay criticising, largely criticising the lack of communication between the two sides of the cultural divide and mostly chastising his colleagues in the humanities. You know, there's this famous phrase that I have to sort of I don't remember the exact quote, but the gist was, you know, here I am going to walk into a party with, you know, humanists and they're laughing at the fact that a lot of scientists don't haven't read their Shakespeare, for instance, which is a a sign of, you know, into your culture and so on and so forth.

And and Snow says and then I turned around and asked my esteemed colleagues if they know anything about the second principle of thermodynamics. And they look at me like I was a, you know, an alien because why would anybody want to care about the second principle, thermodynamics? And I explained to them that that is essentially as important as science as Shakespeare is.

And, you know, the humanities only had a point that is actually still a pretty accurate description of the case just in the general, you know, just socially.

I mean, unfortune.

Yeah, it's perfectly socially acceptable to say, oh, I just have no head for math.

You know, I don't know anything about that. But, yeah, if you say you don't know anything about Shakespeare, you know, the awkward silence falls.

Exactly. Even though your refrigerator works because of the principles of thermodynamics, not because of Shakespeare. Now, so that said, you know, this is now had a very good point. Now, what happened during the 20th century? The the remaining part of the 20th century is the things flipped around largely because of the enormous influx of money into scientific research, partly because of the reasons you were talking about. But mostly, let's be frank, because of the Cold War, you know, science got funded in large amounts and to that extent almost exclusively, because the US government in particular saw that as a way to produce weapons technologies and generally to get the edge over the Soviet Union.

So that was which, by the way, explains why, in fact, science funding itself is actually gone down significantly since the end of the Cold War. There are some areas of science, of course, they're still very well funded, but. Let's not forget, for instance, that a few years ago, the superconducting supercollider that was supposed to be built in Texas was was cut by Congress and there was at the time, there was just a big hole in the ground that had cost something like, you know, several hundred million dollars, I think a billion dollars actually, to just cut the hole.

And they stopped the funding. So even the sensors themselves actually finding themselves into a situation that is not quite as as nice as it was during the peak of the Cold War. Nevertheless, I think your questions are very good in terms of reframing the debate. I would say there are several ways to go about it. But let's start with the pragmatic one.

I mean, what is the pragmatic value of humanity? Now, first of all, of course, my first reaction as somebody who essentially has done pretty much what Snow had done, moving from the signs of the humanity is not right. So so I have a perspective that sort of covers both fields because I've been a partisan scientist for about 20 plus years. Um, I would question two things about that premise. There's no question. I mean, nobody's disagreeing that science has brought us immense benefits.

One should also remember the number of negative things that science brought us, like Islamic bomb, for instance, or napalm or something you can count. Right? Exactly.

Because there is a tendency to sort of only emphasize the positive and not necessarily the negative. But it's I think it's unquestionable. And it would be ridiculous to argue that science has not brought, you know, very large benefits to modern society.

However, there are two ways to argue about the relative values of science and humanities. The first one is to reject the very idea of pragmatism that we're talking about. Liberal arts education and education is not necessarily something about pragmatism, pragmatic in terms of things you can measure money that you can bring in your account in a bank account. Presumably, we want to live in a society of informed, intelligent, critically thinking citizens because that is the basis of an open society and a democracy.

And it's very easy to make the argument that that sort of ability is the critical, critical thinking and evaluate things and think broadly about about issues comes from the humanities. It doesn't actually come from the sciences. Science, science training is simply not geared in that direction. First of all, critical thinking is never taught in science classes. And second of all, science classes tend to be very technical. They're very specific. They're the exactly opposite of what we're talking of sort of a general liberal, liberal arts education.

So one way to approach the issue is to talk about, you know, what do we want from an education? Do we want only people that are technically trained or the one and only people that can do this sort of practical things? Or do we want? Citizens, of course, would argue that we want both, but that means that we do want citizens. The other way to argue about it is to I think it's a little more subtle and perhaps less common, and that is this.

So if you go over the the examples of accomplishments of the sciences, right. Let's say the Human Genome Project or, you know, we went to the moon or we built this and that on the other, or we cure this or the other. Yeah, those are the obvious examples for why the sciences are good. Now, most people don't think along those lines, but, you know, philosophy gave us essentially modern democracy. I mean, John Stuart Mill on Liberty is the foundation of all Western democracies these days.

And one can argue that the democratic system of government is at least as important and arguably more than most of the results that science has given us in that. But as a scientist famously argued back in 1964, his name was Platt, he published an article of finials article in Science magazine about the scientific method. And I still remember that in that not because I read it at the time. I'm not that old, but I read the article several times over a period of years.

And Plott said, you know, we all keep saying that the edifice of knowledge is made of individual bricks, meaning that every single thing that a scientist does in a laboratory or in or in the field goes into this building. There's this gradual edifice of knowledge. And then he says, but we don't acknowledge that actually the majority of these buildings lay unused in the brickyard in the backyard. That is, in fact, most science does absolutely nothing of practical value.

Most of what the National Science Foundation funds does not have any practical application, likely will not have any practical application. And it's done in the name of basic science. Now, you could ask whether it's worth it. You know, is it worth it to invest hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to answer? Very abstract questions, such as, for instance, you know, let's say a biologist who spent an entire career figuring out the mating habits of a particular species of butterfly in Panama, but who cares other than that biologist and, you know, three others that read these papers?

Right. Right. So we give him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do that.

Or more broadly, we all seem to agree implicitly that it's a good idea to give money to a particle physicist to figure out whether string theory is true or not. But ultimately, that's not going to drink. Yeah, it's not going to bring any money to anybody except the physicists themselves. Right.

Know that that makes sense. And I certainly don't think that it's self-evident that all science should be funded, even if it has no obvious practical benefits.

But we probably shouldn't neglect to mention that there are a lot of very useful scientific discoveries that have been made possible by research which was just exploratory or which did not have any obvious immediate direct benefit.

But I think actually that's more that's that's actually harder to back up in practice than one might think. I mean, I thought about it about this very often. You're right. When I was in in the sciences, NSF asks these days regularly, when you submit a grant proposal, what is going to be the broader impact of your research? And you usually come up with some kind of boilerplate thing like, well, you know, basic science often leads to applications of some sort or another.

But in fact, historically speaking, basic science very rarely has led to those applications. And one can also ask, well, is even even when he does, is the way we fund basic science broadly really the best way, the most optimal way to go about it? Now, all of this, by the way, I'm not because I'm trying to convince you or anybody else, for that matter, that we shouldn't be funding research on, say, string theory or the Hadron Collider or anything like that.

On the contrary. Right. I'm I'm thinking that that research ought to be funded because it is, in fact, intrinsically interesting, regardless of the fact of whether or not it will bring benefits.

But if you just point out that that also applies to the humanities, right. Exactly.

So we should before we go to my father, we should probably note that it's a little confusing to conflate all of these different departments together under one label, the humanities.

Right. Like so, you know, the the use of something like, say, philosophy and history, it could be, you know, are very different than the use of literature.

And so, you know, I I have to say, the argument that the humanities foster critical thinking, I I'm certainly open to it.

I'm I'm a little bit skeptical of how often that's true, in which humanities actually do that.

So for something like philosophy, I think that I think that's really clearly true, that like, you know, the the people I've met with a Ph.D. in philosophy are just noticeably clearer thinkers than your typical other than your typical other educated person with a Ph.D. And they they've clearly developed really strong habits from studying philosophy, like the habit of defining their terms and the habit of always checking what are their counterarguments to what I believe and that sort of thing.

And that so that seems like something that philosophy, if if it doesn't provide that uniquely out of all the subjects, definitely provides that, you know, has a very strong comparative advantage in providing that skill. So that's a clear practical benefit.

But but then when you it gets a little bit less clear to me when you get into something like studying literature, does does studying 19th century English literature really train you in critical thinking?

No, no, no, I don't think so. Certainly not directly. I think you're right on that one. By the way, of even philosophy, undergraduates are actually better than most people, critical thinking immeasurably. So, as it turns out and one of the things, you know, as you know, there could be some self selection there, though.

I mean, who are best course. Of course. But, you know, as you know, when I took over recently, a couple of years ago, the chairmanship of philosophy department at CUNY, one of the things I had to do was to try to convince our students that it's a good idea to get into a major or minor in philosophy. And so one of the things that I looked at is, well, what kind of evidence can I put forth to my students for why there should be, you know, involved in philosophy courses?

And there are some interesting things you find out and the data out there. It turns out the, for instance, philosophy majors tend to regularly score in the ninety five per cent per person title in all sorts of standardized tests like the LSAT or the GOP and so on and so forth. And that's because they're trained highly in logical analysis. They're trained in analytical thinking, they're trained in writing. So they tend to score very high, which means that a philosophy major, for instance, easily goes on to have a career in business or in or in law, mostly, especially in law.

So there are practical application of that sort of thing. But I think you're right. Your point is well taken that certainly reading Shakespeare isn't directly a training for critical thinking.

Yeah, it might have some residual benefit. I wouldn't be surprised, but but the the argument that that studying literature, which I'm not saying you're making, but I've heard plenty of people make the argument that studying literature trained in critical thinking.

To me, it smacks of the sort of ex post facto rationalization that, like, look, if you're if your goal were really to foster critical thinking, would studying literature be the first thing that you would turn to?

I think that depends on what you mean by critical thinking. I think that what literature does is, first of all, it forces you to consider horizons, situations and kinds of cultures that you might not be, in fact, you probably are not aware of before you go to college. So the whole idea of doing, say, comparative literature to do not just English literature, but but but across countries, the idea that you're exposed indirectly, obviously, but to the thinking and the writing of different people in different time periods and in different areas of the globe.

And that seemed again, to me that that is actually one of the things that opens up your mind. You may not want to call it critical thinking by critical thinking. You mean specifically applications of logic to problem solving that then you're definitely right.

But I call it open in opening your mind to things that I think are beneficial for functioning in a democratic society.

Well, right. So the question is, how much to what degree does that that knowledge, that insight that you get from reading literature, from other cultures and time periods and so on, to what extent does that sort of translate into being better at thinking about other things?

You know, actually, yeah, but that's that's one of those things that it's very difficult to measure.

And I'm very sympathetic to that. Like when I when I complain that, you know, we don't have any really good tests that prove that literature or art or studying history improves critical thinking.

I recognize that that's a hard thing to prove unless you want to take, you know, a random sample of students and for some of them to major in literature and some major you know, you can't do that.

So I recognize that it's hard.

But I but I don't think that we should automatically conclude that it it works just because we can't you know, it's hard to to test, but I think you're still taking too much of a pragmatic approach there.

I think I'm just responding to the understand, and that is a reasonable criticism.

But again, this this can be turned around easily. So I would, for instance, put forth the possibility that, you know, 90 percent of what students learn in science classes is completely useless to them. They're not learning anything, particularly, you know, what is the point of an undergraduate student, for instance, going through the exercise or learning all the details in the photosynthesis? But what is that person going to do with it?

It's not learning anything about the scientific method, because most of the time they don't tell you how people figure out how the photosynthesis works. That actually would be useful because then you would be learning about the method. Right.

But most of times you just told, OK, here's the chemical reactions and memorize them and spin them back to me. Well, what good does that do?

Yeah, no, right.

I mean, if I if I criticize the way certain humanities are taught or questioned how much value they have, that's not meant to be a unilateral defense of everything that gets taught.

I know that's that's right. I know that that's not the case in your in your case. But but but the discussion seems to be between the sciences and the humanities. And it seems like so many people take for granted that education in the sciences is automatically a good thing.

But I think we should we should sort of broaden the discussion to the larger picture. Why is this happening? Because after all, you know, frankly, the humanities cost very little. I mean, again, in terms of some financial investment from a university, a science department professor costs as much as a philosophy, say, actually usually a little more. There are disparities in and in salaries even within university. And for instance, law school professors cost much more.

Right. Right. But even if we say, well, more or less, those are essentially equivalent. Then on top of that, the university has to pay a lot of money for startups, for labs. Right. For upkeep for labs. And some of that money, of course, get get comes back to the university through grants. That's that's true. But that's only if the scientist is, in fact, successful. A lot of scientists are not successful in the grant.

The National Science Foundations rate for funding grants recently is about five to six percent. That means 94 95 percent of the grant proposals that the NSF gets every year that go unfunded. So that's a huge amount of effort. Sure, the university has to sort of be behind the faculty in question. Then the faculty in question has a 95 percent failure rate. Yeah, that's pretty high.

Sure. You know, so there are actually two separate questions here about about justifying this more than two. But to separate out two questions, there's.

The question of should humanities departments be given the budget to stick around, even if they don't have high enrollment numbers? And and that question can be addressed by saying that, look, they have this value and they should be there for people who want to take them. And then there's the question of should students have to take the courses in humanities?

Because that's sort of a stronger argument that like, look, right now that goes back to a fundamental difference between American education and European education. Americans, especially in recent years, got into this idea that that students are customers that make their own choices. And so if they want, you know, the ice cream cone with chocolate instead of vanilla or with strawberry instead of something else, they ought to have it that way. The European system and used to be the American system until not too long ago wasn't based on that assumption.

The idea was that the the teachers, the faculty know best. And therefore. And you're getting there. Yes, you are paying. Incidentally, you're paying these days an extraordinary amount of money to get an education. But and that's another thing that is connected actually to what we're talking about, the exorbitant cost of education in the United States. But but what you're paying for is an education not to make your choices about what to learn and what not to learn.

So you will have some choices. You know, you choose your major, for one thing, and there are electives within within each course of study. But broadly speaking, it's the experts that is the faculty who tell you what what what to learn and what not to learn. Right. So, for instance, I was not long ago at Notre Dame University in Indiana, which is a Catholic school. It's one of the best universities in a large number of areas, including sciences and some of the areas of the humanities.

I was there invited by both the biology department and the philosophy department, and I was stunned when I went to see the philosophy department. They got these huge brand new building. They have, you know, they claim the largest faculty in North America, you know, something like 40 something. Forty five philosophers or something like that. And that's even without counting the theology group, which is almost as large. And so I asked, of course, the chair of the department said, you know, so how did you do this?

Because these days these kinds of departments tend to dwindle closer to department.

They're getting cut from some universities, especially in the United Kingdom, in fact, but even in the United States to some extent. So I asked him, I said, how did you manage to do that? And he said, well, it's easy. We we mandate a certain philosophy, a minimum number of philosophy classes to everybody who graduates from Notre Dame.

They have to take at least two philosophy courses that guarantees and enrollment of thousands. So this whole idea that university professors, ministers are putting forth that, well, you know, your department is not doing as well because it doesn't attract student, that actually can be fixed overnight, literally.

So am I right to conclude from the tone of your comment that you think it should be humanities should be more mandatory?

That wasn't clear. I think that said. All right.

But again, the idea here is that this is not just an easy way to fix a problem from the point of view of humanities. This can actually work in the benefit of both the sciences and the humanities. The idea here is that if you take seriously the concept of a liberal arts education, you really don't want somebody to graduate from college without any science classes, which some people do right away. But you also don't want those people to graduate from Princeton and go through college without taking a course in critical thinking.

It's it's incredible. But I also don't want somebody to go through college without taking a course in comparative literature, for instance, because I do think that that's part of the well-rounded education of the kind of citizens that I want to hang around with, that I want to help shape our democracy.

So the problem that I usually have with justifications of the humanities as far as giving people knowledge that it's worthwhile for its own sake as opposed to training them in skills like critical thinking, is that the claims are they just tend to be so vague and often so flowery that I'm just a little suspicious.

I mean, I'm suspicious partly because they're they just seem completely untestable to me and also because I'm just inherently suspicious of claims that sound pretty and rhetorical, because people are just people tend to be inclined to believe things unquestioningly that sound pretty. So why have be testing?

Well, OK, let me just give you if I pull pulled a few examples of justifications for humanities departments from professors or university deans to give you an example of the kind of claims I'm talking about. So Cornell University's President David Skorton gave an address to the I think at commencement I don't know is a university wide address in which he was defending the humanities. And he said the arts and humanities teach the basic skills of critical and contextual thinking. And on a fundamental level, they teach us what it means to be human.

Right.

Professor Levenson from Rhodes University said that study in the humanities helps us to better on. Stand who we are and what sort of life might be a good life to lead in this way, the humanities can be said to reveal ourselves to ourselves.

There's no other claim. I would gladly agree. I don't think you need data on that. I mean, first of all, I don't know what kind of data would you possibly ask for? I mean, how would you measure if somebody knows how to live well? Well, I agree.

No, no, I mean, I agree. That's really difficult. I mean, it's difficult to test, but I don't think that that's the point in favor of the claim that can't be tested.

And that's because you're starting from the scientific perspective that unless something is testable and measurable, it's not.

Well, OK, I'm just asking, how would we know if they were wrong?

It's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's you're saying they're right? You know, I'm saying it.

I'm saying that I agree with that. With that idea of education. This this isn't really a matter of being right or wrong.

This is a matter of you know, I don't see I see an intrinsic value. You know, scientists get to use the word intrinsic value, by the way, or intrinsic interest all the time. So I think the humanists should as well. I think an intrinsic value in studying comparative literature for the reasons that I said earlier. Yes. Do resonate with this idea of, you know, you want people to think broadly, to be aware of other cultures.

You want people to be confronted with emotional situations or stories or whatever it is that they certainly are not going to encounter in a science class.

OK, I, I think it's just difficult to if you're saying the value is self-evident or that there's no argument that needs to be made for why studying literature, comparative literature is valuable.

It's hard to see how you would justify that to someone who didn't already agree with you. And this is the problem that I run into when I talk to people about the value that they see in literature and the arts. And just to clarify, I'm not like against literature in the arts. I love literature in the arts.

But I just I like, you know, vigourous claims to.

So there's this comment that someone left on. There's a New York Times article, an editorial by Stanley Fish, who's a professor of literature and law back.

But OK, go ahead. He's a post-modernist. Anyway, I heard he disputes that label.

I don't know, quite like any good postmodern is what the article is very clearly written.

Go ahead. Have the clarity of writing that I don't normally associate. Let's talk about I don't really know him. I actually if I were readers, I mean, our listeners are interesting.

There are several articles on about selling fish on Russian speaking the blog. Check it out.

OK, go ahead, Ben. Before my time anyway.

So he was discussing the the value of the humanities and one of the commenters named Michael Wynne Harris said the correct response when someone condescendingly asks you about the value of the humanities is to simply say to them, if you need to ask that question, then you obviously don't understand enough to be discussing the topic in the first place.

And this is the reaction that I've gotten from some people when I ask what the value is.

And I mean, that makes me first of all, it's annoying, but second of all, it makes me suspicious, you know?

Yeah, it's annoying. And I think you're right to be suspicious. That's a flippant remark, which, by the way, I'm actually fairly sympathetic.

Oh, but but, you know, so let me let me give you the reason why I'm sympathetic with that remark. But but I wouldn't measure I wouldn't establish my argument or found my argument on that kind of remark. I just think it's not as unreasonable as you might think. There is a there's a famous essay by John Stuart Mill where he compares so-called high pleasures and low pleasures.

You know, just a meal was a utilitarian, of course. So his ethics was all about we need to maximize people's happiness and minimize people's pain. Now, everybody agrees on pain. The problem with happiness is that there are different ways of maximizing happiness. Right. So what if I want to watch Jersey Shore every day twenty four hours a day and maximizing my happiness just from me? I wouldn't be too happy with that idea of maximizing happiness because he says you would say, you know, that's a low pleasure.

You do want some little pleasures in life, but there are other things. And in elaborating on these idea, you try to explain in terms of, look, it would be this is there's a famous quote in from that I say that is along the lines of it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a big satisfied. And if the big objects, that's just because you did not have the opportunity to experience being Socrates. So the idea there is that, yes, sometimes in fact, the answer is if you have to ask the question, you probably don't know enough to even engage in the discussion.

But that's not the best argument in these cases. In this case, the best argument is that you do have an argument. It's just not a quantifiable argument. And the whole idea that you can quantify everything in a meaningful way, I think it's deeply misleading. It's imported directly from the sciences, but it's a bad idea. That is one of the reasons, for instance, we're going into this whole nationwide obsession with standardized tests at every level of schooling that arguably measure very little in terms.

Of education, they are easy tests, there are things that you can't you can measure the things that they're quantifiable there, things that you can put in a spreadsheet, but in fact, they don't measure for I'm sorry to use this word, but this is the appropriate measure, the intangible intangibles of education. And there are lots of intangibles. And you can argue that, in fact, education is mostly about intangibles. It's mostly about opening people's minds up to to a world that they would not have any opportunity to experience.

How do you measure opening people's minds up? It's kind of, you know, any any kind of measurement of that sort is going to be contrived. It's going to be missing most of the point. But that doesn't mean there is no value in it as there.

Well, one of the forms that this argument takes when people do try to give more specific examples of the importance of of opening your mind up by literature and the arts, you linked to a an editorial, an essay in the teaser for this episode by someone, a professor named Petko.

Yes. Who's I guess a biochemist, Brandeis.

And he wrote this editorial in response to the decision by the president of SUNY Albany to cut those theater, Russian, French, Italian and classics.

It was a very critical essay, some might say snide.

And so the gist of his article was the running theme was that we can we take these direct lessons from works of fiction lessons about the how how the world works, that we can apply to real world situations.

And without literature and the arts, we don't you know, we don't learn those lessons.

So, for example, he says, Dante's Inferno teaches us about human weakness and folly. But now SUNY Albany doesn't have an Italian department, so they won't be able to learn about that. And then he tells one of its ups fables in which the moral of the story is never trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch. And he says basically your students won't ever learn this message now because they don't have a classics department. And then at the end of the essay, he tells the story of the character in the play by Guta, who makes a deal with the devil and loses his soul.

And Petko says, if only you had a theater department, which now of course you don't, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It's awfully relevant to your situation.

Yeah. Yeah, because it's by a scientist.

Yeah, but you know. Well, because it's easy enough for a is to write something like that and it sounds nice and all that sort of stuff. In defense of the humanities when a scientist does it actually has an additional meaning, a layer layer meaning. But anyway, your point was.

Well my my point. Well I have two problems with this kind of reasoning. First, I'm not convinced that fictional stories like The Inferno and Aesop's Fables and False are actually good sources. If what you want to do is learn about the world, if you want to learn about human weakness and folly, I would tell you to study psychology and history and maybe politics and sociology, but not Dante's Inferno. And and then my second problem is even if those books were a good source of insight into how the world works, they're clearly not the only source of insight into human weakness and folly or, you know, into lessons about how to deal with friends.

And so it's kind of strange to claim, as Petko does repeatedly throughout the article, that we won't learn about these things, we won't learn about human weakness if we don't read the inferno.

First of all, I think you're taking him a little too literally.

I would have thought that, except this is like his consistent point throughout. No, I understand the same article, obviously, but he's not literally saying you won't know anything about human weakness if you don't read The Inferno. But he's saying that these are important facts to have.

If you want to understand your concern. I would agree. But but really, even if we disagree, noticed that all the other examples you you mentioned so you could learn this from history, from this, and then there are none of those where sciences. Well, that's not the hard science is not not not biology, not not physics, I mean, the other like you mentioned, you mean learning about human, right? You mentioned. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I actually I'm not once in this in this episode did I ever argue against the value of learning history or psychology or political science?

I've been mainly dubious of the value of learning literature and the arts right outside of just their value for enjoyment.

But at a very minimum, we can agree then that some of the humanities have that kind of value in history, philosophy, for instance. But actually, I tend to agree with Pascal's analysis in general. That is, it's not just a matter of learning the facts. It's a matter of of how people our students are presented certain problems. And you don't learn from Dante's fictional depiction of of hell. Of course, all depictions of hell are fictional to begin with, but we don't learn about hell for for sure.

And you don't necessarily even learn about the human condition. You just learn about what that particular writer thought about human condition. But there is a reason why we consider Dante one of the best writers of all time across all cultures, because it did seem to have some interesting things to say about the human condition. And it also had a incredibly fascinating way to present that information that, frankly, most textbooks in psychology don't have. They just don't get the same kind of, you know, of involvement from from the student.

You can think of literature as far experiments as you know, consider the situation. Consider this how these these characters are moving in. They're in these hypothetical space and these imaginary space. And look at what kind of things they're getting themselves into. What would you think of that sort of situation? I mean, to me, that is the meaning of literature. On top of which, let's not forget that literature departments are the ones that largely teach our students how to write.

And writing is one of those things. It's a portable skill and science departments don't do it. There's very little of writing going on in science departments, partly because scientists themselves don't like to write.

But it doesn't have to be that way, right. Like you could take a semester or two semesters worth of expository essay writing in which you learn how to write clearly and support your arguments. You know, it seems like a very indirect route to take, to go through.

But human beings, literature taught indirectly quite a bit better than they work that actually often. You mean that? Absolutely. I mean, think think about, for instance, typical discussions in Congress. Let's say I know that's about Congress is usually a bad example or pretty much anything. But there are two ways to present to make your point. If you want to convince your colleagues to pass a particular type of legislation, you can you can flood them with spreadsheets and diagrams and statistics.

Or you can tell an anecdote. You can tell a story.

But that is part of expository writing. I mean.

Right. But that comes from literature. It's not a science scientist. Don't do that sort of sort of thing.

No, I wasn't saying students learn how to write in their science classes. I was just saying they should learn the techniques of clear and forceful writing. And that includes rhetoric and narrative in and, you know, in a writing class, as opposed to reading fiction and arguing about the fiction and writing about the fiction and using that as your training for writing clearly and forcefully in a way that will be useful to you outside of school.

But I maintain that writing about fiction is actually more fun and therefore it's easier to get the students to do it than running about dry matters. Incidentally, there was there was this talk about measurable skills. Actually, there was this really interesting book that came out just a few months ago, and it's raised quite a bit of stink in academic circles about the status of higher education in the United States. And what these people, the authors did was a longitudinal study during which they followed a cohort of several thousand undergraduate students in the United States from the first year of college to the last year of college.

And this was done across public as well as private universities. And the idea was to say, OK, what are these people actually learning? And they were largely bad news and I'm going to start with those. And then there was some little bit of good news, which, however, I think strengthened the case for the humanities. So the bad news was this. These students were given a collegiate learning test at the beginning of their career as undergraduates.

And at the end, the test measures a bunch of things, including critical thinking, ability to write the comprehension of reading texts and so on and so forth. Right? Mm hmm.

Thirty five percent, something like 30 to 35 percent of the students learn statistically, measurably, nothing. In four years.

Their scores were absolutely no different from when they started from the one they had, which is pretty depressing.

50 percent learned very little, you know, slightly more than nothing. So it was it was a it's all around this fairly depressive, depressing analysis of the quality of our education in the United States, which, of course, helped explaining why worldwide the United States has been falling in ranks across the disciplines, including the sciences for the. Compared to a bunch of other nations, now here's the positive aspect of it. The researchers found that there were only two factors that were predictive of actual sustained and sustained knowledge and portable skills that the students were learning.

And those were only acquired in classes that were riding intensive or reading intensive and reading intensive is defined as more than 40 pages per course per week. And I forgot how they defined running intensive. But it's several classes throughout the semester. You don't get those in the sciences. We just don't lose very of writing. And there is comparatively, comparatively very little reading.

You get those from philosophy classes, from history classes, from literature classes. It's the kind of thing the humanities does and talk about measurability. Those are the only measurable skills, measurable things that improve students skills by the end of their academic career.

On the subject of literature, studying literature, teaching critical thinking, I.

I actually think that it can it can have a negative effect on critical thinking just based on anecdotal observation of talking to people who have you say in total?

Well, I mean, I've got to say, I mean, obviously this is anecdotal.

I was just trying to get on your case because you were sort of dismissing anecdotal evidence earlier. But go ahead. Oh, I'm interesting here.

So it was actually when I when I was when I was saying, how would we know if these claims about literature making you a more well-rounded and open minded and smart person? It's like, how would you know? Like, I would have been happy with examples. It doesn't have to be.

Oh, I'm an anecdote then. I am. I'm a perfect example. Oh, yes. I actually when I was in in high school, for instance, and which in Italy works in Europe, most of Europe, particularly Italy, works differently from the United States. Really nice. In the last three years of our school, we do the kinds of things that most students in the United States do in college. That is, we take courses in a variety of disciplines, you know, including, as I said, philosophy, history and so on.

And I remember that the last year, for instance, in high school, I read in the Italian literature class alone, I read 13 books, 13 novels, and I had writing assignments every single week. And I guarantee you that really did something for my writing and comprehension skills, something that the science classes I was thinking certainly was we're not doing. I see. OK, no, that is a good argument for practicing.

Writing makes you a better writer and I totally buy that. It was the insight from the fiction itself that I was questioning. But starting to get back to my complaint about the impact of studying literature and critical thinking.

One thing that I've noticed from people who've spent a lot of time working on literature, comparative comparative literature and other arts, is that their mode of arguing?

They don't seem to be focused on figuring out the truth about a particular question. They seem to be focused on finding support for what they already believe.

And this makes sense to me based on the humanities classes I've taken, because what you're encouraged to do in humanities classes is pick a school, a unique, a clever interpretation of a work of fiction or a piece of art and defend it. And so, you know, you go through you try to find examples from from the book that back up your interpretation of what the the lamp and Madame Bovary symbolize, etc., etc..

And so I actually think that has a negative effect on critical thinking outside of the world of literature.

That is a very fair point. I would only comment make a couple of short comments about this. First of all, that actually works also for the sciences. I mean, we have these again, this idea that I think it's a false dichotomy that, well, you know, the the humanities are about rhetoric and the signs are all about the hard facts, just the fact Maham, it doesn't work that way. The sciences are just about rhetoric as the humanities, because you can pick and choose your data.

You can present them in one way or the other. You can do analysis in one way or the other. There's quite a bit of wishy washy rhetoric that you can do in the sciences as well. And it's all about the critical thinking, something about your audience. Is the audience going to buy your argument or not? So. So what are the argument is backed by, you know, our allegedly hard data or just the argument? I don't see that as a sharp difference.

But the more important point is this. There's actually quite a bit of research in pedagogy that shows that that idea of assigning people different points of view essentially, say a random, for instance, in a class and have them defend that point of view is an excellent way to for people to learn about a topic and for people to develop respect for the position that they might not agree with.

So, for instance, when you do, there is evidence that shows that if you assign a controversial topic like, I don't know, abortion or creationism, the teaching creationism in science classes or something like that to students and you have them the. But inevitably, you will have students who actually don't believe in that particular position, having to defend that position to their best of their knowledge, and the studies do show that that is the best way that people actually gain an understanding, a critical understanding of of a topic.

So there is quite a bit, actually, to be said for that sort of exercise.

Now, you're right, of course, that if the exercise is just about, you know, obfuscating and giving people the false impression based just on rhetorical flair, then it's a better idea. But I would maintain that if you learn the humanities properly, you also learn how to recognize that rhetorical flair and counteract that and say, wait a minute, this is smoke and mirrors. Not a is not a really good argument.

Yeah, no, I mean, I understand then those are good points. I just had the impression that the format of the humanities really, really rewarded it, actually incentivized people for coming up with clever interpretations as opposed to coming up with the right interpretations. But your points are well taken. OK, we're already over.

So we are going to wrap up this section of the podcast and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia Spik Things Masimo.

My pick is a website, part blog, part informational website. It's by a wonderful organization called Give Well, which is run by a former hedge fund analyst from Harvard who wanted to choose a charity to donate to.

And he got really frustrated by how little reliable information was out there about the effects of different charities. So he quit his job and he founded Give Well, which specializes in these in-depth empirical investigations of hundreds of different charities to measure how much of an impact they're each having and to determine which ones are the most effective at doing good.

And it appealed to me and and I thought it was relevant to a podcast that specializes in rationality because it wasn't clear to me until I investigated their website how much irrationality and ignorance there is in the world of charities.

I actually I spoke with Holden Karnofsky, the founder of Give Well, and he told me that when when he asks the head of a charity. So how do you determine whether you're having an impact?

The most common response is that they just look at him in confusion like it's not it's not very good in the world of nonprofits to actually test their theories about what works and what doesn't, even though there's a lot of money and lives at stake.

So go to the website. I especially recommend that you check out the blog where they write these really interesting essays about why they evaluated this or that charity positively or negatively. And then they also have more general discussions like what is the best research say about micro lending, which is the process of granting very small loans to poor people who want to start businesses and why micro lending hasn't lived up to the hype?

Sounds interesting. My pick is a book that came out fairly recently last year. It's called The Philosopher's Quarrell, Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding by Robert Zaretsky and John Scott. I think that book originally, because recently it was David Hume's 300 birthday, which was a big deal, particularly in Europe, as you might imagine, in the UK, um, as been described as arguably the most influential philosopher in the English language, which is not a minor amount of compliment, is certainly one of my favourite philosophers.

So I obviously wasn't naturally drawn to this book. By the way, Rousseau is one of my least favorite philosophers. So I think, OK, I need to learn about the quarrel between these two people. Turns out the book is also very well written.

It gives a nice insight not only into the lives of both Hume, of course, and Rousseau, but also of other major characters of the Enlightenment, like Devro, one of the authors of the encyclopedia, and particularly Voltaire and how they interacted. It gives you a nice sort of idea about the Enlightenment in the different kinds of enlightenment, because as it turns out, the alignment meant different things in different places of the French. Enlightenment was one thing, but for instance, the Scottish Enlightenment, of which David Hume was a major representative, was a significantly different kind of affair.

So it's delightfully it's it's, uh, gives you an insight into an entire historical period and these jousting of of some of the major minds of the time. And in particular, as I said, the major quarrel between these two philosophers, Human Rousseau, was about the limits of human understanding. And the interesting thing is that they both agreed that there are fairly strict limits to human understanding. But but David Hume, the sceptic, was turned out to be much more positive about human knowledge than Rousseau actually was, even though he was one of the French philosopher, which is a group that we normally think of as the epitome of celebration of reason at that time.

So it's a great book. Philosophers Quarrel by Robert Zarutsky and John Scutt. Interesting.

Thanks, Massimo. That sounds right up my alley.

And for the record, I'm also on team whom we are all out of time. So this concludes another episode of Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, true by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.