"Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information. Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated."
Said Leon Wieseltier, Maureen Dowd, in "What A.I. Kant Do" (NYT). Wieseltier is identified only as "editor of the journal Liberties," but I needed more context, so:
Yes, tell me about the the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty under siege by the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived.
I wondered why Dowd — or whoever wrote the headline — went with the stale pun "Kant" when they could have used "Oh, the humanities!" But though I came up with that on my own and was going to use it as a kicker at the end of this post, a quick google showed it's been used and used and used.
It was even famously used, 15 years ago, as a punchline on "The Big Bang Theory":
"Well, then, prepare to be terrified. If your friends are unconvincing, this year's donations might go to say the geology department... or worse it could go to the liberal arts. Millions of dollars being showered on poets literary theorists and students of gender studies"/"Oh, the humanities!"
The internet has made humanities content available to more people than ever before. Few people make use of it, and even fewer the ‘right’ way, for this guy’s or anyone else’s definition of ‘right,’ but that’s not the technology’s fault.
You can say the same thing about brick and mortar libraries. Or universities, for that matter. CC, JSM
Even OG Amazon, when it was just a bookstore, made it easier than ever to have the most obscure dead-tree book in your hands. That’s a triumph of the humanities. CC, JSM
Thanks to Jacques Derrida, the humanities have been under assault from within for almost sixty years. The Nobel Prize for Literature going to the doggerel lyrics of Robert Zimmerman a decade ago marked the end of humanities as a respectable discipline.
"Mystery" is why academic writing is full of jargon which is barely processed even by graduate students. It's a barrier to entry which keeps out merit.
Modern technology has just about obliterated the need for a midwit managerial class in the "service industry," while resource extraction, skilled trades, and the military have never been more important. Hard luck.
Maureen Dowd has been running with the same tired schtick for forty years. Come up with some lame pun and spin her 300 words around it. As if her pun has revealed some deep truth about anything. How the NYT can let her take up space for so long is a shameful waste.
Our hostess commented on the Dowd op-ed and passed right by the very rare 2-page Kristoff op-ed in today's NYT: "The Silence That Meets The Rape Of Palestinians." No mention of "rape dogs" this time, maybe because of the threatened lawsuit.
In the 80's and 90's I would eagerly consume each new issue of the New Republic, particularly the "back of the book", with all the cultural reviews. It was an incredibly rich read. Wieseltier was one reason why. A shame it was destroyed.
It would be interesting to see a list of all of the men in the arts or academia whose careers were destroyed, or at least kneecapped, by allegations of "inappropriate behavior".
If people don't know how to process information into knowledge, it's the fault of the schools and universities that just taught them to regurgitate what their instructors told them rather than to think and understand.
The other day someone, maybe Full Moon, posted a link to a video by the blogger of Pens and Poison. She is a young woman who loves novels and great writing. She attended her dream school Columbia University to study literature and found the faculty was exclusively libtard communists and Democrat Party members, and in 4 years She was never assigned anything except books of literary criticism, leftist, anti-American, anti-Western Civilization polemics and Marxist theory. Never read the actual text of the Great Books, just criticism of them. Her observations extend to the current state of publishing and contemporary American literature, and how it is a cesspool of libtard politics, compulsory DEI, incoherent storytelling and mediocre writing. So they got going for them.
This isn’t a fight over beauty and meaning as Wieseltier tries to argue. This is a fight over speed and availability. The meals at the postmodernist cafés have been a thin cardboard-tasting gruel for decades now. The professoriate are just mad that the tech bros built pure 100% postmodern fast-food joints with triple lane drive-through windows.
I’m very excited AI/robotics. But, then I understand what’s going on under the hood. The blather in this post is Pointy Haired Boss stupidity. But, the fortunate reality is that AI/robotics will inevitably win in the marketplace and in practice. The tech illiterates in the humanities are only imagining that the essay wars will decide the outcome.
Pirates. Plunder. Strong words for a profession that has prostituted itself to one political party and cheers for the international left to overthrow our Republic. One cannot really despise the Corporate Media enough. There’s always more.
Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities
…that Big Bang clip is apt- sounds like humanities guy is resentful of the CS profs who get to buy GT3s while his measly humanities salary barely covers his 911s.
Althouse said... But though I came up with that on my own and was going to use it as a kicker at the end of this post, a quick google showed it's been used and used and used.
What truly wounded the Humanities was the switch from seeking Beauty, Truth and Meaning to perverse navel gazing exercises like Women’s Studies and History of White Supremacy. When we turn away from the wisdom passed down by our greatest minds and declare texts written by white males off-limits for no good reason then it becomes the Inhumanities in short order.
One corollary to the information/ knowledge thing really got going with electronic calculation of all sorts. Most people these days, including scientists, confuse precision for accuracy. I used a slide-rule all the way through my doctoral work in Geochemistry. Slide rules keep you honest about "significant figures", which is the key substrate of accuracy.
When teaching I embedded it even farther -- * Data are disembodied information * Information is disembodied knowledge * Knowledge is disembodied wisdom
Wisdom is the essential overarching framework within which all the others gain meaning and utility. That goes a long way towards explaining why so many "intellectuals" work so hard to demolish inherited wisdom: of the Founders, of Western Civ, of science, and so on -- because true and inherited wisdom makes it obvious that their alleged "knowledge" is generally useless and commonly incorrect pig piffle.
“ Most people these days, including scientists, confuse precision for accuracy.”
you can find no better example of this than what passes for science in the climate change arena. . We live in a universe that’s a cauldron of kinetic, chemical and atomic energy and heat, but they’re tinkering around with insignificant digits of 1 or 2°F and calling it science.
The humanities are dying, but it was a suicide. The humanities academics made themselves and their subject irrelevant because of their political obsessions. Too bad, so sad, but goodbye.
Maybe everyone knows this, but I had to look it up. "Oh, the humanity!" comes from a radio reporter covering the Hindenburg crash.
My daughter would likely have majored in a humanities subject but for the leftist political slant of the faculty and course offerings. But another factor in the demise of the humanities is the perception that humanities majors can't get good jobs out of college. Those are self-reinforcing: Crazy ideologues self-select into the humanities and no one wants to hire them.
Dowd has had two positive features during her career. One was being attractive. The second is her writing. I'm not a fan, but some must be. The first is a ship that sailed away and sank many years ago. The second is rapidly being supplant by AI. Must be terrifying.
Wieseltier was always a pompous fellow. I think he used to talk of his job as "policing the culture." Still, you have to admire anyone who successfully turns himself into a visual icon like that.
The devaluation of the humanities was going on before tech moguls took over. Today, the culture pages of newspapers and magazines are much more about television and movies than about books. Zuckerberg didn't make that happen.
Marxist professors might play a role as well, but even before they came along there was skepticism about capital letter Truth and Beauty and a suspicion that it was just so much high-flown tosh.
You look at this guys picture, and ponder he was fired for sexual harrassment, and its like "Why would I care what he says about anything?"
Throw in the fact that no one read him before he was fired except a small number in DC, NYC, and LA.
The Humanities in the USA have been a toxic waste dump for 30 years. Their original purpose was to teach the values of Western Civilization, and that was hijacked a long time ago by people like Leon.
Was #MeToo a cultural purge orchestrated to get the old, straight White guys out of power? Or did a generation of old, straight White guys age out without replacements from their ranks? Magazines like the New Republic and the New Yorker are very different from what they were 40-50 years ago.
Althouse fixates and nitpicks, changes the subject to avoid talking about the core issue. She baits the sour peaches to foam at their mouths, isn't she nice? It's time to gray rock her.
“They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived. Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.”
Considering the state of the humanities today, I say, “Go Tech!”
Also, it’s too bad this clown never got the chance to meet Blackbeard in person.
"They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived."
At first I thought they were talking about the democrat media and Universities.
But you have to remember both are mostly just jobs programs for women and their simps, both protected classes.
stunned said... Althouse fixates and nitpicks, changes the subject to avoid talking about the core issue. She baits the sour peaches to foam at their mouths, isn't she nice? It's time to gray rock her. 5/17/26, 12:12 PM
Who the fook is this guy? ..."gray rock her"?... Listen cocksucker, I guess you're new around here, but most of us are older and pretty conservative on the whole. We've been coming here for years, we all know Althouse and her politics and proclivities and inclinations quite well, and we still love her and come here for the posts she creates every day. We don't threaten her, and we ain't gonna "gray rock" her. But your sorry ass is in the cross hairs now, as far as I'm concerned. We do love to pile on and ridicule belligerent libtard trolls.
Who's his hair stylist? George Washington? Karl Marx? Frederick Douglass? Fran Lebowitz?
I probably should address his ideas, rather than his appearance, but I don't think he put much effort into them. The culture was rotting from the inside before Gates and Zuckerberg came along.
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The internet has made humanities content available to more people than ever before. Few people make use of it, and even fewer the ‘right’ way, for this guy’s or anyone else’s definition of ‘right,’ but that’s not the technology’s fault.
You can say the same thing about brick and mortar libraries. Or universities, for that matter. CC, JSM
Even OG Amazon, when it was just a bookstore, made it easier than ever to have the most obscure dead-tree book in your hands. That’s a triumph of the humanities. CC, JSM
K-12 public education’s drift toward indoctrination stymied critical thinking exercises. Why think and debate when you can simply chant?
Thanks to Jacques Derrida, the humanities have been under assault from within for almost sixty years. The Nobel Prize for Literature going to the doggerel lyrics of Robert Zimmerman a decade ago marked the end of humanities as a respectable discipline.
"Mystery" is why academic writing is full of jargon which is barely processed even by graduate students. It's a barrier to entry which keeps out merit.
Modern technology has just about obliterated the need for a midwit managerial class in the "service industry," while resource extraction, skilled trades, and the military have never been more important. Hard luck.
Nice to see that Doc Brown has found a new gig.
FWIW "Wieseltier" is German for "weasel-like animal".
Eau de Humanities!
Maureen Dowd has been running with the same tired schtick for forty years. Come up with some lame pun and spin her 300 words around it. As if her pun has revealed some deep truth about anything. How the NYT can let her take up space for so long is a shameful waste.
Our hostess commented on the Dowd op-ed and passed right by the very rare 2-page Kristoff op-ed in today's NYT: "The Silence That Meets The Rape Of Palestinians." No mention of "rape dogs" this time, maybe because of the threatened lawsuit.
In the 80's and 90's I would eagerly consume each new issue of the New Republic, particularly the "back of the book", with all the cultural reviews. It was an incredibly rich read. Wieseltier was one reason why.
A shame it was destroyed.
It would be interesting to see a list of all of the men in the arts or academia whose careers were destroyed, or at least kneecapped, by allegations of "inappropriate behavior".
If people don't know how to process information into knowledge, it's the fault of the schools and universities that just taught them to regurgitate what their instructors told them rather than to think and understand.
I think the AI threat to art is very serious. But "the humanities" died a long time ago, apparently, and Marx killed it.
(hat tip to Lem for that link)
The other day someone, maybe Full Moon, posted a link to a video by the blogger of Pens and Poison. She is a young woman who loves novels and great writing. She attended her dream school Columbia University to study literature and found the faculty was exclusively libtard communists and Democrat Party members, and in 4 years She was never assigned anything except books of literary criticism, leftist, anti-American, anti-Western Civilization polemics and Marxist theory. Never read the actual text of the Great Books, just criticism of them. Her observations extend to the current state of publishing and contemporary American literature, and how it is a cesspool of libtard politics, compulsory DEI, incoherent storytelling and mediocre writing. So they got going for them.
The last job that A.I. will get is stand-up comedian.
That is absolutely right.
Lol! Thank you, St. Croix...and Lem the Vibe Bandit! That's the one!
This isn’t a fight over beauty and meaning as Wieseltier tries to argue. This is a fight over speed and availability. The meals at the postmodernist cafés have been a thin cardboard-tasting gruel for decades now. The professoriate are just mad that the tech bros built pure 100% postmodern fast-food joints with triple lane drive-through windows.
I’m very excited AI/robotics. But, then I understand what’s going on under the hood. The blather in this post is Pointy Haired Boss stupidity. But, the fortunate reality is that AI/robotics will inevitably win in the marketplace and in practice. The tech illiterates in the humanities are only imagining that the essay wars will decide the outcome.
Pirates. Plunder. Strong words for a profession that has prostituted itself to one political party and cheers for the international left to overthrow our Republic. One cannot really despise the Corporate Media enough. There’s always more.
I can't wait for Universities to get replaced.
One of the most destructive forces in the United States is our university system and the elevation of these evil useless people.
They need to go learn how to fix an air conditioner and shut their mouths.
Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities
…that Big Bang clip is apt- sounds like humanities guy is resentful of the CS profs who get to buy GT3s while his measly humanities salary barely covers his 911s.
Automated Intelligence, whether artificial or anthropogenic, is a progressive process (PP)... pun intended.
Google stifled me perhaps.
Althouse said...
But though I came up with that on my own and was going to use it as a kicker at the end of this post, a quick google showed it's been used and used and used.
Huge manatees?
What truly wounded the Humanities was the switch from seeking Beauty, Truth and Meaning to perverse navel gazing exercises like Women’s Studies and History of White Supremacy. When we turn away from the wisdom passed down by our greatest minds and declare texts written by white males off-limits for no good reason then it becomes the Inhumanities in short order.
Leave Literature Alone
Oh, the transhumanity! Abort thy liberal license. Sequester thy progressive perfidy (PP)... pun intended.
oh- the Humana T’s
Silly boomer...hung up on the headlines but unwilling g or una le to deal with today's news.
Good grrl, good German grrl, Mrs Cohen.
Lol
How are crissys book reports on the president coming? Did John's first record ever drop
?
One corollary to the information/ knowledge thing really got going with electronic calculation of all sorts. Most people these days, including scientists, confuse precision for accuracy. I used a slide-rule all the way through my doctoral work in Geochemistry. Slide rules keep you honest about "significant figures", which is the key substrate of accuracy.
When teaching I embedded it even farther --
* Data are disembodied information
* Information is disembodied knowledge
* Knowledge is disembodied wisdom
Wisdom is the essential overarching framework within which all the others gain meaning and utility. That goes a long way towards explaining why so many "intellectuals" work so hard to demolish inherited wisdom: of the Founders, of Western Civ, of science, and so on -- because true and inherited wisdom makes it obvious that their alleged "knowledge" is generally useless and commonly incorrect pig piffle.
“ Most people these days, including scientists, confuse precision for accuracy.”
you can find no better example of this than what passes for science in the climate change arena. . We live in a universe that’s a cauldron of kinetic, chemical and atomic energy and heat, but they’re tinkering around with insignificant digits of 1 or 2°F and calling it science.
Check out the reaction of the University of Central Florida's humanities graduating class, when told that AI was the future.
https://youtu.be/2WcpagVEnIw?si=rjXvERiDfHrsArkJ&t=50
The humanities are dying, but it was a suicide. The humanities academics made themselves and their subject irrelevant because of their political obsessions. Too bad, so sad, but goodbye.
The humanities professors allowed their field to turn into a charnel house. As Mike said above, there isn't any beauty in it.
Take a dive from your ivory tower
And fall on everyone (We'll catch you)
Everyone
The dirt-science profs I usually drank coffee with loved Teh Big Bang Theory. Few of them had read or seen LOTR, though.
Tell me what that means.
I was a subscriber--probably one of two or three in my zipcode--to Teh New Republic from maybe 1980 to the early 2000s.
IIRC Wieseltier wrote about his coke addiction; he was replaced by Andrew Sullivan, who wrote about cock obsession.
Contributors like John Keegan and John Lucaks aged out and so did I.
Maybe everyone knows this, but I had to look it up. "Oh, the humanity!" comes from a radio reporter covering the Hindenburg crash.
My daughter would likely have majored in a humanities subject but for the leftist political slant of the faculty and course offerings. But another factor in the demise of the humanities is the perception that humanities majors can't get good jobs out of college. Those are self-reinforcing: Crazy ideologues self-select into the humanities and no one wants to hire them.
Oh, please. Remember when Bob Ross was the bane of True Art? The humanities has always had gatekeepers, and hoi polloi must always be kept out.
Dowd has had two positive features during her career. One was being attractive. The second is her writing. I'm not a fan, but some must be.
The first is a ship that sailed away and sank many years ago. The second is rapidly being supplant by AI.
Must be terrifying.
Words never heard in politics, "Oh the humility".
Wieseltier was always a pompous fellow. I think he used to talk of his job as "policing the culture." Still, you have to admire anyone who successfully turns himself into a visual icon like that.
The devaluation of the humanities was going on before tech moguls took over. Today, the culture pages of newspapers and magazines are much more about television and movies than about books. Zuckerberg didn't make that happen.
Marxist professors might play a role as well, but even before they came along there was skepticism about capital letter Truth and Beauty and a suspicion that it was just so much high-flown tosh.
You look at this guys picture, and ponder he was fired for sexual harrassment, and its like "Why would I care what he says about anything?"
Throw in the fact that no one read him before he was fired except a small number in DC, NYC, and LA.
The Humanities in the USA have been a toxic waste dump for 30 years. Their original purpose was to teach the values of Western Civilization, and that was hijacked a long time ago by people like Leon.
Jamie, thank you for not saying “the” hoi polloi! You win a free trip to La Brea. CC, JSM
Was #MeToo a cultural purge orchestrated to get the old, straight White guys out of power? Or did a generation of old, straight White guys age out without replacements from their ranks? Magazines like the New Republic and the New Yorker are very different from what they were 40-50 years ago.
I Kant Even.
Probably i wasnt terribly impressed by weiseltier
But what came after was measurably worse
Althouse fixates and nitpicks, changes the subject to avoid talking about the core issue. She baits the sour peaches to foam at their mouths, isn't she nice? It's time to gray rock her.
Metoo# seems to have been a peculiar witchhunt
“They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived. Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.”
Considering the state of the humanities today, I say, “Go Tech!”
Also, it’s too bad this clown never got the chance to meet Blackbeard in person.
Tech is a tool, humanities are an expression of our artistic desires
My god dowd is tedious
My god dowd is TDS.
Tech Derangement Syndrome.
Adding his photo was a naughty bit of trolling, Althouse. It speaks well of your commentariat that only Zionist Rape Dogs took the bait.
Where is the evidence for the allegation
imTay said...
Check out the reaction of the University of Central Florida's humanities graduating class, when told that AI was the future.
https://youtu.be/2WcpagVEnIw?si=rjXvERiDfHrsArkJ&t=50
Just another woman who someone created a job for to close the wage gap.
Then we have a woman with a PHD in computer science making as video.
Education in this country is a slush fund for women who should be raising kids and building a long happy life instead.
"They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived."
At first I thought they were talking about the democrat media and Universities.
But you have to remember both are mostly just jobs programs for women and their simps, both protected classes.
stunned said...
Althouse fixates and nitpicks, changes the subject to avoid talking about the core issue. She baits the sour peaches to foam at their mouths, isn't she nice? It's time to gray rock her.
5/17/26, 12:12 PM
Who the fook is this guy? ..."gray rock her"?...
Listen cocksucker, I guess you're new around here, but most of us are older and pretty conservative on the whole. We've been coming here for years, we all know Althouse and her politics and proclivities and inclinations quite well, and we still love her and come here for the posts she creates every day. We don't threaten her, and we ain't gonna "gray rock" her. But your sorry ass is in the cross hairs now, as far as I'm concerned. We do love to pile on and ridicule belligerent libtard trolls.
Who's his hair stylist? George Washington? Karl Marx? Frederick Douglass? Fran Lebowitz?
I probably should address his ideas, rather than his appearance, but I don't think he put much effort into them. The culture was rotting from the inside before Gates and Zuckerberg came along.
"Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. " Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was unavailable for comment.
I Kant even.
I, for one, am stunned.
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Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.