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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Australia's conservative government announced plans Friday to double university fees for humanities students, in a bid to push people into more useful, "job-relevant" courses like maths and science.
Under the proposal—which critics panned as an "ideological assault"—the cost of degrees like history or cultural studies will rise up to 113 percent to around US$29,000, while other courses such as nursing and information technology will become cheaper.
Education Minister Dan Tehan—an arts graduate with two advanced degrees in international relations—said the government wanted to corral young people towards "jobs of the future" to boost the country's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you are wanting to do philosophy, which will be great for your critical thinking, also think about doing IT," Tehan said.
The plan would help pay for an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and for cost cuts for courses like science, agriculture, maths and languages.
[...] "I'm an arts graduate and so is the minister for education so I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that we're completely unemployable," said opposition lawmaker Tanya Plibersek.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @05:00AM (3 children)
The topic of this thread is a sentence I read in a bathroom stall as a philosophy student. I'm a comp sci/philosophy grad. I thought it was quite clever at the time and even in hind sight it somewhat emphasizes what philosophy is about. A repeated notion is that social sciences drive people to develop ethical or moral character that they might otherwise lack. And indeed philosophy delves deeply into moral and ethical topics making it seem to be clearly the case. Yet that study ultimately reveals, more than anything else, the relative nature of most moral and ethical logic. An elementary example here is something like an absolutist vs a utilitarian. Is it okay to kill somebody who's about to kill two other people? Utilitarian says 'yip', absolutist says 'nope.' Neither's wrong, mutually exclusive answers, both cannot be right - or can they? Welcome to the world of philosophy.
The problem we have is that social science, ethics, and grandiose claims to rightness can be used to argue whatever you want in a generally logically supported and consistent fashion. Now a days eugenics is generally regarded is unethical, yet during it's time it was actively and universally advocated for by academia where it was the ubiquitous in advanced education and 'proper thinking' in the United States. [wikipedia.org] For instance well know civil rights activists such as W.E.B. DuBois or even Thomas Wyatt Turner, a founding member of the NAACP, were hardcore eugenicists. And it's not like the arguments they gave for it were invalid, disingenuous, or inherently unethical. It simply runs into the problem that 'inherently unethical' is something, within the social sciences, you learn does not really exist.
Ultimately social science not only fails to teach you to become more ethical, but I think it likely trends towards the opposite (in terms of common norms) due to the sort of nihilism towards truth that it tends to create. Keep in mind that things such as philosophy are one of the most normal paths towards law. And we all know how moral of creatures lawyers, who frequently then evolve into the third larvae of hell - politicians, are.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 22 2020, @01:37PM (1 child)
And THIS is where primatology and psychology come in! By knowing our roots, knowing how our societies work, and having clear goals in mind, we can craft working moral theories that line up with external observable reality.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:23AM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:20AM
actually.i think Google and Facebook are the closest to being able to attach empiricism to social science, if they're smart enough to realize it. nobody has ever had such a deep, dense, and dynamic data set on humanity before. a sociologist would be like a kid in a candy store with that kind of data set.
Washington DC delenda est.