Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion!

Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.

With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).

I'm not taking offense so much as refuting your argument.

Did I use that word right?

I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)

I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.

I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.

Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.

I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.

I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.

No one denies that humanities are useful. What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them. For example, everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is. This is because Shakespeare's plays are just pop culture from the 16th and 17th centuries, and in a hundred years, people like you will be applauding Star Wars and looking down on others who prefer that century's pop culture and don't see the point in studying an old screenplay written in archaic language.

There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.

> What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them.

We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.

> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.

Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.

The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.

I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.

> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes

That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.

And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'

Both Julius Caesar and Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III use the historical/fictional setting of the fall of the Roman/Galactic Republic to talk tell a deeper story than what first appears. The fact that Lucas intended the movies to be an allegory for the fall of the Roman Republic is well known and even cited on the trilogy's Wikipedia page.

In the original post I replied to, you said:

>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!

I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.

A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.

This strenuous denial consumes life and effort, and for what? What do you win? Why do you care? All I can tell you is good news: These are wonderful, incredible things in the humanities, in Shakespeare, that will change you.

An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.

But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.

But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.

My god, get some reading comprehension. You are destroying your own argument that humanities education is useful outside of academia. At no point did I deride Shakespeare and the very first sentence I wrote in this comment chain was "No one denies that the humanities are useful". Instead, I pointed out that the qualities you derive from it are available in other cultural items and that everyone draws connections from media to real life. No one needs special training to do that, and it is a waste to force students spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars to write glorified book reports.