From hanging out with humanities people and technical people, I’m heavily inclined to put this down to straight-up Hansonian status competition. Humanities people and technical people tend to downplay the value of each other’s fields. It provides a gratifying, group-unifying status boost, and brings few consequences because the victims are on the other side of campus. In general this is fueled by subtle misunderstandings between groups.
In this case, humanities people will be overestimating the degree to which the techie’s studying literature are simplifying things—for instance they might think that the tech people are actually saying their algorithms can capture the complexity of human reaction to literature, instead of just providing useful approximations. Thus, it feels like an insult to them, and a chance to pounce on the hated enemy, and in the process affirm their allegiance to the ingroup, who after all are the people who really matter. Artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and economics all get similiar reactions.
From hanging out with humanities people and technical people, I’m heavily inclined to put this down to straight-up Hansonian status competition. Humanities people and technical people tend to downplay the value of each other’s fields. It provides a gratifying, group-unifying status boost, and brings few consequences because the victims are on the other side of campus. In general this is fueled by subtle misunderstandings between groups.
In this case, humanities people will be overestimating the degree to which the techie’s studying literature are simplifying things—for instance they might think that the tech people are actually saying their algorithms can capture the complexity of human reaction to literature, instead of just providing useful approximations. Thus, it feels like an insult to them, and a chance to pounce on the hated enemy, and in the process affirm their allegiance to the ingroup, who after all are the people who really matter. Artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and economics all get similiar reactions.