I think I understand. My immediate reaction to reading your post was, "I hope he still reads literature, for fun at least. :-("

I agree that there's something a bit questionable about history and philosophy being lumped in with poetry and visual arts, but it's really hard to know where to draw the lines. Philosophy is arguably better suited to being treated as a soft science like psychology, but it doesn't quite fit there either. Meanwhile, some literature and poetry arguably border on being an expression of philosophy.

We're getting into a tangent here, but though I don't know how to classify things, I do think it's important to classify "science" as being somehow linked to philosophy. Science began as a subset of philosophy, and the validity of science is dependent "natural philosophy".

However, I'm not sure I share your view on philosophy's adherence to mathematical rigor. I've seen some mighty stupid philosophic arguments justified by what amounts to attempts to translate syllogisms into equations, and I think in the end, philosophy needs to make sense. It can be as obscure and difficult to understand as you'd like, but it has to come back to questions of "does this make sense?" and "is this true?" and "is this convincing?". Of course, the great thing about it is, that assertion is a matter of philosophic argument!

But I'm going way off topic here.

I'm not sure why you'd put it that way. I would sooner say that, as a humanities crank myself, I'm bitter towards the treatment humanities get in academia, and in society as a whole. I'm not drawing on conservative news stories as much as on my own experience in going through higher education.

I agree. That kind of analysis is stupid as well.

As much as anything, hopefully you will have a better reading circle if you're paying thousands of dollars in tuition to attend it. Otherwise, I'm not sure how the principle of the thing should differ. I guess a lot of people pay the tuition so that they can associate themselves symbolically with a minor league football team or basketball team, so paying for a superior reading circle doesn't seem so silly to me.

Towards the end of your post, I have no idea what you're going on about. I certainly didn't say that analyzing old artistic/literary works wasn't a good thing to do, or that you shouldn't learn theories and develop frameworks for discussing them. I didn't complain about professors not making sense to me. My complaint was more that my experiences with higher education indicates that it's generally not rigorous enough. It focuses on modernity and novelty, and the professors don't actually understand their own fields well enough-- when it's taught by professors at all. Instead everyone is focused on getting published, which often means being controversial or novel while paradoxically playing it safe to please your peers.

I think the fact that these people think a "tenure track" is the only use for the degree just might have something to do with why fewer people pursue it.

Maybe a few people don't want to teach, hmm?

Actually, we apparently disagree. I believe that between "Who do you trust?" and "Whom do you trust?" it is more correct to use "whom". "Whom" is the direct object of "trust". The standard test applies: when you answer the question, would you use "he" or "him"?

Now, that's the issue of which is more correct. I wouldn't jump down your throat for asking, "Who do you trust?" but I think "whom" is actually more correct, so I wouldn't correct someone for saying it either.

At best they will dick around with test models for another few years until Obama or Empress Hillary kills it.

Toss every single employee of the organization into prison for life. Toss THEIR families out on the street and burn all their houses to the ground. Then pass a Federal law enslaving all white people in America.

Would THAT make amends or should we wage genocide on them as well?

The fact is that corporate America runs on fear. No one would lie unless their boss taught them that bringing him or her bad news was a career ender and/or they would be blamed for it.

I think this is pointing at a larger cultural issue: The "Humanities" disappeared down a post-modern rabbit hole of nonsense. It's become widely held by "experts" that classics are all bullshit and only the most novel works are interesting. Paintings aren't important unless it's an abstract piece painted with feces. Literature isn't interesting unless it's incomprehensible. Philosophy isn't worth talking about unless it's mathematically provable.

These subjects have the potential to be incredibly interesting and even important to our lives, but instead it's relegated to pseudo-science and trivia, and as a result, a lot of the "expert" PhDs don't know what the hell they're talking about.

That's a bad tip. First, that's not how the usage is determined, and second, you haven't cleared up the issue of "when is it merited?"

I believe the rule is that you use "whom" when it's the direct object of a verb or preposition.

The whole point of the commission is that he is NOT free to refuse.

Having worked in large organizations before, even surfacing problems to management in meetings the issues get ignored. Perhaps the guy wasn't smart enough to create a paper trail saying there was an issue. Seems like too nice a scape goat. Where is the QA? Anyone that designs makes mistakes, but the point is you have a team helping verify what you produce is up to spec. Telling me none of the other thousands of people involved in the vehicles didn't catch the issue either?

You know what happens when we assume.

The problem with expecting people to have mail clients is that it can be very inconvenient when people aren't bringing their own computer with them. Web applications have the benefit of being available cross-platform on any computer with a web browser that can access the internet. Another problem is that mail client development has been somewhat stagnant. What are my options? Outlook or Thunderbird? And how has Thunderbird improved in the past 10 years?

I mean, really, email itself has been stagnant. You might angrily respond saying, "Well how do you expect it to develop? It does what it does, and it does it well!" And yet I'm still flooded with spam, and don't have an easy method of end-to-end encryption. There isn't good support for cross-platform server-side metadata extensions (e.g. if I tag an email message on my IMAP account in Thunderbird, and then I access it on another computer in Mac mail or Outlook, those tags aren't there). Email kind of sucks because it's stuck in the 1980s.

"There's no need to sympathize with the baker any more than we have to sympathize with useless art degree majors whining how they only job offers they get (if any) is "beneath" them."

And yet, I do. A mark of civilization is providing every human being with enough profitable work to keep body and soul together.

Usually don't reply to anonymous cowards, but I gather you're the same guy, so here goes:

That's because I'm not at all opposed to encryption. I'm saying that this stunt to advocate encryption will be ineffective. My argument is basically that we need to standardize on forms of encryption that will then be built into all platforms natively, including effective methods of key management, that make the whole process transparent to end-users. If end users need to install software, if they even need to understand that their email is encrypted in order to access it, then you're doing it wrong.

That's all well and good. Your mother sounds much more sensible than most people. You may think that she's clueless, but most people are both clueless and stubborn. They barely understand the concept of encryption, don't understand anything about how it works, are not very interested in security, and will outright refuse to accept changes in their workflow. If I were to set something up like this for my own mother, I wouldn't trust her to do it. I would have to set it up for her and then keep a copy of the keys myself as a safeguard. Even then, I'd worry that at some point, she'd decide to generate her own new keys and then lose them, because you just don't know what the hell that woman is going to do.

Myself, I wouldn't use GPG because there's not wide enough support. I use Outlook for work, and last time I tried it, the GPG plugin didn't work in Outlook and just crashed everything. I would sooner try to use S/MIME, which is more widely supported. But that's sort of my point-- you need a single set of standards that everyone is using, or else the encryption schemes have limited utility.