alt Hacker News>What is the value to the rest of humanity that a small group of people possesses something that can be called human understanding?
If you're going to ask that then you need to ask the same thing about essentially every non-STEM department.
>What is the value to the rest of humanity that a small group of people possesses something that can be called human understanding?
If you're going to ask that then you need to ask the same thing about essentially every non-STEM department.
People in the humanities regularly write things that many people find interesting and entertaining. One need not be a historian to understand https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag... and find it interesting. The value here is not that they possess human understanding. It is that they can share human understanding, in a way that many humans can be interested in.
But, for example, take my first paper: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/66... The title was, "Derivations whose iterates are zero or invertible on a left ideal." In order to understand the title, you need to learn what a ring is, what a derivation on a ring is, what an invertible element of a ring is, what an ideal of a ring is, and why these are concepts that anyone would have invented. In order to read the theorem, you have to further understand what division ring is, a matrix ring is, the characteristic of a ring, and a polynomial over a ring. The proof is even worse.
Good luck interesting anyone who wasn't a mathematician. (And good luck interesting most mathematicians!)