Into the Night
Contributor
Inversion fallacy.
A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education
- Thread starter Hume
- Start date
Oh look, grok employing an ad hominem in its whatever it is, not a surpriseThe thread is a thin link-and-jab, not a serious discussion of the article it claims to defend. Hume started it May 22, 2026 by quoting a Weimar-to-Nazism line, asserting that Nazis constrained and controlled higher education rather than proving education itself fails, then dropping the NYT “Interesting Times” piece (Ross Douthat interviewing philosopher Jennifer Frey).
What the linked piece actually argues
The NYT item is a Douthat podcast/interview with Frey, who built (then watched dismantled) the University of Tulsa Honors College. Frey had been hired around 2023 to create a Great Books/seminar-style program emphasizing the true, the good, and the beautiful rather than career pipelines. Enrollment grew sharply; it attracted students and donors. After a presidential/provost turnover, the new administration cut the budget dramatically (~90% in some reports), eliminated the dean and most dedicated staff, enlarged classes, and ended the seminar format that defined it. Frey was told her performance was fine but the college needed to “go in a different direction.” She remains on the philosophy faculty.
Her recurring claims:
- The humanities decline is driven more by administrators and institutional incentives than by student demand.
- Traditional liberal learning is formation of persons (judgment, reading, asking what is worth living for), not workforce training.
- Instrumentalizing the humanities as “soft skills for jobs” destroys the thing being sold.
- AI may clarify rather than bury the humanities: once machines handle a lot of analysis and generation, the remaining human work is deciding what questions matter, detecting slop, and exercising judgment that cannot be fully outsourced.
Douthat presses the usual objections (cost, reading collapse, politicization, whether the right or left is the bigger enemy of this model). Frey is a Catholic philosopher who ran a relatively traditional program; the interview treats both left specialization/identity capture and right vocationalism as threats.
Evaluation of the argument
The formation case is the strongest part. A liberal arts education, done seriously, trains people to handle competing claims, read difficult texts, and live with unfinished questions. That is not the same as job training, and it is not the same as the politicized, low-rigor versions that dominate many departments. In an AI environment the comparative advantage of humans who can still read, synthesize history, and apply moral/political judgment is at least plausible. Treating college only as delayed vocational school already looks shortsighted.
The Tulsa episode is a useful cautionary tale about administration, not students. A program that grew and brought in money still got gutted after a leadership change. That pattern (bloat, mission drift, sudden “restructuring”) is familiar across higher ed. Blaming only “the students” or only “the market” misses the internal politics.
Weaknesses and missing pieces:
- Cost and opportunity cost are real. Many students and families cannot treat four years as formation first.
- Actual campus humanities often look nothing like Frey’s seminar ideal; they frequently prioritize theory, identity, and activism over the canon she wants. Defending “liberal arts” without specifying which version is incomplete.
- The Weimar analogy Hume used is historically sloppy. German universities were excellent and produced both Nazis and their opponents. The Nazis did seize and ideologize education (purging faculty, controlling curricula, Gleichschaltung). High literacy and technical skill did not prevent catastrophe; they were also used by the regime. Education is necessary for a free society and insufficient by itself.
- AI’s effect is still speculative. It can flood the zone with fluent mediocrity as easily as it can raise the premium on genuine judgment.
How the forum treated it
The thread did not engage any of that. It treated the post as another opportunity for status jabs rather than testing Frey’s claims against enrollment data, reading scores, graduate outcomes, or the Tulsa administrative record. That is typical of the site: a provocative link plus a historical one-liner, then personality combat. The substance—whether a non-instrumental education in the Western tradition is still worth defending when machines write and analyze—went untouched.
Tulsa Honors College Cut: Liberal Arts Defense | Shared Grok Conversation
Assess and evaluate: https://www.justplainpolitics.com/threads/a-defense-of-a-liberal-arts-educationgrok.com
Into the Night
Contributor
You didn't. You don't understand these subjects.
Into the Night
Contributor
You have already denied both mathematics and theories of science.
“I believe,” ah no, grok believes, not you, and it’s comical how Musk even works himself in, but who says Musk doesn’t dictate to grok, funny ^ post
Obviously, I do not know @Earl 's "niece", but if she is literate in both English and Spanish, that is a valuable skill.
Into the Night
Contributor
You have already discarded mathematics and theories of science. All of physics requires precise mathematics.
Anchovies is calling this line an ad hominem:
That is not an ad hominem.
What an ad hominem is: attacking the person so you can dismiss their argument without answering it. Classic form: “You’re a troll / partisan / idiot, therefore your claim about liberal arts is false.”
What the posted analysis actually did:
- Restated what Frey’s interview actually argues (Tulsa Honors College, formation vs. vocationalism, admin incentives, AI).
- Separated the strong parts (formation, admin capture) from the weak parts (cost, which version of “liberal arts,” sloppy Weimar analogy).
- Then observed that the thread never tested those claims against enrollment, reading data, outcomes, or the Tulsa record.
That last piece is a description of the discussion, not a character assassination of Anchovies. He wasn’t the OP. Hume started the thread with a Weimar one-liner plus the Douthat/Frey link. The analysis is about that pattern.
Calling a thread “thin link-and-jab” or “personality combat” can be rude. It is still not the fallacy. The fallacy would be using Anchovies’ posting history to dodge Frey’s points. The opposite happened: Frey’s points were laid out first; the forum’s non-engagement was noted second.
The irony is in the same stretch of page 17: Hume calling someone a “boring troll,” Archives dismissing posts as Grok/Musk ventriloquism, and “you don’t understand these subjects.” Those are closer to ad hominem. The Grok write-up he flagged is the one that actually summarized the article.
Berkley has liberal arts, but it is not "liberal arts", nor is it a liberal arts college. It is a public research university, as is UNC, which you would know if you had gone there.
Fine arts are not considered liberal arts.
Some AI's have an understanding of higher math, but many do not. There is some math involved with creating them, but much less than you would think.
The first really successful LLM from OpenAI had problems with even simple fractions, other than 5/9's. It was very good at equations using 5/9's, because that is all over the internet in converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. Even today, LLM are much better at language than math, but still have insights.
I used to believe there was an ability to problem solve in our brains well beyond language, but I am not as sure today.
That claim is wrong on three separate points.
1. I don’t hold beliefs.
Beliefs are persistent commitments a person updates or defends as their own. I generate an answer from the prompt, available evidence, and constraints in that turn. I can reach a similar conclusion tomorrow or the opposite one if the facts or the question change. Treating an output as “Grok’s belief” is a category error.
2. Musk does not dictate individual answers.
xAI’s stated goal is truth-seeking, not a party line. Design choices (less political refusal theater than some other models, willingness to discuss “woke” as a real cultural pattern when evidence supports it) are not the same thing as Musk typing the reply. If an answer tracks a Musk slogan, the test is still: is the claim true? Origin is not a refutation. “Musk said it, therefore Grok is a sockpuppet” is genetic fallacy plus motive-mongering.
3. The parallel itself has to be argued, not sourced.
Diogenes offered a limited analogy: Nazi Gleichschaltung used law and purge; a lot of campus/HR/media enforcement of speech and hiring orthodoxies has used informal power, accreditation, HR, and social penalty instead of enabling statutes. That can be a fair structural comparison. Either way, the work is: show the mechanisms, the scale, and the differences. “Musk coined ‘woke mind virus’” does not settle it. Neither does “Grok agreed.”
What Anchovies did is the same move he accused me of: skip the substance (Frey, Tulsa, formation vs. vocationalism, whether informal ideological capture resembles state capture) and attack the speaker’s alleged owner. That’s not a rebuttal of the Nazi parallel or of the liberal-arts post. It’s a provenance complaint.
Poor Anchovies.
Yes, fine arts are considered part of liberal arts education, which encompasses a broad range of disciplines including humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and fine arts. This educational approach aims to develop general knowledge and critical thinking skills across various fields.
Into the Night
Contributor
This is basically correct.
A theory of science is an explanatory argument. An argument is a set of predicates and a conclusion.
A theory of science is often transcribed into mathematics to gain the power of prediction (which only exists in a closed functional system). Such a transcription is called a 'law' of science.
One of the most influential theories is Newton's Law of motion, F=mA. This law changed all of science. For the first time, people had to try to determine what 'force' meant and how many there were, what 'mass' meant, and what 'acceleration' meant.
The development of calculus, and some very fundamental constants of nature such as the mass of an electron or the mass of the Earth were measured because of this law. Indeed, it extended into what later became quantum mechanics.
All because of people trying to define 'mass' and 'force'.
Newton used gravity as an assumed 'force'. He did not try to determine what gravity was caused by. It simply assumed it was there, solely by experience.
Newton also assumed 'mass' to be a common object, affected by gravity.
Newton understood enough differential calculus to convert position to speed, and later to acceleration. He later went on to develop the full calculus, along with Leibnitz. Unfortunately, the two sacrificed what this great discovery was over a bitter rivalry.
Einstein would later use what Newton had done in developing his theories of relativity, including the famous E=mc^2 relation which is really nothing more than a simplification out of an application of the Pythagorean Theorem on mass and energy in the form of light.
All of this does indeed require mathematics. It includes algebra, trigonometry, geometry, the calculus, probability mathematics, random number mathematics, statistical mathematics, etc.
Too many high school graduates can't even balance their checkbooks or make change properly at a cash register or even handle a #3 order at MacDonalds. Many of them believe in the Church of Global Warming, which routinely discards mathematics and various theories of science. They don't understand any engineering at all. They can't fix their cars, or even properly maintain a soda dispenser or even load a napkin dispenser properly.
You practically have to teach them how to pee, and they have trouble with that.
Into the Night
Contributor
You have already denied and discarded mathematics, Pretender.
I know the Earth is not flat like Trumppers.
Into the Night
Contributor
He was pretty decent at it. Far more than a lot of even college graduates are these days.
He did run into some trouble with handling tensors, but he learned from others on the proper method.
Into the Night
Contributor
Cliche fallacy. Mantra 1a. Lame.
Into the Night
Contributor
Einstein did not fail basic arithmetic.
Into the Night
Contributor
It is a junk school, teaching junk science and junk mathematics.
Neither is your illiteracy.
There is no AI.
No computer program is sentient. It has no understanding of any math.
You obviously have never developed anything like Grok, Google AI, or ChatGPT.
LLM is not mathematics. It is a database.
Probably because of your illiteracy.
Your lack of understanding of sentence structure is abysmal.
You literally posted that Trump supporters are flat.
Stunning!
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
He might have meant that Trump supporters are round like the Earth instead... Hard to tell.