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Liberal arts will outlast robots
What a boss can't teach in a newsroom is the causes of the War of 1812 or how photosynthesis works, because there isn't time. A boss can go deep on a few favorites, like Taft, Roosevelt, and the 1912 election, but not on everything. So new hires need to arrive with the furniture of the mind, a well-furnished brain ready to make good critical-thinking decisions.
An admiral who majored in journalism and filled his electives with philosophy and poetry shows how it works: learning a bunch of different things is what paid off later. If AI makes intelligence more widely available, the relative value of EQ goes up, and EQ without communication does little for a team. A team needs high-character generalists who can communicate with, motivate, and listen to the people around them.
Why does background knowledge help critical thinking?
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia argues that critical thinking depends on what a person already knows. Studies of reading comprehension show the effect: readers with more background knowledge on a topic understand and remember passages about it better than readers who have stronger general reading skill but less knowledge. In a 1988 study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, students who knew baseball understood a passage about a baseball game better than students who did not, regardless of reading ability.
Why do generalists forecast better than specialists?
Psychologist Philip Tetlock tracked about 28,000 predictions from roughly 300 experts across two decades, reported in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment. Experts who drew on many ideas, whom he called foxes, forecast better than experts who built everything on one big idea, whom he called hedgehogs. He borrowed the terms from a line attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Why are they called the liberal arts?
The name comes from the Latin artes liberales, the skills suited to free citizens as opposed to the trades of laborers. Medieval universities organized the seven liberal arts into the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Students typically studied these before moving on to law, medicine, or theology.
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