That was my experience as well. I took a humanities class in college as a semi-random choice from a list of electives, and gained an entirely new perspective. As a budding computer geek I&#x27;d always thought of history, art, architecture, music, writing, language, <i>all these things</i>, as kind of a list of separate fields that all changed over time for whatever reasons. It was truly eye-opening to learn how interrelated all these things are, and the implications for how history has progressed for millenia and how it has affected our own time.

They also made it harder in the name of safety, in the sense that frontier models used to be more amenable to trying to do this, but now can&#x27;t.

Indeed, and it is one of the things AI can&#x27;t do for you for the same reason a friend can&#x27;t do it for you.

Setting the AI angle entirely aside, this has always been the value of the humanities: learning how to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view. That&#x27;s immensely valuable, no matter what you end up doing with your life.

Isn&#x27;t learning base-60 math helping to understand time calculations? I mean, didn&#x27;t the author didn&#x27;t get that or am I simply wrong with that assumption?

Research taste in history: the importance of learning Babylonian math (resobscura.substack.com)