HACKER Q&A
📣 amadeuswoo

When has humanities/history knowledge helped you in tech?


Personally, I've been reading about how historical empires handled delegation and trust—who gets autonomy, who needs oversight, how that scales. Finding it weirdly applicable to how I think about system design and working with AI tools.

Curious if others have pulled from history/humanities in ways that actually transferred.

  👤 elbci Accepted Answer ✓
separation of concerns -> division of labor (hint: there's always a power imbalance even if it's hidden under reification)
👤 jbreckmckye
I think a lot of programming - the more business focused, application minded stuff - is a kind of analytical philosophy. You spend a lot of time as a dev working on "domain logic" which requires you to be very exacting in your terminology and carefully distinguish between ideas.

You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.

(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)