Venture Capital and the Revenge of the Liberal Arts

the humanities revival continued

I have been saying for some time that the fresh, new energy for the humanities is coming from unexpected places: it is online, among STEM, tech, and VC people. This is not to run down all the excellent work actual humanities people are doing, many of you reading this being blog included in that. But it is striking to me just how much enthusiasm and interest there is for the humanities revival among these people, at the same time as it is often said the humanities are dying in their traditional homes. Here is an extract from a new interview with Jeff Bussgang, a venture capitalist and Harvard Business School professor.

And now if the AI is doing it for our young people, how are they actually going to know what excellent looks like? And so really being good at discernment and taste and judgment, I think is going to be really important. And for young people, how to develop that. I think it’s a moment where it’s like the Revenge of the Liberal Arts, meaning, like, go read Shakespeare and go read Homer and see the best movies in the world and, you know, watch the best TV shows and be strong at interpersonal skills and leadership skills and communication skills and really understand human motivation and understand what excellence looks like, and understand taste and study design and study art, because the technical skills are all going to just be there at our fingertips for all the reasons you said, Jim.

But what won’t be there is the discernment and the end and the taste and the strategic thinking. And that’s what we have to bring. And we bring that through this very nuanced, I think, amalgam of all of these experiences and judgments and really human instinct about what quality looks like.

You can find the whole interview, with transcript, here on Substack at The OSVerse. And, of course, if you want to know more about taste you can read my piece How to Have Good Taste, which is about to hit one-hundred-thousand readers.

The Experimentation Machine (Ep. 285)