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Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

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Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #61
spdionis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But often in university a good 80% of the material doesn't _really_ matter

What the hell are people majoring in that 80% of the material doesn't matter? I'm sitting here post-MSc wishing I'd done 80% more material in undergrad so I'd be properly qualified for the stuff I want to do!

I had an epiphany about feedback loops one day and since then I wish I paid attention during the 1.5 years of control theory classes I had at university. It also made me finally realize that a lot of this "useless" stuff is actually important, but we may not realize it immediately.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#102

Post by TeMPOraL »

6502nerdface wrote: post #53
trgn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension. The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be. Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university…

> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so. How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievement…

I guess because the wonder of human achievement only matters in so far as it can be turned into the wonder of inflowing dollars. Seriously, the more efficient our economy becomes, the more it sucks the life itself out of everything. Dreaming, big or small, is not profitable.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#103

Post by TeMPOraL »

trgn wrote: post #38
marcosdumay wrote: post #6

Guess what, when you insist on doing only useless work, people start to think your work is useless. Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming even objectively false…

I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension. The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be. Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university…

The side effect of creating highly-paid, highly-educated clergy was that smart people who don't have to worry much about feeding themselves tend to do interesting things. It's something we've lost today, and I think it's a big part of why basic research is in trouble today - because science doesn't usually pay off in short term, and is best done by people who are free to do whatever catches their interest. This is also not compatible with the new "neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school".

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#104

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dgacmu wrote: post #95
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works? Why should we expect that the w…

You seem to be asking whether it is possible to derive truth a priori by logic, or whether truth is dependent upon the physical context in which it's found. Perhaps the answer is a combination of both. Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)

> Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)

You were of course paraphrasing Kant, and the very fact that the question remains, from the point of view of professional academic philosophy, unsettled hundreds of years later speaks very loudly about the inadequacy of armchair speculation as a guide to truth.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#105

Post by eli_gottlieb »

spdionis wrote: post #79
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell are people majoring in that 80% of the material doesn't matter? I'm sitting here post-MSc wishing I'd done 80% more material in undergrad so I'd be properly qualified for the stuff I want to do!

Computer Science. 80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones). The rest 20% can be learned in a couple of afternoons. If you're American YMMV tho.

>80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones).

Soooo what courses were you taking, in which the non-theoretical material was 80% useless? When I think about applied computer-science subjects, I think of operating systems, embedded programming, circuit design with FPGAs, networking, program optimization, compilers... all eminently useful subjects.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#106

Post by TeMPOraL »

lintiness wrote: post #13
cholantesh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably another boring humanities elective of dubious merit, being taught by someone whose adult life has been preoccupied with empty navel-gazing.

this, i think, is what he's addressing. if you don't see value in humanities or the arts, i'm afraid you're completely missing the point of being alive. a world run completely by engineers is no place i want to live.

Hey, let's not go so binary, shall we?

Personally, I want the world to be run by engineers, because they're the intersection of actually knowing stuff about reality (hard science) and using knowledge to fix problems (trades). I also want them to be connected to the human side of the world. Which is what naturally happens with smart people, unless you spend their childhood teaching them humanities are bullshit - which is what our schools excel at.

Out of people interested in humanities that I know, the best ones at it are engineers. On the other hand, I also meet people with liberal arts background who are keen to learn more about hard science and building stuff, and they are good at it. What we really need to fix is the perception of humanities, and we can do so by trimming all the accumulated bullshit.

We should do the same with some areas of harder fields, like medicine, while we're at it.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #105
spdionis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Science. 80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones). The rest 20% can be learned in a couple of afternoons. If you're American YMMV tho.

>80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones). Soooo what courses were you taking, in which the non -theoretical material was 80% useless? When I think about applied computer-science subjects, I think of operating systems, embedded programming, circuit design with FPGAs, networking, program optimization, compilers... all eminently useful subjects.

Also a lot of stuff you internalize better when you get your hands dirty in it. That OpenMPI class may not be very practical or relevant on the job market, but it can teach you quite a lot about the problems and approaches in the field of distributed computing.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#108

Post by pnathan »

Domenic_S wrote: post #90
pnathan wrote: post #63

If this is news to you, dear HN reader, then you really haven't been paying attention to the discourse surrounding education in the last 30 years of the United States. I believe the big work to hit the popular mind initially was Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, which essentially says the same thing , but the disease was slightly less advanced then. As an interesting linguistic note: the liberal arts were conceiv…

> the discourse surrounding education in the last 30 years of the United States. Not that you're wrong, but TFA is talking about Canada: > I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. which I find interesting.

Yes, but the US is widely regarded as a, if not the?, leader in higher education. So if you're keen on understanding the intellectual currents of education in your piece of the world, it's wise to keep abreast of the currents in the US: they will show up in your fine part of the world in time. I'd guess in these days, the time between 'major American idea' and 'hits the rest of the world' is under a year, if not under a month.

I am not sure how distant the third and fourth tier Canadian schools are from the US paradigm, or how independent they feel. I'd guess they follow the lead of American universities pretty closely.

I am super comfortable saying that many UK academics have been lamenting the same thing for the past decade and more; I used to belong to an online academic community with many UK members (also in the Classics) in the 2004-2008 timeframe where the song was being sung with a different verse (but same chorus). If the UK and the US are singing a song; Canada, Australia, and the rest of the English speaking world aren't going to be far behind.

Particularly in the Anglophone world (I can't speak to the others, I am sorry), ideas are shared very fast, and often the US is granted leadership, whether it should be or not. Having been deeply involved in the US university system, I would regard a great deal of the modern innovations in the universities to be a tremendous waste of non-intellectual effort, in many cases for the purposes of boosting the support staff (Gotta embiggen the headcount kingdom) or for comforting the tender feelings of immature children.

I don't mean to lay all the blame on the universities; and none of the blame should lay on the student's shoulders; those who are older and have the reins of power have driven the cart to the ditch. That the load of the cart fell in is not the fault of the load, but the driver. A great deal of blame sits squarely on the United States electorate's shoulders; a non-trivial portion sits on the k-12 policymaker's shoulders; and the rest of it can be shuffled off to the flow of history, parents, the media, and the usual human condition.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#109

Post by mamon »

trgn wrote: post #38
marcosdumay wrote: post #6

Guess what, when you insist on doing only useless work, people start to think your work is useless. Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming even objectively false…

I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension. The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be. Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university…

You couldn't be more wrong about that. Humanities, liberal arts education are the most useful parts of education (and I say this as an engineer). The reason why, through the ages ruling classes educated themselves in philosophy, history, literature, is that it shows you how this world really works, how politics is done, what separates rulers from ruled, what are the basic human rights. Greek and Latin, which you consider useless as well were key to this, because up to Enlightenment era most important papers were written in those languages (either by Plato and Aristotle or by Cicero, or medieval philosophers)

Lower classes were allowed to educate in some practical matters, like medicine, architecture, geography, etc. but studying liberal arts was forbidden by law (e.g. in ancient Rome), because there is nothing worse, from master's point of view that the slave with sense of entitlement, fighting for hers human and political rights.

Democracy arose about the time when humanities education became common enough - because it became hard for people to settle for less than the freedom.

Now, in 21st century we see opposite trend: people are encouraged to study STEM fields, completely ignoring history, literature and philosophy, which basically makes them highly skilled puppets. Which of course is welcomed by ruling class of our times.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

#110

Post by Luc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
mooreds wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loved the reference to 'Gorgias', which, incidentally, I read in my college days at a liberal arts school. Rhetoric isn't the path to truth, but it can sure help with power. Here it is online: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html Edit: added link to 'Gorgias'.

Finished reading. The text is cut short on this page, but even after reading what is there, I am left amazed. A few points (mind you, I haven't read anything from the classic besides what they managed to force me to ingest in school, which as you can imagine is not much): - Though I found the discussion overtly long (yay my non-existent attention span), it's surprisingly easy to read; I expected ancient Greek texts t…

There's another link on that page that has the full text (a fair bit is missing in the web version): http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.1b.txt
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