211–220 of 263 posts
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But falsifiability is not the purpose of liberal arts creation is. This is one of the reasons I don't believe that it belongs in an academic discipline were critical thinking seems to be of higher value than constructive thinking.
Funnily enough, critical theory is a liberal arts discipline!
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Why's that, might I ask? I've seen statistics that I haven't verified that indicate that while somewhere between 25 and 40% of CS undergrads aren't able to find work as programmers, around 40% of professional programmers don't have a CS degree. And I'm really not sure what to make of this.
Because they wasted years of time learning useless garbage that universities teach that is of no use.
All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.
[Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]
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Students in elite American universities (ivy-plus) come from the top 1% of all American students in their cohort, not to mention other countries. However dismal American performances in PISA/TIMSS and other tests have been, the top 1% of roughly 3 million students every year are still bound to be generally smarter and more motivated than the average Singaporean or Japanese student.
What makes you think other countries does not also have "elite" universities? China and India has five times the population of the US and several universities which are harder to get into than MIT. Fwiw, I don't believe in the theory of the GP. Math is a subject best done by yourself so what your peers know or not doesn't matter, imho.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…
How does this perspective that people are stupid gain ground? It seems to be a self serving, self important and extremely judgemental perspective held by some insular techies.
The world is as much about politics, people and culture as it is about science. A failure to understand how the world works not just scientifically but politically, culturally and economically, the history of societies and accompanying philosophies gives individuals no context or understanding of their world. A one dimensional perspective both ways impoverishes rather than enlightens.
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I think you're mischaracterizing humanities as not falsifiable as if it should be like mathematics. The content is not wrong in the same way a math question is, but many humanities classes are explicitly about taking arguments presented in essays, books, journals, by the government, by public interest groups, by private industry, and testing them against "objective reality and truth that exists around them." No human…
> Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny. The reason we have a "left" and "right" in politics is it is impossible to prove one true and the other false. No matter how intense the scrutiny or clever the arguments.
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He’s an engineer or scientist. The world needs engineers and scientists, and it makes them feel good to assert their superiority. At the end of the day, these guys always work for somebody, who is usually some sort liberal arts or business major. It’s something to keep in perspective when somebody asserts that math and science run the world.
Math and science does run the world, but the mathematician and scientist does not. I believe this is more accurate.
Hell, once the frameworks get mature, even the programmers don’t need to know much. My understanding of the math behind crypto is incomplete, but I successfully implemented validated systems with other people’s “Lego bricks”
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> PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable You mean PL design, don't you? Performance work is very empirical. If my new type of inline cache is better then I need to prove that and it's falsifiable (using benchmarks, which I admit aren't ideal).
In fact! I can falsify your claim that PL research isn't falsifiable by using some PL research! http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/producing-wrong-data.pdf > Of the 133 papers published in the surveyed conference pro- ceedings, 88 had at least one section dedicated to experimental methodology and evaluation
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PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, diffi…
> PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable You mean PL design, don't you? Performance work is very empirical. If my new type of inline cache is better then I need to prove that and it's falsifiable (using benchmarks, which I admit aren't ideal).
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> But they are not falsifiable. I disagree. Historians are constantly making predictions of events happening today, based on their knowledge of history. Some are accurate, some are not. They can then take this output, and use it to refine the views of history. This doesn't even cover how history is written by very unreliable narrators, and historians have to do more than learn the "what" to uncover the "how". Your ar…
“Falsifiability” is a word with meaning. If you identify a single counter example to a mathematical conjecture, the conjecture is wrong. That is not true for history, philosophy, psychology, or the other liberal arts.
Falsifiable means subject to test. It doesn't mean provabe on the sense of math. Only math is provable like math.