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Computer science is a liberal arts degree

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Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#91

Post by dorchadas »

fullshark wrote: post #77
dijit wrote: post #4

I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum. It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline t…

The author isn't the only one confusing the two, a very large % of kids in college confuse the two. They don't even know what they (or their parents) are actually buying, just that it's the required training for a career, thus they assume practical skills are what they are getting.

This is because companies have basically made university vocational training. They don't want to train their employees, so they want the universities to do it. This harms both universities (as institutes of learning) and students, imo, but the companies come out ahead so it pushes on sadly.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#93

Post by simonh »

paulcole wrote: post #82
ankurdhama wrote: post #76

Ah, the ever green tradition of humans to define very fuzzy categories and then debating enlessly about what stuff belongs to what category.

It’s not really much of a debate. If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.

Unfortunately whether paulcole likes something isn’t the only way we categorise things. However just in case it really catches on, could you keep us updated as your tastes change, so we can stay current.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#94

Post by dorchadas »

VLM wrote: post #83

This is downstream of publish-or-perish. My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image. You have to not…

> but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university. Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actually about learning the fundamentals of why things work, in preparation to go further on in said field. Or just about learning about 'humanity' in general (as universities were more in the past; humanities oriented). I think this is the root issue. To me, university should be (2) and (3), not (1). But companies want it to be (1), and students expect it to be (1), whereas professors want (2) and (3) depending on field, and that's where part of the problem lies.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#95

Post by paulcole »

simonh wrote: post #93
paulcole wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really much of a debate. If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.

Unfortunately whether paulcole likes something isn’t the only way we categorise things. However just in case it really catches on, could you keep us updated as your tastes change, so we can stay current.

Feel free to reject my reality and substitute your own.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#97

Post by robertoandred »

ukj wrote: post #11

Yes it is a liberal arts degree: no humans - no need for computation. Understanding ourselves and our needs is necessary for inventing; improving or sustaining any technology. Yes it is a STEM degree: no rigor - no computation. Understanding how the universe works is necessary in order to exploit matter and convince it to do computations for us. Everything humans do (STEM included) is for humans; and by humans. This…

Science, tech, and math fall under liberal arts. You’re creating a distinction where there isn’t one.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#98

Post by solveit »

nxrabl wrote: post #47

A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can…

> This is unique to programming as a discipline - programmers have historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale.

Politics? Economics? Writing?

I don't necessarily disagree on the dangers, but they're certainly not unique to programming. Some German guy wrote a few thousand pages of fairly dense and convoluted economics/philosophy and ninety years later an eight-digit number of Chinese people died as their nation Greatly Leaped Forward.

How? A cascade of people having "historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale".

I don't think programming has fucked up anything near this scale yet. I'm sure it will eventually, but it hasn't yet.

Re: Computer science is a liberal arts degree

#99

Post by [deleted] »

robertoandred wrote: post #97
ukj wrote: post #11

Yes it is a liberal arts degree: no humans - no need for computation. Understanding ourselves and our needs is necessary for inventing; improving or sustaining any technology. Yes it is a STEM degree: no rigor - no computation. Understanding how the universe works is necessary in order to exploit matter and convince it to do computations for us. Everything humans do (STEM included) is for humans; and by humans. This…

Science, tech, and math fall under liberal arts. You’re creating a distinction where there isn’t one.

[deleted]
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