> I think the frequenters to HN are going to be predominantly comp-sci in background, but I have seen posts from persons with expertise in practically all knowledge domains.
Yes, I also have a similar feeling, although I don't have much data to back up this assumption -- but I think the name of the site, "hacker news", has certain appealing to people with that background, although these days the general semantics of the word "hacker" has been a bit different than it was in different time periods in the past [1]...
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-short-history-of-ha...
> My thinking about academia is that tools and methods should be taught independently of fields and disciplines. You should be able to study tools and methods to the best of your ability and you shouldn't be able to fail them. Certain skills precede certain others but you can keep leveling up so to speak for as long as you are able. This means that math and logic and programming and methodologies get taught to everyone and you're encouraged to push yourself as far as you can go with them.
I think quite a few other educators (i.e. Richard Levin and Cardinal Newman) also hold similar ideas about the purpose of college education (especially liberal education)... and in Levin's own words, "the purpose of liberal education is to develop the capacity for independent thought rather than to acquire specific or 'useful' knowledge"...
Nevertheless, in practice, regardless how you can make abstractions out of it, you have to use certain knowledge from specific domains as instances and examples for such teaching....and at the end of the day, it is always the practical skills thus acquired that would give any concrete meaning to those reasoning methods and tools...
> This is an attempt to get rid of mathiness. If it's seen as a path anyone can journey along for as long as they want then we de-mythologize it.
I always feel that one nice feature about mathematics that other disciplines -- if we really could separate mathematics from them -- do not necessarily possess is its convenience in measurement...I feel that the essence of measurement, be it scalar based or non-scalar based, is differentiation (and sometimes we could enforce certain types of ordering over this differentiation)...and hence it could be nicely used in various fields of study -- after all, the core of any study is often to differentiate and to categorize a certain set of objects...
> We have to build a third culture. One that subsumes the arts/humanities and sciences. One that neither valorizes math and the hard sciences nor literature and its handmaidens. Thinking about abstraction leads to the lambda calculus in the hands of Church and to abstract expressionism in the hands of Kandinsky. What am I trying to say here? I guess it is, why do I have to go to Scientific American if I want to read about Betty Shannon but I have to read the Times Literary Supplement for the low down on Deleuze and Guattari?
Well, I guess that's a problem of personal preference...although I myself have nothing against arts or humanities. But, for instance, what senses one can make out by teaching drawing for a kid who cannot see and does not have the willing to do that kind of expression? This example might be a bit extreme, but the point is that there is a whole spectrum with all kinds of nuances and individual differences over the set of the entire human race...
But I agree that we could have this "third culture" to give those students who would love to immerse themselves into such knowledge an opportunity to develop in those aspects...
And as a matter of fact, one of the practical goals that many liberal arts colleges in the United States ( -- I am sure many other parts of the world have also been doing similarly...) is to encourage students to develop in all kinds of areas they would enjoy. For instance, one of the students I know graduated with three bachelor degrees, one in music and one in computer science ( -- I don't remember the last one)....
> Agh, maybe what I'm saying I'm not able to yet articulate. Hope this doesn't come across as pretentious waffle.
I think you have articulated it quite well...and I myself personally enjoy this type of learning too :)