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Comment by umbrellathorn | Hacker News Reader

> for a useless degree they'll never use

I went to school for such a degree. While I don't use it in my day to day now, I still consider it priceless. There's some inherent value added to a person who pursues to study a bit of humanities, history, philosophy and art in college apart from their major. Scholarly work really helps shape the way you look at life for the better.

Part of this is that you really understand why you need to trust academic work for general human advancement. We have too many people thinking it's okay to discredit scientists and scholars because they don't understand how research works.

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> We have too many people thinking it's okay to discredit scientists and scholars because they don't understand how research works.

And a similar number of people who elevate science to the level of religion, marching in its name and developing a brand of hero worship for scientists when they too know nothing at all about the scientific process. Both are forms of anti-intellectualism that are growing in our polarized political environment.

I've seen this form of scientism playing out frequently on Reddit and other Internet forums lately. Discussion will be about some piece of controversial research, e.g. GMOs or vaccines. People who want to discuss the merits of the research are shouted down by what I can only describe as 'science fanbois' -- anything that is 'against science' must be wrong.

They're missing the inherent tension in science between a received body of knowledge and the skepticism it takes to produce new knowledge.

> Some piece of controversial research, e.g. GMOs or vaccines

Who or what determines what is controversial?

To me, vaccines are not controversial at all. You can pick and choose specific ones to argue about, but the concept of vaccines is literally proven, beyond a doubt.

As for GMOs, there's a lot more room but even still, the fundamentals are nothing controversial. This is also proven in pretty much anything you can buy in a grocery store today.

Controversial literally just means that there's strong, polarizing disagreement. It's fairly well-defined, and vaccines definitely qualify. This doesn't mean that examining the actual positions of each side would lead you to conclude that they're of equal worth: it just describes the significant disagreement that exists. (As opposed to, say, the heliocentric model)

I don't think it's really about science, it's more about reddit. You'll find the same thing on any discussion on any somewhat popular subreddit regardless of the subject. There's almost always a reddit hivemind sanctioned Good Answer to any issue and if you stray away from the Good Path you'll get buried in downvotes, regardless of how much effort you put into arguing your point. Conversely if you make a completely useless one-liner comment agreeing with the Good Answer then you'll be showered with upvotes and propelled to the top of the page.

Upvote/downvotes are de-facto agree/disagree buttons on reddit. As a forum it's completely useless to discuss anything beyond cat pictures and funny gifs.

HN isn't all that different, so it's probably about more than just reddit.

For example, you can post the same remarks criticizing functional programming in a post about C# or Java and get upvotes, while the same post in a Haskell discussion will be downvoted. You can try the experiment yourself to verify it.

This applies to companies as well - you will be upvoted for pro-Microsoft or anti-Google posts in a news topic about Microsoft, and the reverse in a news topic about Google. This is because people who use Microsoft products will be very interested in Microsoft news, but not interested enough in Google news to go and downvote opinions they disagree with there.

> For example, you can post the same remarks criticizing functional programming in a post about C# or Java and get upvotes, while the same post in a Haskell discussion will be downvoted.

It's simply unreasonsble to think that the value of a comment is independent of its context.

Certainly, although it's clear that the largest part of the context would be the audience that the comment is exposed to. And it also shows that the upvote and downvote feature is not used correctly here either - it's used to promote or hide comments that the viewer agrees or disagrees with.

Just the same as Reddit. It's a deeper issue than just being 'reddit', and it's more about online discussion in general.

It's significantly better in my experience. It's not perfect but you can actually have a plurality of opinions on a subject. I think the fact that the community is tighter and that low karma accounts can't actually downvote help massively. Also no visible scores which reduces the "gaming" aspect. I kind of wish HN would go a little further still and ration downvotes for everybody, it shouldn't be something you throw willy-nilly.

That's true. Maybe the issue is that when there's only a 'down' and an 'up' button, people infer everything into it. Maybe we should have an 'up' button for interesting posts, a 'flag' button for posts that don't add to the discussion, and 'agree' and 'disagree' buttons to make it clear that it's a different thing from upvoting a comment.

Then people could turn on or off some way to see which posts are heavily agreed or disagreed with without downvoting interesting posts just because you disagree. You could even have a system where you mark people you respect and then only see which posts they agreed with to get a more personal feel? Might be an interesting discussion board idea to pursue.

The community is smaller, the barrier to finding the place are higher.

There are several factors that ensure better Signal to Noise ratios in communities.

Protective Moats, specific technical subject matter, for example.

Essentially it boils down to difficulty to engage, or non trivial effort required to engage.

The factors you mentioned have little impact on the behavior of the sub, which is mostly influenced by the people and norms of behavior, over the UI.

>Discussion will be about some piece of controversial research, e.g. GMOs or vaccines. People who want to discuss the merits of the research are shouted down by what I can only describe as 'science fanbois' -- anything that is 'against science' must be wrong.

Discussions on reddit (and all sorts of other social platforms) are being influenced and manipulated by people who are being paid to do so, and anyone who denies that at this point is delusional.

Source: I know people who run firms that provide this service.

It's always fascinating to me how little some of these people understand science. There was a forum I frequented where there was a prolific "scientism" poster, and pretty much every time several of the working scientists on the site, myself included, were like "Um...that's not how this works."

I was referring to the work one has to go through to get your research recognized in the scientific community, for example. I'm not "worshipping" science.

I had in mind people who go on planes to disprove the earth being round, who believe crystals have actual healing powers, or people who refuse proven cancer treatment.

Say what? I'd say a "propper scientist" will know about the "scientific process" pretty well.

Sure, there are plenty of pseudo scientists out there that promote their political or economic agendas, but you can't discredit all science because of that.

Right now "hard" science is the best way to explain things around us and the universe. Sure, often it is wrong as new science gets discovered, but that's how human knowledge evolves.

As for the "soft" sciences (anything social/psyc, etc), that's a completely different matter. They are more prone to trends, fads and more personal biases, hence I would put them in a different category.

I think the sentence is meant as 'too many people who don't understand research and are therefore willing to discredit scientists'

That was poor wording. It was in reference to the science "cheerleaders" who, from my own observations, are often equally as clueless about science as there anti-science counterparts.

> They are more prone to trends, fads and more personal biases

This is not necessarily true, and I would urge caution when making such generalizations. There is junk social science and there is also plenty of junk "hard" science. Examples of fake data, political and personal biases interfering with the scientific method, occur in all fields. Some "fads" eventually become accepted fact. It took 100 years before plate tectonics was accepted by the majority of the scientific community, there are many such examples.

Don't universally discount social science: it is just as important as physical science. We actually need more social scientists to help understand the reasons behind anti-science movements in the first place, and to help legitimize science as a process, critial thinking, and to debunk illogical arguments.

When you have prominent social scientists arguing that pointing out statistical errors in papers is "Methodological Terrorism" (http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...), I call that junk science.

And if social scientists want to "help legitimize science as a process, critial thinking, and to debunk illogical arguments.", they should start with fixing their own reproducibility crisis and p-hacking crisis before instructing other people on science as a process.

I completely side with Gelman on this issue, but you can't point to this one case to dismiss all of social science. One can find examples of p-hacking, irreproducible research, and fabricated data in any field, but the existence of such does not invalidate the entire discipline.

I am merely cautioning against over generalization that just because there are some high profile examples of bad social science, there is still a lot of very good social science happening and it would be a shame to ignore it.

"A similar number of people" developing a brand of hero worship for scientists? Maybe I'm hugely biased but that doesn't really mirror what I see online and elsewhere.

Are you telling me that for every climate change denier, for every anti-vaxxer, for every creationist, for every chemtrail/tap water/moon landing/flat earth conspiracy theorist there's a rabid scientist who elevates the current scientific consensus to the level of religion?

That's borderline whataboutism IMO.

The "March for Science" that happened earlier this year had estimated attendance of 1.07 million.

Now go to Google Images and search for "March for Science". Nearly every sign I see is either political in nature, elevating science to a level of religion/infallibility, or casting science as a fashion/meme ("Scientific is the new chic", "Science isn't wrong", "In science we trust").

I would say that much of this is directly related to how anti-science many leaders are now.

Not sure if memes are diagnostic here. Even a sane moment these days has to resort to low quality clickbaity stuff if they want to get social media (or real life) traction.

I'm not convinced, I haven't followed that particular event closely but as far as I know it was mostly about opposing the anti-science views of Trump and his administration. Given that he said multiple times that global warming was a chinese conspiracy I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for, regardless of your opinion on the topic. Using this to say that this million of people participating are adepts of scientism is a bit of a stretch IMO.

Using the same logic I could say that the 62+ millions of Americans who voted for Trump are climate change deniers but I don't think that would be fair either.

> opposing the anti-science views of Trump and his administration

> I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for

But opposition can easily veer into defining, and then rigorously defending, a 'pro-scientific' dogma that actually ends up opposing new, legitimate research.

As a complete hypothetical, what if an esteemed climate scientist discovers evidence that global temperature increase estimates actually are too high by, say, a factor of 2? Will people take that evidence seriously, or write it off as 'climate change denial'?

Similar to Twitter, it's hard to nuance a complex thought on a garish protest sign. With the example of a sign reading "Sciences isn't wrong", that's not literally a statement of science's infallibility, it's just something some guy wrote on a sign. If you had a conversation with the individual I'm sure they would espouse to you what they meant with their sign.

It feels like an act of willful ignorance to interpret the few words or catchy phrase on a protest sign and ascribe them as that person's core beliefs.

That's part of the problem now though, there's no room for nuance. You almost HAVE to take an extreme position in order to be heard.

For instance, the GP mentioned anti-vaxxers. There are many different kinds of "alternative" stances on vaccinations, and only one (very) extreme position is "vaccines cause autism". But if you mention anything about vaccines that isn't 100% of vaccines are amazing 100% of the time you are considered an "anti-vaxxer", lumped in with the vaccines-cause-autism crazies.

Consider: I haven't made a judgement on vaccines in this comment, yet I guarantee you have a feeling/judgement about what you think I believe. Like I said, no room for nuance.

You're not presenting your opinion on the subject of vaccines though, you're presenting your opinion on the subject of having opinions about vaccines. Give me your nuanced thoughts on vaccines if you want to have a productive discussion with someone.

I think we're seeing a completely different trend, spurred on by social media and the ability for people to broadcast their own messages/opinions about a topic, and that is, everyone has a loud, and often spurious, opinion about everything. This is something that's always been true, social media is just amplifying this aspect of human nature.

It's so wild how certain topics will trigger a response. Your comment was about nuance, and I replied with (what was meant to be) a mostly complimentary comment, expanding on that topic. But you latched on to the vaccine part of it that was meant only as an example. Something about that subject really gets people's blood pressure up; I notice my comment above was downvoted as I predicted - although not by you, as far as I could tell. (FWIW a nuanced discussion about vaccines isn't germane to this topic, so I will respectfully pass on that.)

Anyway, I think you're right about social media amplifying human nature, but I don't think it's about opinions. I think most people don't really care too deeply about most things -- one major reason why voting turnouts are so low! Sure, they care about one or two things passionately, but they're mostly moderate on most things. More universally though, people care about attention. They love attention. It's wired into our DNA; babies do everything they can for attention, because attention is survival.

But it turns out that having moderate views isn't really all that interesting. It doesn't demand attention the way having (or representing to have) extreme views does. So are the extreme views genuine, or just a show for attention?

My problem with your previous comment is that while on the surface it's perfectly reasonable, it's also unsubstantial and the type of fluff you hear as an introduction to a flat earther youtube video. The good old "show both sides of the issue" that's used by all fringe theorists ever to get people to discuss their side of the story.

Of course that's a complete strawman on my part here, you didn't say any of this. But consider this for instance:

> For instance, the GP mentioned young earthers. There are many different kinds of "alternative" stances on the age of the earth, and only one (very) extreme position is "earth is 6000 years old". But if you mention anything about the age of the earth that isn't exactly *the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago" you are considered a "young earther", lumped in with the creationist crazies.

I could do the same thing about flat earth or, if I wanted to heat up the discussion even more, the holocaust.

You can and you should question everything all the time, but at some point we have to reach a consensus and move on. We can't spend all of our time proving again and again and again that the earth is round, that Earth is not 10000 years old and that vaccines do not cause autism. If new evidence surfaces it should be reconsidered of course but the case for the anti-vaxxers is pretty weak as far as I can tell.

One thing I noticed going to a major conference in my academic field last year (IDWeek for those interested). Each and every one of the plenary speakers had some reference in their talks that betrayed a classic liberal arts education.

The titans of a scientific field still valued arts, and history, and culture. And derived value from it.

Hell, I'm a working scientist and one of the most valuable classes I ever had for thinking about the world was a feminist art history class.

There is the problem. I have full respect for "useless" degrees. If people want one then they should get one. However since it is "useless" you should not be mortgaging your future to get it. Get a "real job" first and pay for the degree out of your pocket, perhaps taking night classes.

As a member of society I need you to take care of yourself. You are a burden on society if you don't have a productive job paying your own way. We provide a "safety net", but the less who use it the better. Too many people using the safety net will make society break down. We believe is education required to be productive, so we subsidize education to get more productive people in society.

Or to put it simply: If you love art, get an art degree.

These discussions often become "either/or", ignoring the possibility of studying STEM and other pre-professional fields while also receiving a thorough introduction to the humanities.

You can study Computer Science while also learning a bit of art history, or architecture, or psychology, or the sciences, or business, or...

And doing so might even make you more valuable to your employer, to yourself/your family, and to society.

> You are a burden on society if you don't have a productive job paying your own way... We believe is education required to be productive, so we subsidize education to get more productive people in society.

This mode of thinking is a great way to churn out lots of well-behaved, competent corporate employees. From this viewpoint, it follows that the path to the upper class is reserved for the already-rich.

Having a computer science degree does not guarantee gainful employment.

Nothing guarantees gainful employment.

So what?

I think it's also important to note that even people with useless degrees having higher earning potential simply by virtue of having a degree, and there is real social value in having someone who is educated in something for its own sake.

As another member of society, I think you need to rethink your position on what it means to be a burden on society.

You are not a burden just by not having a "productive job, paying your own way". You are a burden if you deny people their essential human dignity, by forcing them to conform to your vision of what they should be in order to eat. You are a burden if you take for yourself a surplus and do not use it to supply those with a dearth. You are a burden if you lie, cheat, steal, and assault. You are a burden if you do not respect and appreciate the hundreds of people working in harmony who helped each other to ensure you survived to adulthood with enough education to write your own opinions.

If all you do is sit on a couch with a cannabis vape and a game console, you're no burden to me. Some people keep house cats, and have no problem feeding them without getting much of anything in return. A "non-productive" human may yet do something. It might not be great, but could be at least marginally useful, if we allow them the time for their calling to mature and motivate them to action. Or they could just be a dud for their entire life. I don't really need to make a monkey dance in order to throw it a nut.

I don't particularly need you to take care of yourself. I may even be willing to pitch in with others to take care of you, on the conditions that you first do no harm to others, and then that you give back in whatever way you feel you are able. But that generosity only extends as far as what I think you may need. If you want something extra, you're going to need to give a little more before you get it.

We are way past the era of "no work; no eat" edicts. Thanks to our machines, we don't have a labor problem any more; we have an information problem. The systems in place for connecting creators with consumers, to everyone's mutual benefit, have never been entirely adequate, and haven't scaled very well to a world of 7.6 billion people.

Sure, and the relationship you have with your dog is probably "priceless", too, but that doesn't mean it should be trivially easy to get a three-figure loan to bring one home, and that animal shelters should charge three figures per adoption.

I'm really not belittling your degree. I value such degrees highly. I also don't think they should cost so much, nor that the student-loan bubble should be allowed to facilitate charging you so much for it. Ideally fixing the system wouldn't eliminate such degrees, they would just decrease the cost to something reasonable.

In my case, I went to school to become a musician. Got a master's degree in music performance, but got tired of working hard and earning very little.

I self taught computer science and programming, so now I have a good salary and a much more comfortable life.

I feel my bachelor's was pretty special since it was a liberal arts degree and my employer seems to recognize the difference between me and someone who didn't go to school and/or just studied STEM exclusively.

I was very lucky to have scholarships, that made it easier on me when I was younger. But wanting to go back for CS made it impossible later in life without getting in debt. And I refuse to get a student loan. It's sad that when someone didn't get lucky with a well off household or scholarships, they have to cripple themselves into debt.

While I agree that one can gain a great deal of enrichment from studying non-lucrative majors, I think people should highly consider double majoring in this case. I majored in computer science AND philosophy as an undergraduate. Doing both took under 5 years.

I think a lot of people don't realize how little they will earn with their degrees compared to how high their debt load will be. That's not including people who fail to even finish their degrees.

Isn't a philosophy/CS double major kind of like a math/CS double major? In that it expands your knowledge in the same domain, rather than a completely new one would (like, for example, studying German literature or biology would).

I remember helping my sister with her philosophy home work, and being surprised by the amount of elementary logic and set theory being taught.

That depends in large part on the philosophy department. More analytic [1] departments will teach lots of courses that could just as well be cross-listed as theoretical computer science courses.

But some departments are less analytic (e.g. departments heavy on [2] and [3] aren't too difficult to find in the US). In those departments, the mode of thinking is very different from what you'll experience in a CS course.

And in both cases, taking a lot of humanity courses will teach you how to write well. Which is definitely a skill that a lot of CS majors lack.

(Also, a course of study in analytic philosophy can definitely help round out a CS major that's too light on the theory courses.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics

I wouldn't say either of those expand your knowledge in the same domain. Related, sure.

Other than a class on logic, all of my other courses involved enormous amount of written argumentation, e.g., reasoning, ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, Asian philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of film, metaphysics, etc. I would say that only logic had a direction connection to computer science, although as a computer scientist, I would choose to write essays about the Turing test, philosophy of AI, etc. This was 15+ years ago, but I assume things are still the same in many philosophy departments.

In Australia we have the ability to do a double degree not just a double major.

It usually saves 2 years compared to doing them separately and you get 2 degrees on the final piece of testament.

I found it tremendously useful as my "humanity" was my Physics degree to complement the Comp Sci. Plenty of philosophy in the hard sciences when you learn the history and where we are going.

My alma mater required engineering students to take a reasonable amount of credits in something other than engineering. Enough to be close to a minor, but more flexible.

I always thought this was an excellent idea.

Not just nice for the people who personally went through that change, but it is also valuable for the general public to have such people around. But balanced against having more people with crushing debt I fear that the net effect is negative. A strong "background radiation" of humanities education can have a very positive effect on democracy, it is pretty much the defining difference between a working democracy and a populist nightmare. But if student loans leaved those who have the education no other option than to maximally leverage it to get ahead of others, it will likely have the opposite effect. (I felt tempted to write weaponize instead of leverage.) Maybe humanities education is only stabilizing "background radiation" when it is wasted, on the level of personal economics?

Maybe you could spend one year doing it instead of four.

Fortunately, our current education system is already set up to allow this. With a few AP credits, you can easily major in a STEM field and spend a year+ worth of time on courses outside of CS.

There are others who think it's okay to discredit scientists and scholars because they understand exactly how research works.

Apologies if I offended, I should have put "useless" in quotes. I meant degrees that society does not give as much value to as to what you paid to get them.

You can't sell soap to a pig.

Can't tell if you're enlightened or institutionalized.

> Scholarly work really helps shape the way you look at life for the better.

Like what? What scenario did you encounter and how did your studies help you? Otherwise it sounds like a vague claim that every religious institution would make.

> Otherwise it sounds like a vague claim that every religious institution would make.

Yeah it's like when people defend hazing. "Oh it builds character!" No thanks please.

If I can steal your question for the parent comment and get more specific:

> the way you look at life for the better

Do you feel your outlook has improved, or are your life outcomes measurably better, and how?

Additional question: was it worth the $37,000 in debt, and do you think that perhaps we could achieve the same better-ness with less debt?

> Like what? What scenario did you encounter and how did your studies help you? Otherwise it sounds like a vague claim that every religious institution would make.

Studying for a degree involves more than just reading a book. A good degree (no matter what major you choose) should leave you with the skills and capabilities to learn and teach yourself new skills. This - not the knowledge gained - is by far the most valuable takeaway that I have from my studies: Oh, I need to learn about the problem space X. How do I start, research, teach myself things about something previously unknown. School teaches knowledge, university learning skills.

Degrees are cost prohibitive and there's no incentive to increase supply. Higher costs signal exclusivity and prestige - which I would argue is the true value of a degree. It's an item of luxury that is intended to open doors for you.

If we could objectively measure the tangible benefits of a degree and replicate it with a low cost alternative - it still wouldn't carry the same prestige because it's not exclusionary. I think the greatest barrier to truly accessible education is our status seeking behavior.

This was not my experience. I think the University in this case matters; and thus we shall not conclude that all of them are useless or priceless.

My opinion is that many (I'd say most but I'm not certain) of the universities in the US are pretty good.

"There's some inherent value added to a person who pursues to study a bit of humanities, history, philosophy and art in college apart from their major. Scholarly work really helps shape the way you look at life for the better."

I dont feel this is the case, and I wouldnt say its priceless. its on average ~30k$ + 2 years of extra course work, and honestly, we are getting very little bang for our buck.

it has little impact on my career, but cutting my tuition nearly in half, and giving nearly 2 years back to me would be huge.

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