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Comment by AdamM12 | Hacker News Reader

I'd say the anti-intellectual authoritarianism has emanated from campuses. That being said when I first went to college I also held the view that mandating some level of humanities was important to be "well-rounded", and on some level still think this is true, but I've since soured on the people who say we need more B-school & Engineering schools students taking these classes to promote so called "critical thinking" as I've felt that "skill" is more a personal mentality than any thing taught in a class. That and I think it is rent seeking by the schools who have less economic resources. Also part of my souring is, which I think you are alluding to, that it seems to be more about indoctrination than anything else.

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No... “rounding” is mostly about being able to coherently think and write, which requires structured practice to achieve competence or mastery. The median engineer is awful at both.

I do agree that the dumbing down of universities comes from universities, and the prominence and political power of nonsensical areas of study drags everyone down.

The median engineer is not able to coherently think and write? Is the median humanities grad better able to do this?

I don't see much of a difference. The majority of engineers I've interacted with have actually been well adjusted people who can coherently think and write.

You probably work with a lot of engineers.

The time a CS graduate spends learning algorithms and honing fluency in computer languages is spent by a history major reading, analysis and writing papers. On average you tend to be better at things you do a lot. It’s not to say the average engineer cannot think and write, but those aren’t skills you select for. In some cases, you may need engineering talent who can not communicate in your language!

Engineers write less and for a different purpose. A technical writer, newspaper journalist and novelist approach a similar action (writing) with a different approach and methodology.

There’s a reason why you see attorneys in leadership roles outside of their domain than other professions that attract smart, diligent workers. (There are few doctors in politics or non-medical corporate leadership positions, for example.) They tend to be better at broad-scope analysis and zoom in a deeply technical area with consultative assistance, and they tend to be better able to communicate the outcome of that analysis. They tend to be humanities or social science majors.

Median any position is probably not terribly great at it. Agnostic of engineering imo. I do think you need structured practice to get good at anything but I don't necessarily believe that needs to come from a mandated class, i.e. structured self study, nor do I think mandating the class would actually get people to absorb the material. I'd imagine you probably attended some liberal arts classes that had a subset, if not majority, of people who were there simply because it was mandated. Those persons aren't necessarily interested and because of that won't put forth the effort so why waste the teachers time or the students through coercion? Does one really need to master any given skill to "succeed" in life? I think simply being good enough at any given thing you live a good life is a fine bar to set.

I actually think that my writing improved more during my CS degree than my history degree.

In CS there was an emphasis on clarity, succinctness, and thinking about how well you've communicated your ideas to your intended audience.

Having said that, maybe the large volumes of writing practice from history made me receptive to those lessons.

There were also a couple of history professors who were very good at cutting through overly flowery and insufficiently meaningful writing with comments like "where is your evidence for this?".

I haven't the slightest idea of what "Critical Thinking" is; the term seems more cant of the education decryer than anything else.

However, I will say that the apprehension of works of beauty and the development of abstract thinking patterns with regards to ethics, anthropology, and metaphysics are valuable, for reasons I'm not certain how to articulate. I might only say that I would not wish to live in a world without them, and would consider anyone who--having the means to appreciate them and the requisite intellectual ability--found them simply unnecesary or undesirable, to simply lack som essential form of humanity.

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