Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

IMHO most people should take a STEM degree if they're going to uni. Not because of the labour market, which is a fickle thing.

The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also after education, where you're reading the newspaper, looking at art, and so on. Importantly you aren't going to lose the text reading skill because you'll be using it a little each day.

So you have plenty of practice in the humanities, at least to get you started doing it seriously if you need it later in life. And you have enough that you're not gonna be surprised when someone mentions there was a civil war in the US.

Math stuff seems to be use it or lose it. You can easily avoid linear algebra and big-o thinking, and you will if you aren't forced to think about it. If you do a STEM degree at least you will have heard of stuff and practiced a load of otherwise obscure topics, giving you a starting point that isn't years behind on prerequisites, and leaving you where you won't know what's interesting.

I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.

I don't think I would argue that reading itself is as hard as learning and using math concepts, but it is a skill that can be lost. after a few years of mainly reading documentation and forum posts, I feel my skill at reading longer-form content has atrophied.

> I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.

most interested people can read pop-history, pop-econ, etc. type books and sound pretty knowledgeable in casual discussions, but all they are really learning is how to parrot a couple popular authors' opinions. I think the real observation here is that humanities are much easier to "bullshit" about than something like math, where it actually has to make sense within a rigorous framework.

I would argue that the type of deep dives into original documents that you do in a humanities degree is actually quite difficult. to do this type of learning well is no easier than learning STEM topics, imo.

I also think that STEM degrees teach you to break down problems mechanically and "think like a machine". It also can teach you to be able to project an idea to a logical conclusion even if that end point is uncomfortable or surprising. That might not sound like a skill to a lot of people, but I've noticed people without STEM educations or who aren't self-taught in some sort of similar way aren't always great at doing that. I noticed that the people that dropped out in the first year of CS, for instance, really struggled with seeing the machine as having intentions, or at least anthropomorphizing it more than was useful.

That being said, I also notice that a lot of my STEM colleagues look down on creatives and humanities, which is really unfortunate. It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.

Great point. I think there are some subtle things about Maths in particular and science in general that make it more educational. One is learning to accept and understand things that are at first counter-intuitive. When solving Maths problems I seem to recall that it was often easy to fool myself into a wrong solution due to faulty intuition. Maths trains you to distrust it, dig into problems, use logic and check/test your solution. Furthermore the hard feedback you get helps all the above. Discussing something or writing an essay on a topic which doesn't have a defined answer doesn't seem like a great educational experience even though the activity itself is valuable.

> It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.

Did you do a humanities degree and a cs degree? I did a psychology degree then went back to school later to get my cs degree.

The intellectual rigor just isn't there in any humanities classes because most of the students shouldn't be in college at all. Yes, there was a small handful of really smart people in psychology but most of the students were there to party for 4-5 years while their parents paid for it.

Generalizations are such fun; when you say, "The intellectual rigor just isn't there in any humanities classes because most of the students shouldn't be in college at all" I think you are conflating rigor with substance. Computer Science is easy but tedious if you're a Math major as I was. On the other hand, Native American literature was anything but easy because it required the clarity of a different world view as well as being able to write about it within the reality of the "inside-outside" nature where much of the literature originates. That understanding and the ability to write well is a rigor of its own.

I don't know, rigor is really hard to define outside of sciences, and even then, a science can be not as rigorous as others and still tell you useful things. I mean, economics isn't quite as rigorous as physics, but it's still useful.

One of the hardest but most rewarding classes I took in college was creative writing. There's not a ton of "rigor" to that; a lot of it is really subjective, and even with the widely agreed upon rules, there are certainly times when it's useful to break them. But I learned a ton from that class all the same.

The proliferation of boot camp grads and autodidacts getting hired in industry would seem to suggest that CS does not apply the same way as other STEM degrees- compared to say mechanical or chemical engineering, one need not be immersed in such math concepts since college to get through industry.

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