How to Get a Real Education | Hacker News Reader

How to Get a Real Education

online.wsj.com

61 pointsajhai9 comments

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2426459

Some false premises:

That a B student shouldn't learn physics, mathematics and can't be an engineer (whether software or even electrical or mechanical engineering).

That it isn't worth it for a B student to study the classics.

That entrepreneurship is easier than hard sciences or engineering: from what I've seen, the skill-sets involved are orthogonal, and such a blanket statement can't be made.

Re-reading this after his sockpuppet outing, it reads even more smug, self-congratulatory & non-ethical.

The argument for teaching physics (or any subject) to everyone is that with a basic understanding of the subject, one can make better decisions regarding things like global warming, standing on a spinning chair with wheels to change a light bulb, being deathly afraid of nuclear power, etc.

A bit smug. Is there no use for a renaissance man any more?

I think there's a place for a Renaissance man; I fancy myself a fledgling. But the Renaissance man of yore was independently wealthy, or engaged in a profitable enterprise not accessible to the mundanes: the combination of useful breadth and interesting depth requires resources both temporal and monetary.

So to focus on a largely dull, specialized and marketable education in one's youth is no sin. It allows the development of that depth later on.

There is room for abstract math and creative writing and painting and essay writing, but they should be a side dish to the main course of "Getting Shit Done."

I've always said that becoming a generalist is a two-step process:

1. Become a specialist

2. Become a generalist

Step one is important because it gives you a useful and marketable skill to support yourself while you're working on step two, but also because it means you understand what it really means to be an expert on something. This gives you some humility and perspective when you start attacking all the other domains of human knowledge.

Unfortunately, in terms of learning the same proportions of the total sum of knowledge as the old renaissance men, attaining real renaissance personhood is impossible at current life spans. Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much. A scaling problem, the entropy per bit of data is decreasing, we are increasing the total number of bits of data in our knowledge at a much higher rate than we are its entropy.

Now it is such that you are a generalist if you have peripheral knowledge of related sub sub fields of your sub field of expertize in some sub section of a topic.

> Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much.

I think we are boosting our learning capacity and efficiency by better understanding how our minds work, and how this giant web of knowledge that we have created can be simplified. I'm absolutely dumbstruck that we still teach the majority of children using the same methods used for at least a hundred years, despite the (information) world being a completely different place than it was even a decade ago.

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