On path to riches, no sign of fluffy majors
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Engineering, and to a lesser extent the professional fields like Law and Medicine were intended to let smart bourgeoisie bootstrap themselves.
I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers?
This isn't the way our society works anymore, and the liberal arts curricula never really adapted with the times. To some extent, liberal arts is still a valuable major for those wanting to pursue Law, and whose colleges do not have a discrete "pre-law" curriculum. Other than that, however, liberal arts is fairly impractical. Still valuable for intellectual development, but intellectual development of a sort that's not prized or valued or applicable to modern working society.
It's also been popular in the American context, which isn't a society that has a rigid class structure. That at least used to be connected with a certain view of democracy and self-government, which held that liberal-arts education was a prerequisite for a working democratic society (e.g. Thomas Jefferson's views).
It's just the newspaper version of a repost.
Well, the constant supply of graduates with six figures of debt and a degree in medieval basket weaving complaining that they can't find a decent job suggests that this obvious lesson still hasn't sunk in.
Besides, not everything in your newspaper has to be new.
Oh, and a third thing: it fits in well with the recent "higher education bubble" meme. Higher education isn't overpriced if you do it right, but it is overpriced if you study the wrong things.
Why would I leave the "path to riches" to earn - at best - the same as I've made as a teenager? Meaning. Research and teaching give meaning to an otherwise dull life of emailing people I've never met about issues that no one will remember in a few years time. It's fun to work with people, fun to talk about issues that no one quite understands (language acquisition, in my case), and exhilarating to teach students who will hopefully outperform me in every way.
This community is largely driven by money. People ask "How hard is it to make an app that makes $XXXX in revenue?" at least once per week. But there are other things that provide meaning and drive in people's lives. I've forgotten it on a fair share of occasions, but I hope I never look down on someone who dedicates four years (or more) of their time to studying the arts/humanities as opposed to the "hard" sciences or engineering.
Be warned, though. The path to being a tenured professor is littered with brilliant people. Another reason why I did not want to go into academia is that the tenure process at a research university is grueling, and you aren't given much to bootstrap it with.
I'm telling myself not to be nervous about all the brilliant people, but to try and learn from them along the way.
What I mean is, don't feel obligated to be become an academic. I use the term "love" deliberately, because you may end up feeling a similar kind of commitment to academia that people feel to their lovers. That is, the relationship isn't doing you any good right now, but you want to continue based on how you used to feel and commitments you made to yourself based on those feelings.
A lot will happen in the ~5 years it will take for you to get your PhD - just as a lot can happen in a serious relationship. You may come out at the other side not wanting what you did when you started, and that's okay.
I will agree - if you are having trouble making rent and keeping food in the fridge, you're probably not having a very good time looking for meaning in life.
But do you really need to maximize your income? Do you need a $300K job in finance or a $120K job writing code?
I also have a degree in history, so I did pursue liberal arts at the same time. But I knew that wasn't enough for a complete life, in my case.
It's hard to realize that happiness is everywhere, even in abject poverty, when you are financially comfortable.
It takes a lot of effort and a unique mindset to change momentum when you're on a successful trajectory; you're less likely to take a risk to discover a more meaningful life.
You will make connections and develop a lifestyle that keep you happy and comfortable enough that you will not want to make a change, even when that change would eventually be for the better.
Life will happen. If there's something you're curious about or otherwise want to do, why wait?
"The study of humanities imbues us with a rich internal, emotional wealth such that graduates do not feel the compulsive need for ultimately harmful acquisitive obsessions throughout their lives, whereas holders of science degrees are condemned by their mechanistic brainwashing to toil furiously for worthless material rewards."
Fortunately I did CS though. Humanities students are free to license it from me.
1. Higher education isn't about learning how to perform in a vocation; it's about learning how to learn. It's not about taking the next step in a career path; it's about being exposed to the wisdom of history, about making one's inner world more expansive, about learning to think in radically different ways.
2. An undergraduate degree is an indication to a prospective employer that you have the intelligence and discipline to stay with a four-year program. You can learn most truly valuable working skills in training or on the job.
The problem with both of these assumptions is that even if I believe them, not many others (esp. prospective employers) seem to.
Which is ok because I'm constitutionally not a particularly materialistic person and I did find my education to be very enriching, valuable, and, well, educational.
Also, I'm still sort of trying to prove the second one by learning to program in my free time (from my boring, low-level bureacratic government job).
There's your problem. Do you really believe that someone with an English degree can pick up up a programming language as fast as someone with a degree in CS?
It's no surprise that employers don't share your assumptions, they are wrong.
It's wholly possible that I'd lose that bet.
The bigger point, though, to me, is that "how fast can you pick up a programming language" isn't what I thought about when choosing a major. That's not what I thought college was about.
I honestly believe that employers would do better to consider Humanities majors who did very well in school, and otherwise demonstrate that they're intelligent, disciplined, and capable if not yet specifically qualified for the job. That's probably harder to figure out, but filtering by degree, then, is just laziness.
It does appear that college is becoming a more vocational education, which I think is unfortunate. And that's probably because employers think like you do. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Why signal it in a fields that sometimes don't even really depend on any skill at all (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) rather than show off your discipline and intelligence in something like engineering or physics?
I think your understanding of my position is colored by your assumptions about value. If you mean "no intrinsic value" as 'employability' or 'earning potential,' I would say that I value other things more than either of those. To answer the question, though, I wasn't trying to signal my intelligence when I chose my degree. I was trying to learn. I was exploring fields that I found interesting. I chose Comp Lit specifically because it offered me the broadest set of opportunities for learning. (I minored in Linguistics, and would have probably double majored if I thought I could afford to spend another six months in school.)
As for skill, I think you misrepresent what the Sokal hoax was about, and what it proved.
I actually did start school as a CS major, and I found it interesting and still do, but the CS curriculum was prohibitively restrictive and exclusive to other fields, and I wanted to explore more. If any of the 'hard' fields had given me more cross-disciplinary opportunities, I probably would have chosen one of them.
Do you understand the basics of how a compiler translates C code into assembly? Do you understand some of the basic concepts of computer design (why we need RAM, how cache improves performance, or how an operating system allows you to run multiple applications at once)? That's not even getting to the level of understanding what a transistor is, or the calculus behind Ohm's law? Knowing how and why something works makes it easier to know what can be done within the bounds of the system, and the better you know the system, the easier it is to find ways to take the system further than someone else could.
I doubt you think you should be able to become a doctor, lawyer, architect, mechanical engineer, or other advanced profession without a related degree, so why do you think that the computer industry should be any different?
And as with the rest of the professions you mention, I imagine there are many subfields of programming for which school is the best place to learn the specific advanced technical and conceptual aspects of, but not for an undergraduate degree.
I guess I wish I could have learned more CS as part of my Comp Lit degree, but everything beyond CSE 142 and 143 were closed to me as a non-major.
I also didn't mean to imply that I was looking for programming jobs fresh out of school, nor that programming was the only field that I was looking for jobs in. I'm learning to program on my own because I want to, but I was looking for jobs in many fields, but despite the degree and four years of military experience, I had a really hard time. Probably a big part of that was the state of the general economy, but I got the feeling that the 'soft' degree was also a part of it.
I do understand the economics of the situation. With so many people graduating from college with a specifically applicable degree in the field you're in, why would you hire anyone else? And, relatedly, why would you pursue a degree in something that isn't going to be directly related to a job when you graduate?
Maybe it sounds like sour grapes from someone who picked the wrong major and regrets it, and maybe that is a component, but it's not a complete description of how I feel. I do think a well rounded education is valuable, maybe not in the sense that it's going to make you more money, but in the sense that it makes you a better person, and makes the society that you're a part of a better one.
And that's not to say I think I'm better than you because I studied literature and you didn't. It's just that college might be the last chance for you to get exposure to different ideas, different people, different experiences.
Well-roundedness is not something one gets just from studying the humanities. Knowledge of science, mathematics, and basic engineering are also essential. This gets overlooked a lot in discussions where the issue is framed as "high salary versus a well-rounded education".
Unless we redefine well-rounded in a way that is contrary to its original meaning, engineers may very well be more well-rounded than people studying humanities.
From your life as a coffeeshop barista rooming with 6 other people to pay the college debt, how do you feel about that now?
/snark
I believe that education in humanities does not incapacitate people in any way, and the "critical thinking" skill it teaches is actually an extremely worthwhile and essential skill. However, there is a perception (based on some legitimate evidence) that it is easier to "wing it" in college if you are majoring in humanities. In other words, the very best humanities graduates may indeed be all very smart, however the portion of people who winged it while in college is probably higher among the humanities majors (it's hard to get away with a wrong math answer). So if you have little people experience, hiring an engineering graduate can be a "safer" bet depending on your industry. Which leads to engineers being biased to hiring other engineers. I personally believe that both "soft" and "hard" skills are desirable (but of course I am biased myself since I believe that I possess both...)
In the empirical method, you are encouraged to put on a blindfold and pretend to be perfectly unbiased when making a decision. That works very well for things about which you can actually pretend to be unbiased. Less so for things where you have to make conclusions based on your life experience.
Critical thinking (as opposed to the scientific method) becomes important when doing things like hiring people. I cannot afford to go outside, put on a mask, randomly sample people, spend a few years with each, write down the results, and generate a correctly averaged profile of my perfect employee. On the other hand, I do have an intuitive "feeling" for what type of people I am compatible with, what type of person is most likely to be smart and productive, and I have to make decisions based on this. At the same time I have to take into account my own biases.
Critical thinking as taught in the humanities is about balancing biases, while the empirical method as taught in the hard sciences is about attempting to remove bias altogether. The latter is superior but very expensive.
Engineering schools aren't there to teach you human resource management and promotional strategies. When people need it, they pick it up on their own, like you claim to have done. Most of the startups run by engineers do their own promotion and management - is their something you learnt which says you can do it better than the engineers who are doing it? I highly doubt it. I am not putting you down - I am just saying the things as they appear to me.
Information design, in the sense of good UX, is picked by people who have the knack for it; others hire help. UX is largely a black art and I would rather trust someone with a track record than someone who claims to have learnt it while studying art.
> and the "critical thinking" skill it teaches is actually an extremely worthwhile and essential skill
Critical thinking is important. What does humanities do which teaches critical thinking, and what do CS programs do which hampers critical thinking? If anything, hard sciences are supposed to inculcate critical thinking.
> Which leads to engineers being biased to hiring other engineers.
That's called heuristics. If the project needs an engineer, why would I go looking for a non-engineer? If you don't have a degree, but a track record, that's fine. But why on earth would I care about you humanities degree.
Additionally, I don't feel that I struggle in understanding social situations and norms, not as much as the typical engineer.
But also I feel at times that my CS knowledge is not as deep as it could be -- I am probably at or below average for CS majors in my theoretical understanding, despite having some major engineering accomplishments.
Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions? The CS I know has a large, abstract part and any and all concrete things you see today originated from abstract reasoning. Didn't Lisp originate from an abstract paper implementing a turing-complete machine from basic operators?
This is the second post I am replying to which talks about insights and abstract questions which technical(or CS) people supposedly lack. It would really help to have a couple of concrete examples.
If you consider the knowledge and abstraction capability it takes to design the schema for an app -- thinking about the knowledge in the system at a meta level -- philosophy is in some ways analogous to that.
However, even if there was a perfectly obvious analogy between ontology in CS and philosophical ontology, I think that many engineers would still forgo thinking deeper about life. (Sorry, I know how condescending that sounds and I don't mean it that way.)
> Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions?
This type of response is annoying. Is there anything that prevents an eight-year-old from learning C and doing your job? Theoretically, no. Practically, yes. It's not the right question, because whether there or isn't something that prevents them from asking those questions, the perception is that they don't do it.
The typical argument about the value of humanities is that it teaches "critical thinking." This argument has to be made because a humanities education does not teach many skills which are directly useful in a job. For example, not many people are going to get a job where they are asked to write a critical analysis of a book. So, the argument is that the critical thinking skills required to do that analysis will transfer to tasks that are part of a job. I don't disagree with this argument. That is, the critical thinking skills will transfer, even if the specific skills will not.
irahul's point is that a CS education requires developing critical thinking skill as well. And if we're going to argue that the critical thinking skills required to write an English essay will transfer, then we must also argue that the critical thinking skills required to design a compiler will also transfer.
By the way, what you said is condescending, and I don't know how it could not be.
Hive mind at work? You wait to see how others are responding to my posts and then use annoying language?
> Is there anything that prevents an eight-year-old from learning C and doing your job? Theoretically, no. Practically, yes.
Is there anything that prevents a CS major from thinking at abstract level? Theoretically, no. Practically, no.
Does CS encourage abstract reasoning? Yes.
> It's not the right question, because whether there or isn't something that prevents them from asking those questions, the perception is that they don't do it.
CS comprises both abstract, theoretical aspects as well as concrete applications. If we are talking about that they don't do it in CS context, where does "CS doesn't do abstract" perception came from?
Hell if I know -- you should be asking yourself, since you're the only one who is making this imaginary claim.
If I had to guess, it comes from your deep-seated psychological need to make sure that getting an engineering degree was the correct decision in life, and not one that will ultimately lead you to a lonesome, unhappy and desperate existence in your middle years as a mid-tier engineer of no particular importance. And worse, you might spend those years watching the guys with the humanities degrees become successful leaders of their fields (and yours), starting families and having many children with their beautiful wives. (This foray into the source of that claim, which only you have made, was facetious, mind you.)
Or at least that's what I would guess from the degree of defensiveness you've employed to protect your choice of major from attacks that you imagine are being leveled against you -- despite the record clearly showing no such thing has been said.
I can't imagine why else you would interpret relatively benign statements about the benefits of other fields as being pointed and offensive like you have.
You deleted your first reply, probably because you decided it was inappropriate. (I downvoted and flagged it - something I have done only a handful of times.) I don't think this one is much better.
All of his responses have been a defensive, reactionary manifestation of that prejudiced conclusion.
My response is largely in jest -- a lighthearted guess as to why somebody would be so rigidly opposed to the benign and obvious concept of comparative advantages -- since it's either that or flame him back. I can't provide a defense for what he thinks other people have said on other comments.
The first response was out of line, that's why I removed it. I think this one is much better.
I think as someone who has both an engineering and a humanities education, I am the last person who would have an emotional stake one way or another. On the other hand, a cursory examination of his comments would show that every response to "the benefit of a humanities education is X" is met with a reaction with something of the form "engineering students can also do X" (meaning that they are physically capable of doing it).
This reaction occurs regardless of the merits of the initial claim, and without a basic examination of its points. He then delves into what I can only call a petty dissection of the semantics of the argument. If I had said that a benefit of my education was the prominent role of public speaking and debate, no doubt that would immediately have been met by a predictable, worthless (in the literal sense of providing no value) rejoinder: CS students can debate also.
This is a degenerate point and not at relevant to a serious discussion of what benefits are provided by a humanities education. That sort of criticism can be leveled at anything.
This doesn't even address the fact that the way he has chosen to frame this conversation is totally absurd. "CS doesn't do abstract" is what he thinks people are saying, which would be a ridiculous statement to make. The terms of the debate don't allow for any sort of gradation or nuance -- this perspective can't admit that there is a qualitative difference in abstract reasoning between engineers and philosophy, while still allowing that both receive an education in it.
That isn't what I was looking for. I was responding to "abstract and esoteric questions" and the implications that somehow CS people don't have the knack for the abstract. I am just saying that philosophy might or might not have abstract and esoteric questions(I don't know and don't care), but CS has them for sure and have had even since its genesis.
> However, even if there was a perfectly obvious analogy between ontology in CS and philosophical ontology,
Why would I care? How does this come into picture at all? I was responding to your abstract questions, which to me came out as somehow philosophy helps you understand CS better. If you didn't mean that, we aren't discussing the same topic.
> I think that many engineers would still forgo thinking deeper about life.
Again, how does this relate to philosophy and CS majors? And what is deep for me isn't necessarily deep for me. You might like pondering over if god exists and what's the meaning of existence. Sorry to sound condescending, but if that's what you meant about thinking deeper about life, that isn't deep enough for me. I have my personal belief system which changes based on my perception and that's good enough for me.
Not what I said at all.
From looking at your responses here and elsewhere on this post, it seems that you have difficulty accepting the idea that other fields of study might present skills that are not ordinarily available to a CS student.
I'm sorry you've chosen to take offense -- and become defensive -- to the proposition that different majors offer different skills. This seems like it would be the wrong thread for you to participate in, since that is the fundamental assumption.
I have difficulty accepting the idea philosophy, humanities or any other discipline makes you more competent at CS than CS education itself. If philosophy taught you something valuable, good for you. It didn't teach you CS and didn't make you more competent at CS.
You are the one who is having difficulty understanding that your abstract and esoteric questions aren't unique to philosophy, and things which are unique to philosophy don't add anything to make you more competent at CS.
> This seems like it would be the wrong thread for you to participate in.
This seems like unnecessary fluff.
EDIT: On second thoughts, this really is the wrong thread for me to participate in.
You keep editing your posts, not because you are correcting a typo or adding a new perspective, but based on if my post is downvoted or not. You use offensive language when my post is grayed, and delete that when it's not.
Why you continue to do that is beyond me, nor is it clear to me why you think that abstract reasoning about nodes in a graph is the same as abstract reasoning about life and existence. Your argument -- inasmuch as you have presented one, between your fits of pettiness -- hinges on this idea, presented without any sort of justification, that all abstraction skills are equal.
It's as silly as saying that a programmer must know linguistics, since programming results from the study and expression of a language. And therefore, the linguistic field of study presents no benefits over CS, since all programmers know linguistics.
(Just saw your edit and I'd like to note that none of your posts here are gray. I don't even know if you and I are responding to the same thread at this point.)
People with technical backgrounds have insights on things which you won't have when you are beginning. More often than not, insights originate from relevant background.
Not trying to prove you wrong or anything, but can you quote one or two specific examples of these insights which you think people coming from technical background don't seem to have.
> not to mention all the communication skills that come in handy
In my experience, technical people have above average communication skills. I am talking communication skills - not social skills(how to be nice when you actually aren't). Technical people hone their communication skills the same way you do - they read and write a lot - blogs, mails, books etc. Sure they aren't going to go win a booker(neither do most of English majors; if we are talking literary achievement of that scale, you undergrad isn't going to be a significant impact) but as far as communication goes, that doesn't seem to be a problem.
Take HN for example. There are a lot of people with purely technical background here. Do you think HN crowd has poorer communication skill compared to your non-technical crowd?
> most people I've known are trained to think that interest in one completely excludes interest in the other.
I don't know about people you know but I would rather read "Coders at work", GEB, "You must be joking, Mr Feynman" etc than Ancient Indian civilizations or romans contribution to science.
I haven't been trained not to like it. I simply have no interest or use for it.
https://github.com/jashkenas/ was an English major I think, his JavaScript projects are one home run after another- Docco, Underscore, Backbone, CoffeeScript.
http://www.flight404.com still wouldn't call himself a proper programmer, since he writes crappy code, but through his mix of art and programming he popularized a new computer graphics trend. Processing, OpenFrameworks probably wouldn't be where they are today without him.
Steve Jobs' famous example is when he took a typography course, learned the importance of proper text design. In a speech he said if he didn't include those insights in the Mac, PCs would not have them for decades, since they copied the Mac. He's probably right, programmers left to their own devices would have stuck with typography from terminals.
The Flash movement was driven by programmers interested in art.
Software engineering on its own is a pretty narrow interest. A surefire way for technological/human progress to get stuck is to focus on a single discipline. Chasing salaries in the hip disciplines makes sense for individuals but sucks for economies, imagine if we had more patent troll lawyers.
Look, I am not saying people who haven't majored in CS can't write good code. I am taking exception to the remark that you can do your undergrad in English, join a CS grad program and have insights about CS owing to your English program. That simply can't happen.
Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates et al. didn't finish college. That doesn't imply not finishing college gives you insight college doesn't.
Code quality probably isn't influenced by unrelated experience, but the decision making, what projects to choose, how extensive they should be, what's important, is heavily influenced by outside experience.
Look at the example of startups. Often engineers who start them focus on cool technology, lose sight of the business, customer needs, can't come up with reasonable product ideas etc. They need guidance from people who ran a software business, made these mistakes and understood what's important.
It's the same with any other additional discipline, if you major in English prior to programming you're better positioned to make a word processor or document startup. I think you'd also be better at designing clear APIs and readable code, documentation for others. So many CS-only majors are horrible there. If you majored in design, better at making design tools.
Sure you can pick up skills after getting a CS a degree and the startup approach could give you that. But is that a better approach than majoring in art then picking up CS?
When you have too many college grads coming into a field, taught similar curriculum and Java, you have narrow group think. A person that comes at CS from a different angle will make a bigger difference in CS than those grads. It's an outside perspective, helps in any field.
Another example who isn't a CS major is Ryan Dahl, maker of Node.js. Lots of CS graybeards laugh at his naive efforts and spaghetti, but for some reason his project is popular. Perhaps those who weren't brainwashed by college CS tend to stand out? Let's do a study on that.
I didn't say previous experience doesn't play a part - I said his English major doesn't play a part in his writing good code. I might be wrong - only Jeremy can answer this.
And how do you come to the conclusion English major is a major influence in Docco? Knuth is credited as conceiver of literate programming and for all we know, Jeremy just liked it and ported it.
> It's not about CS insights, it's the non-CS insights at work here. Underscore is nothing new in CS, it's just well crafted, has a good API.
From Jeremy's attributions, underscore.js is largely a port of Ruby's Enumberable and Python's itertools. The api, more or less, is loyal to the source.
> Look at the example of startups. Often engineers who start them focus on cool technology, lose sight of the business, customer needs, can't come up with reasonable product ideas etc. They need guidance from people who ran a software business, made these mistakes and understood what's important.
Yes, need guidance from people who have experience in running software business and undestand what is importance. They don't need guidance from people with irrelevant background.
> It's the same with any other additional discipline, if you major in English prior to programming you're better positioned to make a word processor or document startup.
There are products which were designed to serve the creator and were a big success. There are products which the creators didn't design for themselves which still managed to succeed. All we have here is anecdotes. I don't agree with your definitive assertion that English majors are better positioned to make a word processor.
> I think you'd also be better at designing clear APIs and readable code, documentation for others. So many CS-only majors are horrible there.
Pretty much everyone is horrible at designing good apis. Again, I don't follow how and why English majors would be better at designing apis.
> If you majored in design, better at making design tools.
I am not contesting relevant experience helping you being good in a particular domain.
> But is that a better approach than majoring in art the picking up CS?
To each its own; for me, majoring in CS and picking other things later is better.
> When you have too many college grads coming into a field, taught similar curriculum and Java, you have narrow group think. A person that comes at CS from a different angle will make a bigger difference in CS than those grads. It's an outside perspective, helps in any field.
May be it does. But you are generalizing a lot here. CS programs aren't a narrow group think you make them out to be. To make a bigger difference, it doesn't just take someone with outside perspective - it takes someone who knows all the rule better than anyone by heart and then breaks the rules he doesn't find proper. You need to understand the inside perspective and why things are the way they are before injecting outside perspective.
> Another example who isn't a CS major is Ryan Dahl, maker of Node.js. Lots of CS graybeards laugh at his naive efforts and spaghetti, but for some reason his project is popular.
Ryan Dahl isn't a CS major but he clearly understands CS. I am not saying someone who doesn't have a degree in CS can't do anything proper with CS; that was never the point. From his reddit AMA, he has put a lot of work towards his CS education. He just didn't write Node.js because his non cs background gave him some unique insights.
And the CS greabeards have done a lot as well. Just that they don't agree with Ryan Dahl doesn't mean anything - both groups have done good work.
> Perhaps those who weren't brainwashed by college CS tend to stand out? Let's do a study on that.
Again, how does CS brainwash? And how do you propose we do the study? I don't think Jeremy Ashkenas would like to come over and participate in a polarized discussion.
Literate programming and writing essays in English major is the connection. He appreciated Knuth's ideas enough to seriously use them.
Any large scale educational curriculum "brainwashes." It makes lots of people think the same, have the same ideas. How many CS grads make their own CMS early on?
And we're all generalizing here, these textwall discussions will go nowhere.
My point was after a certain amount of time and progress, after a certain number of people join a discipline, progress in it slows. It's a law of diminishing returns. When large numbers are attracted to an industry because of high salaries, it seems to hurt the discipline. Same idea as too many cooks in the kitchen, too many programmers on a single project, only on a different scale.
Maybe that's why CS and software hasn't made much progress this last decade. You need to add more disciplines after a certain point.
The really excellent insights come from people with seemingly irrelevant background who are making a connection that people with only the typical backgrounds wouldn't. Philosophy of science and philosophy of language have helped me immensely in computer science. As has use of deductive sorts of processes (philosophy is a lot like debugging).
>Do you think HN crowd has poorer communication skill compared to your non-technical crowd?
That's not really a good comparison.
You would have to compare a randomly selected set of humanities majors against a randomly selected set of engineers. On average, I'd say both groups would lose to people on HN.
GEB and the Feynman book are as much works of literature as they are technical pieces. GEB in particular requires knowledge of multiple realms, which is what makes it difficult.
I highly doubt it. Can you quote me some example of these really excellent insights which came from people with irrelevant background?
> As has use of deductive sorts of processes (philosophy is a lot like debugging).
I still don't get it. deductive processes aren't something unique to philosophy. I studied Mathematical logic and induction more extensively than a philosophy major. The point you are making it is somehow philosohpy helps understand comp. sci. better. I fail to see how.
> That's not really a good comparison.
I don't have a fair survey at hand. From personal experience, good programmers have excellent communication skills.
> GEB and the Feynman book are as much works of literature as they are technical pieces.
That wasn't the point. The parent post said about technical people trained not to like non-technical stuff - I was just saying that I was forced to study History in high school an d I didn't like it at all. I don't have any use or interest in why did the opium war start or analyzing Shakespeare's writing - if I am going to read, it would be something which I find fascinating and/or useful. Technical people trained not to like non-technical stuff is non-sequitur.
You might be interested in Paul Feyerabend's 'Against Method,' it is a similar topic to this and a pleasant read.
> I still don't get it. deductive processes aren't something unique to philosophy. I studied Mathematical logic and induction more extensively than a philosophy major. The point you are making it is somehow philosohpy helps understand comp. sci. better. I fail to see how.
Philosophy (particularly analytic philosophy), has a specific method breaking down problems that you don't really see elsewhere. That doesn't mean it is necessarily 'better' than another course of study... it is just a tool that I find to be useful and relatively unique to me. It seems pretty obvious to me that you can't get by at CS without acquiring knowledge of CS. The point is that the diverse background is better than being one dimensional. Note that philosophy helps my programming, not necessarily my comp sci.
> I don't have a fair survey at hand. From personal experience, good programmers have excellent communication skills.
It could just as easily be generalized that good programmers are smart, and smart people are good at communicating.
I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person.
As a study that compares bachelor degree to bachelor degree, this is still useful. To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology, nor one that charges less for degrees that can only be used as stepping stones.
That said, a study that includes post-bachelor degrees in the ranking would be interesting. What would be especially informative would be a combined ranking that factors the average cost of education in with the average earnings increase/decrease. Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.
My alma mater, a public university in Ontario, Canada does this, but it appears to have more to do with government regulation of certain programs. Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher, and engineering slightly above CS.
Good! This is, IMO, the best approach to degree programs. People could study what interests them without mountains of debt when leaving school.
>Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher
Interesting. I've always heard that a proper computer science curriculum is almost indistinguishable from an applied mathematics curriculum, and that it's in computer engineering/programming/applied computer science/(yadda yadda) that the real bacon is made.
Of course, I've never taken classes in a true CS curriculum, so I really can't say.
Here are the actual amounts, FWIW: http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infofin/students/UG%20Schedule%2...
Yeah, I think the most useful comparison would be to make comparisons based on the average return for the most typical terminal degree in your field would be, or at least to give you a suite of responses based on varying degrees.
>Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.
As a side note, is a BS in pure math particularly useful, beyond the fact that it's a bachelor's degree? That always struck me as one of those disciplines that would require an advanced degree to be of use. (My freshman year calculus TA, when asked by one of his students if he was going for a master's, said, "No, I'm a PHD student. The master's degree is the door prize of mathematics.")
Note that I don't have a masters/PhD in mathematics, so take this with a grain of salt. But from what I've seen, if you want to actively study & research mathematics, it's PhD or bust.
If, however, you want to be a software developer, a statistician, or to work in finance, for example, a BS in mathematics will serve you quite nicely. It may even have a slight advantage in that it's a bit more versatile: I'm currently working as a software developer but could take the degree any number of other directions.
And for other degree paths, it's simply useful as a bachelor's degree -- though I have had friends indicate that they found non-technical (managerial, sales, etc.) jobs insanely quickly with a BS in math or physics. They always attributed it to the inherent difficulty of the degree; of course, that's just anecdotal, so I'm not sure if that's really the case or not.
My guess is, the people who value making a lot of money and who major in English do just fine for themselves, the people who lack drive and ambition who major in English work at McDonald's, and the people who major in humanities because they value things besides money live in an artists' commune in Brooklyn making art and music and not really caring that they're not making as much money as you are.
Here is a huge list of notable people who studied philosophy who have done quite well for themselves.
http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosoph...
George Soros, Cartleton S. Fiorina, Ricky Gervais, Ethan Coen, the list goes on and on.
Also, Peter Thiel, Paul Buchheit, and Paul Graham all studied philosophy if I recall correctly.
Or people who have't majored at all - Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. Parent post is making rules out of exceptions.
Specifically, at the time of the Civil War, students were mostly studying the classics - even if engineering and other disciplines were available at some institutions. West Point, for example, was essentially an engineering school at the outbreak of war. I wonder what value students at the time saw in their degrees that we don't see now, and I wonder what has happened to change that perception / reality...
log(mean_realized_income) ~ log(mean_expected_future_income)
But I also like JonnieCache's take on it in these comments; fluffy majors know better than to care about such base needs as material wealth!
But the practical skills taught in BUS, CS, ENG etc are more valuable in a corporate setting, and hence for the majority of folks who just want to get a job.
There may not be enough engineers at the moment and that inflates salaries. However, the way out of this is not to encourage folks to major in engineering "for the money." Much better to have a smaller number of engineers who are intrinsically motivated.
http://cl.ly/2n0B1S2b080n3V0y3329
Looks like a "we need more social in our business" decision.
Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for....questions of ethics, of weighing values, of being able to see and reason from multiple viewpoints, of being able to communicate efficiently, of being able to empathize accurately.
Don't get me wrong - I also wish all of us were more educated in highly abstract thought (math). It's just that many of us stop learning and questioning the day we learn to count. If "value" or "riches" is a number to us, we need what the humanities reveal more than anyone.
"Riches" is in the eye of the beholder, one supposes. I got a B.S. in biochemistry before my M.D., have fairly extensive software engineering experience and training, have a modestly low Erdos number....and yet I tell you my colleagues and I would be better docs and engineers with a strong emphasis in our early training on the humanities. In my case, I'd have been much better off turning my minor in English into a major, learning to draw and sculpt and create more, writing more, reading more philosophy/ethics/history, learning more foreign language.
We need more medical students and programmers who major in the humanities. Medical schools in particular nowadays push hard for people from the humanities (those students also need to take a relatively few science requisites) We need people who move between disciplines more easily. We need fewer specialists. Those 4:00 AM moments...when you lack data, when you lack algorithms, when you need to understand broad fields, understand and communicate with people, and make the right ethical decisions require the liberal arts at least as much as our ability to count.
To paraphrase a dead poet or two, our lives ain't about laying pipe. Go read and think over poetry and literature and history and the dilemmas a thousand cultures already worried over - we'll be better engineers or entrepreneurs or doctors.