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Comment by jlos | Hacker News Reader

The best parts of education is not primarily the material you remember. It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying and the familiarity with a school of thought.

For example, I studied Greek before software engineering. I've forgotten quite a bit, but theres an entirely different set of thought processes I have access to while doing software engineering because of it.

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> It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying

I've heard this over and over again, but I don't believe there's a shred of evidence for it.

I see this type of like used to justify whatever it is the speaker enjoys being forced on everyone else. Something like "everyone should learn philosophy because it trains the mind" usually means "I like philosophy and wish it was taught more at schools".

The statements you provided are obviously the same thing though, no?

If you interpret "the mind" as "my mind" then yes, it can't be more obvious.

I strongly believe it's a rationalization for having to spend so much time studying.

Pretty much. jlos is claiming that college educated people have a monopoly on certain thinking patterns, isn't that extremely elitist?

I think it depends on what you think education is : if you believe that education is going to an elite university then I think it is elitist. If you think education is being exposed to a wide range of ideas and perspectives - a range beyond which you would have found by yourself - then I don't think it is. A kind Aunt with three bookshelves and an open mind can give you an education that you couldn't buy. Would that make you part of the elite? It would be difficult - it could take years - but it's not elitist.

Every discipline (academic, artistic, practical, even athletic) deal with certain types of problems and have develop their own heuristics for dealing with those problems. And because most discipline involve not a single skill but a set of skills, some disciplines will have skill overlap.

If you play music, run your own business, study (or practice) engineering, or become involved in an academic discipline you develop a set of skills you can carry to other domains. Don't really see how the dispute here

I’d say the best part of education is familiarizing yourself with the domain. You may forget the details but the familiarity and know how about what a Sobel edge filter is useful the next time you encounter such a thing in professional life.

Analytical thinking and pattern recognition is indeed also a key benefit of education.

At least this is what I told the students when I was a TA for a class teaching prolog!

Can you expand a bit on how Greek helps? Are you talking about Ancient Greek? I know a few latin derived languages but I never taught about the relation to computer languages.

I’ve recently been trying to translate a book my dad wrote from modern (‘demotic’) Greek into English. It’s a very slow process for me, as English is my first language and my Greek is very poor. I have to constantly look up a lot of words and puzzle over some sentences repeatedly. I did notice though that Greek (or my dad at least) seems able to communicate ideas in very few words that when translated into English, as directly as I can manage, I find require longer and more ‘flowery’ sentences to achieve the same effect, at least with any degree of elegance or conventional tone. I’m not sure how much of that is due to his writing style (or mine! :) and surely it is a very qualitative, subjective impression, but it does seem to me that Greek is quite an ‘efficient’ language. I’m a terrible, entirely self-taught programmer/copy’n’paste script kiddy, but I would imagine that learning any new language helps with programming on some level (and perhaps maths/logic even more so?): dealing with different symbolic representations, grammars, alphabets, logographs etc. Here’s an article I found on the subject of formal grammars/Chomsky and their influence on computing: https://exaud.com/noam-chomsky-computer-science/

Yes, ancient greek. And I think the connections are mostly indirect. In interpreting literature in another language (Latin, Greek, etc) you spend time analyzing syntax and grammar looking for the idea or intention. Programming is very different, but code does still express and idea or intention.

Also, really helps with reading and written communication.

Thanks! I believe in it! We don't know what we don't know, if we learn only useful stuff!

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