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Comment by achillesheels | Hacker News Reader

Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.

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This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense

Shocking that comment by someone quoting Seneca, in Latin, in their profile would be pretentious!

It is normal for many. Learnt at school, met quite often during their studies. It is an implicit part and a normal experience of many curricula of studies: it was of common use until only a few centuries ago. So, no exceptional display: normal like French for old diplomacy and international exchange in general in a not so distant past.

What can I say, I try to rise above the illiterate mass shrug.

And also: yes, some assume that you may have some familiarity with Latin - irregardless of expertise, an attitude that makes you interested and embracing when you meet it (instead of recoiling), because you speak English. You use the language, so it is normal to think you open to what makes its gears.

Especially in a forum ("intellectual curiosity" intended) where many are engineers, one will suppose imbecility ("lack of proficiency in the use of the stick": again Latin, of course, as it builds a good share of the language) a countervalue. This place is called 'Hacker's news': you look inside things and not your own language, hacker?!

Are you to say that medical school students understand the inherent dielectric and dipole moments in biomolecules and how these interact with pharmacological compounds?

you have no idea what you're talking about mate

I'd advice reading the famous article "More is different" by P. W. Anderson. It takes condensed matter physics as a counter example that knowledge is a pyramid, and that e.g. biology is just applied chemistry, which is just applied physics, which is just applied math and so on. I am glad social science people do not need to know quantum physics, nor medecine does group theory ; their fields are dense enough on their own sake ...

Actually, a universal understanding of the natural world would provide necessarily greater intuitive perspectives on what is necessary to be experienced universally by human minds. Create silos does more harm than good.

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