- Siloization of industries is a problem in general because it causes people to think dogmatically. Isbell makes a fair point, and it's more of a societal problem than a computing specific problem.
My intuition is that if medical school students memorize Anki decks, they're going to be good at pattern matching but not seeing the big picture and why things happen. People react poorly to being challenged, responding with either aggression or avoidance. Rarely do they ask themselves why something is the case.
Business people might know how to increase revenue but not understand what money is, how it is created and destroyed, and how it affects people's incentives.
- I'm not sure the computing ethos is taught particularly well in schools. For example, the Unix Philosophy for writing command line tools or GNU's free software. In my view, colleges should be an fast feedback learning environment with significant input from teachers, fundamental readings, and exposure to new things to point people in the right direction.
- Philosophy, math, and CS are a strong combination that go well together. I'm not surprised the author found himself at home in it.
- I don't worry that people get into CS and care only about machines. I worry that people are getting into CS only for the money, leading to the enshittification of everything. The problem is the moral values of society as a whole.
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Fundamentally, Georgia Tech as a school strikes me as an industrial research/engineering powerhouse funded by federal grants, a major workforce contributor to F500 companies, and at its core a public school with the attitude and values students at public schools often have such as anti-intellectualism, which is promoted and visible in the administration and can be seen in how Georgia Tech changed its logo from a more academic, serious logo to an unserious logo. But this is a growing problem at universities everywhere across the US. Housing shortages, university degree oversupply, and so on.
The weakness in its CS curriculum is actually its threads, causing a lack of breadth. By focusing on a thread such as "People/Media," they can pick classes that don't even touch fundamental aspects of computing such as databases, networking, compilers, programming languages, and so on. Apparently CS is switching to a direct admit method to stop the 500-600 person classes I've had for almost the entirety of college.
I did have classes that focused on interesting topics such as law, differential privacy, cross-border data flows, philosophy and cognition, and so on. Particular classes I enjoyed were taught by teachers such as Galil, Swire, and Verma, where I felt the class content was serious, but this might also mirror my changing tastes in how education should be done as I get older. The harder and more serious the content and reading in a class is, the easier it actually is.
And there's also a big maturity and understanding change that happens as well, which I don't really think is changeable.