Comment by sangaya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangaya | Hacker News Reader

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First off, I've read HN for a while and never felt the need for an account. This post provided that need. Thank you.

"A Computer Science graduate, for instance, can often graduate without having ever written a line of html, javascript or css."

In the interest of full disclosure I hold a BS in Computer Engineering and am currently working on a MS in Computer Science. I myself graduated without ever writing a single line of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS in any course and have yet to write a single line in my MS.

We used Assembler (16 and 32-bit, Motorola and Intel), C/C++, and Java. I never wrote HTML, but was required to write a basic web server that provided access to HTML pages. I didn't write any JavaScript, but did write code for embedded systems.

Point is no Computer Science student should ever write those as part of the program. For one, any student of CS worth their weight in salt can teach themselves such things. And the only time it's acceptable in the class room of a quality program is when the Professor asks for the documentation of the program to be an HTML page. In that case HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are an afterthought, not the point of the project, and not taught in the class room.

The difference is that you're seeing the value of a (good) college education, whereas most of the people who post the anti-intellectual rants here, in Reddit, and elsewhere want to view the sole purpose of higher education as vocational training. If it doesn't teach you Javascript, it must be useless!

(That these same people tend to develop fetishes for math and physics is an interesting aside; I've never met a mathematician or a physicist whose attention is drawn to practical questions.)

How large is your sample? The heroes of the field, Gauss, Euler, John von Neumann, Feynman etc, were certainly drawn to practial questions.

Pretty large. Those guys are in a rather select minority, and one could reasonably argue that their original intent was not to pursue practical knowledge. It just happened that they were amongst the lucky few academics whose work was valuable in its time. It does happen, occasionally, but it isn't the driving force behind most scientific/mathematical research.

Why is it anti-intellectual to question the value of higher education?

When someone rants against college, he or she usually includes those things that colleges teach. He or she claims they are impractical, inapplicable, etc.

That is pretty much anti-intellectualism summed up. Now, this is not necessary. A anti-college rant does not need to include comments as to the value of what colleges teach. It's just that many do, and they become conjoined in people's minds.

No one really learns anything just for the sake of knowing stuff. They always do so to derive some benefit. This is even the case for "impractical" knowledge. Usually this kind of knowledge is of principles instead of techniques for doing X. Principles are useful to know because A) they are what techniques are derived from so now people can derive their own techniques and B) there is innate satisfaction from the beauty and elegance in the principles behind things. Since everything we do is for the sake of some kind of happiness, knowledge qualifies as something like sex or entertainment, activities people engage in for their own sake.

Those, like yourself, who deride people for asking about "practicality" and "applicability" probably really do think knowledge is useful for the reasons I outlined. What do you gain by dismissing such questions as "anti-intellectual" instead of trying to understand and explain why you think learning is useful?

Because fundamentally, you're questioning the value of education. The intellectual doesn't pursue knowledge with a particular goal in mind. From that perspective, complaining about the "value" of a class on (for example) philosophy or English literature doesn't make any sense.

Practical questions are boring, mathematically. Engineers get by with the most basic of linear algebra and diffeq. This is boring, mindnumbing mathematics. There are few applications of, say, category theory to real life.

So for the most part, the interesting problems are not in daily life. Most of those have been solved.

> There are few applications of, say, category theory to real life.

...and there you have nicely summed up why CS appeals to me as a field: it is an arena in which interesting, contemporary mathematics can have an immediate and practical application in solving real-world problems.

I agree that theory is more appropriate than specific tool training at university, but it's an exaggeration that web technologies are necessarily an afterthought.

And I disagree with your disagreement. If you have done plenty of coding on embedded systems, compilers, implementing data structures, etc., HTML and the like are very easy to pick up.

You can go on the web and find yourself some tutorials, and at the end you'll do some decent web programming. But try to find some good tutorials about processor architecture, memory cache, digital circuits... and it's much, much harder to end up proficient without any guidance (it sounds easy if you know these already - but imagine you had no notion at all of digital circuits, where do you start? how do you even know it's important?). University doesn't necessarily teaches you everything in depth but it does at least expose you to the various implications of programming, such that if you end up in a big project, whatever it is, you'll know the basics and where to find the information.

Web technologies are also hinted at during the process, so if you need them later, you at least have some basic notions (from building a web server, etc).

uni only exposes you the materials it deems important (or corrupted by industry)

nothing prevents a passionate person to google, buy the book if necesary, and email the experts in fields

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