Hacker News Reader

Comment by nick_urban | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of thinking in engineering, but not much critical thinking.

The type of thinking involved in STEM is mostly instrumental rather than critical. It's about mastering techniques and learning "how".

Critical thinking, on the other hand, is about asking questions, especially reflective questions that are more "why" than "how". It's about examining taken-for-granted assumptions and considering alternative perspectives.

In general, it's much easier to see your assumptions when you are confronted with people who have very different ones. Every age has its dogmas. Studying history, philosophy, and foreign cultures usually opens our eyes to them.

View on HN

I disagree with this, strongly.

I was a double english and math (cs-emphasis) major. I went to grad school in Industrial Engineering/Operations research because I wanted to study a field where engineering type thinking is applied outside the traditional engineering fields.

The things I've learned in engineering and science classes constantly influence my thinking outside these fields. For example, I recently did a computer science programming assignment (coursera data structures) about percolation and phase transitions. Immediately, I started seeing the model in so many things - vaccine coverage in a population where people start to opt out, availability of housing, the dating scene as people start to pair off and get married. Any probabilistic process where things seem steady state until the last moment, and then a sudden shift occurs. I know my example may be a little trivial, but that's the point - some of these are silly, and probably very misapplied, but other times, they lead to extraordinary insight. My thinking about a very wide range of things is deeply influenced by may background in math and engineering. I constantly build math models in my head when I read the news. I see it as a basic form of literacy - and you only get it if you really engage with the kind of difficult math typical of STEM fields.

I really think that humanities students are in greater danger of ending up narrowly focused than science students. Even if I hadn't majored in literature, I (like most STEM students) would have had to take a substantial amount of history, art, literature, foreign languages, and so forth as part of my GE requirements in college. The math and science requirements are typically far less rigorous for humanities majors.

It's a terrible mistake to think that math, science and engineering aren't essential components of a broad, liberal education.

My message must have been unclear, because you think you disagree with me, but I completely agree with you :)

Let me just say: math is wonderful. Science is wonderful. You're absolutely right that math provides a rich source of models and metaphors for understanding the most diverse domains. Everyone should study them!

Yet I don't feel the need to sing the praises of math and science. Why? Because nobody doubts their value. But people do question the value of the humanities. They even imply that they are worthless and should be eliminated. And that seriously concerns me, because in my opinion, they are invaluable. They represent a huge portion of our cultural inheritance, and yes, they teach things that are not found in STEM subjects.

Two important things that the humanities teach are history (knowing how we got here and why) and what I previously called "critical thinking". I realize now that that term is too ambiguous. People think I mean something like "good thinking" or "novel thinking", which are certainly present in STEM as well.

What I intended is much more specific than that. It's the ability to question our assumptions about ends. Science asks about how things are. The humanities ask about how things ought to be. It's an alltogether different domain of inquiry.

Whether it is literature, philosophy, painting, or theater, a humanistic work proposes an ideal for human life. Over time, great works in the humanities dramatically alter our collective understanding of what is good and worthwhile. They help us ponder our destiny.

Popular culture does not do that for us. It is driven by business interests and rarely makes detours into the pursuit of serious questions. The humanities do. They are our sincerest and most persistent attempt to get to the bottom of what really matters.

Yes, clearly critical thinking and the scientific method have nothing in common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking#Skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Elements_of_...

Obviously, no scientist or engineer has ever stopped to ask themselves "why does it..." or "what if it doesn't actually do..." or "maybe it's not x, but y instead?"

It'd be wise to remember that the sciences were once called "natural philosophy."

Liberal arts courses on the other hand are mostly memorization and regurgitation of the ideology currently favored by the academia's current regime. Before they moved to "~ studies" majors, liberal arts majors used to study the works written and drawn by scientists and mathematicians and engineers. It's easy to see why the humanities would prefer "critical thinking" to be redefined as something fuzzy enough to require no original thought or even an attempt at reaching a logical conclusion.

I'm not a scientist, so it's harder to speak to that, but as an engineer, I can definitely say that engineers are in general more interested and more skilled at asking questions of "how" rather than questions of "why".

When I studied the humanities, I read Euclid, Galileo, Darwin, etc. The history of science is an essential part of the humanities. Unfortunately, it is not part of "STEM" in the sense that politicians use that term.

Scientific revolutions are definitely a case of "natural philosophy", but that differs dramatically from "normal science" as described, for example, in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am likewise concerned that movement towards a jobs-oriented STEM curriculum will actually retard the progress of the sciences, by producing more functionaries and fewer deep-thinking scientists capable of innovation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

Exactly.

One of the major discussions in my engineering program is that there isn't a "right" answer like there usually is in regular math.

Instead, there's a "best answer given the current circumstances and limitations."

It becomes entirely about the How and the Why.

In my experience at a college with a large engineering program, the S and M parts of STEM has a large emphasis on critical thinking and the TE do not. That's only one data-point though.

Also the school was so heavily STEM focused that I wouldn't trust any of the liberal arts students there to reason their way out of a paper-bag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com