107 karma · joined March 25, 2022
edit: Also it goes without saying that an MD crab cake is blue crab. I think VA crab cakes would be blue crab too, but out west I've had Dungeness crab cakes and they aren't bad but it's not the same.
The books me and my friends found to be ass-kickers were the dense philosophy books with many seminars back-to-back, like how there were seven? on Critique of Pure Reason and six? on Phenomenology of the Spirit. Important books, to be sure, but there's a limit to endurance.
Math -- without math class at St. Johns I don't think I'd have ever thought I could be a programmer, much less that I could learn it on my own from books and online self-study. I still don't know much about math-as-math, but having a class dedicated to studying proofs and formal logic in various forms and communicating that to a group has been extremely valuable to me in my professional life. So I'm somewhat of a patriot for the math program.
That said, I think the poster in this thread who argues it's "a bad way to learn math" is correct. The St. John's program was founded in 1937, and, let's face it, the world of math and science is different now. If you sat me down next to a math major and made both us do a math test, they'd massacre me.
I'm more critical of the lab program. It felt like a complicated review of high school physics, chemistry, and biology and it was the area where the "amateur" nature of the teaching often hurt, rather than enhanced, the lesson. My thoughts about "the world's moved on since 1937" are even more acute related to lab. I don't feel I was very literate in science after I graduated beyond being able to talk about the Maxwell equations or relativity with some confidence.
Language class is a mixed bag. It's meant to support seminar by giving you access to Greek (and in junior and senior year, French) so that you can dig into some of the original sources. I enjoyed and was good at it -- but it's two years of college French that may make you able to read French literature but unable to order a meal in Paris.
When it comes to the seminar class, I enthusiastically endorse the St. John's method. I don't think there is a better way to read philosophy, history, literature, politics, etc.
Unrelated to the subjects themselves: at the very least, you're spending four years with roughly the same class of <100 people, reading the same texts, doing the same intellectual work, exposing your thoughts in class, living in the same area, eating in the same dining hall. That kind of -- let's call it intimacy -- means you're going to make some pretty deep friendships and rivalries and learn some social skills about getting on in group settings.
Would I recommend it? It's not for everyone. For people who don't need their hand held and who like the idea of reading and talking about a bunch of important books that discuss a lot of important questions in life, I think it's very right. For people who want to prepare for a specific technical career, or who are very shy, or who are not intellectuals by nature, I don't think it's right at all.
Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.
There are numerous safeguards (you have to ask, wait 15 days, and ask again; the doctor can refer you to psychiatric care if they think your judgment is impaired; and others).
The state government of Oregon has a FAQ about the law at: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/providerpartnerresources/evalu...
There's nothing in the natural order that says I must starve if I don't report to a particular building every day and sit at a particular desk when the tools for me to perform the same labor at a place of my own choosing exist. Forcing me to do so in order to maintain an employment contract is coercion, plain and simple, and the sooner society destroys that norm the better.
It's my sincere hope that Malcolm continues his slide into irrelevancy.