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100000% accurate article. It frustrates me when I see even professional programmers perpetuating the "Math Myth", as it's called here. "It's important for all p
by Jimmy 10y ago
100000% accurate article. It frustrates me when I see even professional programmers perpetuating the "Math Myth", as it's called here. "It's important for all programmers to have a foundation in CS theory!" No, it's not.
The vast majority of human beings will never do anything intellectually intensive post-college. Even those in STEM fields. Not that an undergrad degree is "intellectually intensive" anyway.
EDIT:
>The second argument is the one I always hear around the mathematics department: mathematics helps you to think clearly. I have a very low opinion of this self-serving nonsense. In sports there is the concept of the specificity of skills: if you want to improve your racquetball game, don't practice squash! I believe the same holds true for intellectual skills.
Dear God, I'm so happy to see this in writing. For a while, I was afraid that I was the only one who had realized this. This observation has several useful immediate corollaries. For one, it shows that those "brain training" games that some people like to play are a waste of time. Also, it shows that if you ever catch yourself saying "I'm working on my X to help with Y", it probably means that you're just afraid of the failure that will inevitably come when you initially begin to practice Y, and that fear can only be ameliorated if you just dive in and start doing Y.
- mempko 10y agoThe reason for it is because the vast majority of jobs college people get are bullshit jobs. I blame capitalism and it's tendency to create useless positions in hierarchical organizations. If you think the gov makes all the useless and pointless paper pushing jobs, you have never been in a large company. In fact, market capitalism creates all kinds of pointless soul sucking jobs like lawyers, police, and insurance brokers. This is because nobody trusts each other. You can blame gov regulation, except most regulation is written by lobbyists for mega corps
- Jimmy 10y agoI said "intellectually intensive", not "meaningful". The majority of people throughout history worked manual labor jobs that weren't intellectually intensive, but they were often quite necessary. >If you think the gov makes all the useless and pointless paper pushing jobs, you have never been in a large company. I'm currently employed at a large company doing mostly pointless work, so I'm not sure where you got this assumption from.
- mempko 10y agoIn Adam Smith's wealth of nations he talks about division of labor and how it makes people "as stupid as a creature can be". I would argue the work a farmer and people in tribal societies do is more intellectually stimulating and varied than in the modern world. Unless for a select few engineering jobs, we mostly damn people to do the same narrow set of tasks every day. Also about the gov bit. I was talking to the larger HN readers than just you. Sounds like you know exactly what I am talking about.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago> 100000% accurate article. It frustrates me when I see even professional programmers perpetuating the "Math Myth", as it's called here. "It's important for all programmers to have a foundation in CS theory!" No, it's not. It's important for enough programmers, and their managers, to have enough of a foundation in CS theory that they can understand and believe when they've encountered an intractable, impossible, or research-level problem. Otherwise you're just going to spend time sputtering to your business people about why you can't solve the Traveling Salesman Problem before lunch and the Halting Problem by dinner. http://xkcd.com/1425/ http://xkcd.com/1425/
- nullc 10y ago> The vast majority of human beings will never do anything intellectually intensive post-college Not true of the people I know or the people who work for me. Perhaps its true for some-- the idea makes me quite sad. What a waste.