11 ms·

The only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree

122 points by msurel 16y ago

hga 16y ago
The less polite original title: "The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree". Unfair since plenty of those with liberal arts degrees contribute to society in a way we geeks value, but still amusing.
- olefoo 16y ago
  There are a fair number of geeks who were liberal arts majors in their earlier years. It's not a crippling setback. In fact it can be an asset when you need to communicate densely abstract technical topics to those of a decidedly nontechnical background. I've met a fair number of philosophy and language majors who are programmers, web designers or system administrators. And a number of them have much greater mental flexibility than someone who got a four year CS degree for the job prospects but have never demonstrated any great degree of intellectual curiosity.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Some "technical" content comes from those backgrounds as well, which sometimes turns out to be useful. I'm in AI, and people sometimes run into pitfalls that a stronger background in some other area would've let them see much further ahead of time. Sometimes a solution that seems like it might work is one that you'd immediately spot holes in (or at least likely points of difficulty) if you were familiar with philosophical logic, or semantics of language, or something else of that sort.
pw0ncakes 16y ago
The same joke over and over.
- ovi256 16y ago
  It's still true.
  - darthpanda 16y ago
    And hilarious!
  - pw0ncakes 16y ago
    What's true about it? That, within certain contrived scenarios involving existential threats to humankind, humanities knowledge becomes useless? Science and technology are important, and deserve more respect and funding than they get in this society, but not to the detriment of all else.
    - jlc 16y ago
      I think the standard (and weak) joke about the uselessness of humanities degrees is to some extent a red herring. The real subject of satire here are technophilic power fantasies, such as _The Core_, _Impact_, _Asteroid_, etc., etc.
      - Semiapies 16y ago
        The real red herring is the idea that this is satire with a message and not just a joke.
mattmanser 16y ago
Do we really need physicists? What have they done apart from give us ever increasing ways of destroying ourselves. Has quantum theory brought happiness to the world? Love? Peace? Has it helped you feel more connected to your neighbours, to the person on the bus or tube? Has it had any meaningful positive effect at all on the human condition? Or is it and its ilk of science degrees merely a relentless march to the day that the whole world disappears in one of two ways, self-annihilation or self-exile in VR? And even if we survive somehow, what about once the relentless march of science is over, when there are no more secrets to uncover? What next? Is that the end of meaningful life as this author thinks? Or is there perhaps something more to life than finding the next equation? Perhaps we will put aside the toys of technology and start reflecting on ourselves. Maybe by doing a liberal arts degree.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Pretty much everyone I love is alive and healthy today because of science. I myself am alive and healthy today because of science.
  - sketerpot 16y ago
    Hell, you can even start pointing at particular bits of science. For example, there would be mass famine without the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia synthesis.
    - evgen 16y ago
      Of course, without this process producing a lot of available nitrogen to use in making explosives during the first half of the 20th century we would probably also have avoided two world wars. Occasional famines and a lower upper-limit on human population or millions dead from guns and bombs... interesting set of choices.
      - piguy314 16y ago
        Eh this is the classic guns kill people vs. people kill people argument. Not having guns or bombs isn't going to stop a war. Some of the bloodiest wars in history were fought using swords and spears.
duncanj 16y ago
Don't you understand? We're not really learning how to critique The Bell Jar from a absurdorealist point of view, we're learning how to use our minds!
callahad 16y ago
There's a flaw in assuming that an undergraduate liberal arts education is terminal. For instance, "between 1986 and 1995, more people earning PhD degrees in the earth sciences graduated from Carleton (50) than any other four-year college." And that's from a tiny liberal arts school with a total population of ~2,000 students.
- celoyd 16y ago
  There’s a lot of fuzziness about what “liberal arts” actually means. To me it means something like a general education including both sciences and the humanities. In this sense there’s nothing the least surprising about getting a liberal arts education and a degree in the earth sciences. But I see it in a lot of contexts where it seems to mean fluffy humanities and only fluffy humanities.
fizx 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- eavc 16y ago
  The irony of this is incredible. You're reaching to label this as an example of confirmation bias. What's the term for trying to make data fit a preconceived idea, again?
eavc 16y ago
As someone with a philosophy degree and many years of formal training in classical music, I give this piece a hearty thumbs up. While the author clearly values the liberal arts (um, it's McSweeney's), there's something to be said for actually getting things done in the world. A lot, actually. What the author is parodying is less the degree itself but more the miles wide and inches deep approach to education and life that many intelligent people are fond of taking. I've been guilty of this, and satire is usually born of familiarity, so I assume the author has been as well. The point is, recognize that pursuit of education as amusement and status symbol is a hobby done for you and none other, and if you want to make some kind of impact outside of your own head, you're going to either have to get deeper and more focused or get more pragmatic.
- CoreDumpling 16y ago
  As someone with a computer science degree and several years working experience in software development, I feel an urge to play devil's advocate here. In terms of "getting things done in the world," how is making iPhone fart apps any more of a contribution than, say, publishing a screed in a tabloid? I'm trying not to set up a straw man here, so I'm deliberately choosing lowest common denominator activities. I don't think it's fair for us technical folk to rest on our laurels simply because we have mastery over some very specific kind of knowledge that has a great deal of useful applications. We have to get out there and get real things done, too.
Tichy 16y ago
The irony is that usually there are no asteroids headed for earth, so it is debatable how useful the astronauts and nuclear warhead constructors are.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Keep in mind we seldom really need them, but, when we do, we need them really, really bad.
  - DrSprout 16y ago
    Actually, by most accounts we did fine without them for 200,000 years.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      We did just fine without them for a good couple dozen million years. It's just that we won't be able to do without them forever ;-) In fact, I like to tall my son the dinosaurs only died because they had neither rockets nor nukes.
      - Tichy 16y ago
        You realize that Armageddon was just a Hollywood movie, right? :-) I am not sure if the same thing would be feasible in the real world, with current technology. Nor am I convinced that we will eventually be able to escape our dieing sun, but I keep my fingers crossed.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        Unless we have a good couple years of advanced notice so we can gently push it in another direction, nukes are the best option. If you spread the thing wide enough, less of it will hit you. If the pieces are small enough, chances are few of them will do any damage. It won't do much good if the thing is the size of a state, but mountain-sized rocks seem manageable this way.
      - 16y ago
TotlolRon 16y ago
This is total bs. The ONLY thing that can stop an astroid is Bruce Willis. And aerosmith.
jarek 16y ago
Just to confirm... the typo in the title of this submission is on purpose, right?
- borism 16y ago
  what typo?
  - jojopotato 16y ago
    Asteriod is the typo in the submission. Either that or there is some joke I am not getting.
balding_n_tired 16y ago
Ah, Grinnell, alma mater of Robert Noyce. Actually, I'm not sure what the point is. The fantasies with which underemployed recent BAs make the 40 hours pass? A take-off on the brand of thriller in which Joe Normal gets sucked into international (or interplanetary) intrigue and danger? Revenge for the balderdash the author was forced to write last year? But wasn't the lead in _The Eiger Sanction_ an art history professor who did CIA hits in the off-season to support his Picasso habit? Yeah, Clint Eastwood's a bit long in the tooth, but I'd back him against Bruce Willis for asteroid destruction any day of the week. (Cf. _Space Cowboys_<liberal arts mode>, another profound exploration of the human spirit</liberal arts mode>.)
anonjon 16y ago
Why do people in engineering/scientific fields get a free pass make fun of my philosophy degree? I'm getting kind of tired of hearing jokes about how I should be working at McDonald's and that because I have a non-science degree I can never contribute anything to society. That's bullshit. I'm in a masters program right now for computer science, and that it is a ton easier than the bachelor's in philosophy was. My first thought is that these people majored in the sciences because they were terrible at abstract thought and could never work beyond memorizing equations. These people are useless as they will never make the breakthroughs that the greatest scientists have made. (Einstein's approach to relativity included plenty of mathematics and science, but it was also based in thought experiments). Secondarily, people have a tendency to mock and belittle anything that they don't understand. By definition, they do not understand most areas of the liberal arts (too abstract). So you get shit like this thread. The original article was quite good, however.
cousin_it 16y ago
How I'd answer if I had a liberal arts degree: "If I make up a hypothetical situation where you wouldn't fit in, does it prove you're worthless?"
williamjames 16y ago
The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities, unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. In classical antiquity, the liberal arts denoted the education proper to a free man (Latin: liberus, “free”), unlike the education proper to a slave.
- jfornear 16y ago
  The modern liberal arts student avoids math and science like the plague.
  - AmericanOP 16y ago
    In practice, the belief that a liberal arts education has equal value to a BS degree is anti-science.
- jquery 16y ago
  There's something to this. Modern society taxes (enslaves) the high earners (specialists) in favor of mostly giveaways to the middle and lower middle class (liberal arts majors) and to the very rich (bailouts). *note: originally I was writing this as a joke but it stopped feeling like one halfway through.
  - searchergss 16y ago
    Dude, jokes aside. You forgot the masses that cannot even afford to go to college, and depend on your "giveaways"
wooster 16y ago
I'd just like to point out that Harvey Mudd College is a liberal arts college. As is Pomona College, where I got my (BA) degree in Computer Science. So, yeah, the post is funny, but some of us have both a liberal arts degree and an ability to do utilitarian things.
baddox 16y ago
What are the odds of actually stopping an asteroid? I suspect that asteroids small enough to be escaped by evacuation wouldn't be detected soon enough, and I highly doubt if we could do anything to divert or destroy a larger asteroid.
yetanotherlogin 16y ago
Few things are more tedious than reading science majors endlessly, smugly belittle arts subjects. "Oh ho ho, something I don't understand and haven't done and probably couldn't do, they must be idiots, let's constantly mock them". I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. Thankfully some of the comments, at least, show a more nuanced grasp of reality.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. A developed vocabulary is awesome, but you always got to consider who your audience is and why you're writing. If you're trying to persuade a lot of people, it's almost always better to choose the easier and more readable word instead of the bigger or deeper or more obscure word. I read a hell of a lot, and I had to look bilge up to figure out exactly what you're saying - you could've just said "trash" instead and everyone would've got your meaning. Likewise, "tedious" could be "boring", "smugly belittle" could be "insult", you could drop "endlessly" altogether since it doesn't add any more information. Likewise, "quite enough" doesn't convey more than just the word "enough", "nuanced grasp of reality" could've just been "perspective". Here's how I'd write it: > Few things are more tedious than reading science majors endlessly, smugly belittle arts subjects. "Oh ho ho, something I don't understand and haven't done and probably couldn't do, they must be idiots, let's constantly mock them". I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. Thankfully some of the comments, at least, show a more nuanced grasp of reality. ...becomes... > It gets old reading science majors put down the arts. It's easier to mock something than it is to try to understand it. Sheesh, I saw enough of that on slashdot and I'm disappointed to see it here. It's good that at least a few commentors are taking the time to share a perspective from the other side. So, you write less, it's faster, more people understand you, more are convinced, and you come across less arrogant. Anyways, I been there myself, I grew up reading lots of books and always used to choose the bigger word. Now I choose the simpler more readable way unless the bigger word is really necessary or conveys more.
  - 16y ago
acg 16y ago
The real issue is the separation of Arts from Science. The best artists are scientists and the best scientists are artists. Was Da Vinci any more into liberal arts than science. Anyone who specialises in a single viewpoint and is unable to compromise probably isn't a candidate for saving the earth.
Semiapies 16y ago
Way too many people taking this far too seriously as an attack on liberal arts. It's just absurd humor and could be flipped for equally funny effect - some movie astronaut/action hero in a tense meeting of academics who all consider his input weirdly vital.
- ajuc 16y ago
  Of course it's joke, but when I tried to think of situation that would be analogical in importance and where astronaut/engineer would be so much worse fit than liberal arts, I couldn't. That probably just tells my imagination is limited. But not everybody has to be able to save the world when it comes to that. Singers and writers are useful, and they wouldn't fit in to asteroid scenario, neither.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    Or loads of "geeks" who know barely more than a layman about astrophysics.

122 points by msurel 16y ago

hga 16y ago

The less polite original title: "The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree". Unfair since plenty of those with liberal arts degrees contribute to society in a way we geeks value, but still amusing.

olefoo 16y ago
There are a fair number of geeks who were liberal arts majors in their earlier years. It's not a crippling setback. In fact it can be an asset when you need to communicate densely abstract technical topics to those of a decidedly nontechnical background. I've met a fair number of philosophy and language majors who are programmers, web designers or system administrators. And a number of them have much greater mental flexibility than someone who got a four year CS degree for the job prospects but have never demonstrated any great degree of intellectual curiosity.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Some "technical" content comes from those backgrounds as well, which sometimes turns out to be useful. I'm in AI, and people sometimes run into pitfalls that a stronger background in some other area would've let them see much further ahead of time. Sometimes a solution that seems like it might work is one that you'd immediately spot holes in (or at least likely points of difficulty) if you were familiar with philosophical logic, or semantics of language, or something else of that sort.

pw0ncakes 16y ago

The same joke over and over.

ovi256 16y ago
It's still true.
- darthpanda 16y ago
  And hilarious!
- pw0ncakes 16y ago
  What's true about it? That, within certain contrived scenarios involving existential threats to humankind, humanities knowledge becomes useless? Science and technology are important, and deserve more respect and funding than they get in this society, but not to the detriment of all else.
  - jlc 16y ago
    I think the standard (and weak) joke about the uselessness of humanities degrees is to some extent a red herring. The real subject of satire here are technophilic power fantasies, such as _The Core_, _Impact_, _Asteroid_, etc., etc.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      The real red herring is the idea that this is satire with a message and not just a joke.

mattmanser 16y ago

Do we really need physicists? What have they done apart from give us ever increasing ways of destroying ourselves. Has quantum theory brought happiness to the world? Love? Peace? Has it helped you feel more connected to your neighbours, to the person on the bus or tube? Has it had any meaningful positive effect at all on the human condition? Or is it and its ilk of science degrees merely a relentless march to the day that the whole world disappears in one of two ways, self-annihilation or self-exile in VR? And even if we survive somehow, what about once the relentless march of science is over, when there are no more secrets to uncover? What next? Is that the end of meaningful life as this author thinks? Or is there perhaps something more to life than finding the next equation? Perhaps we will put aside the toys of technology and start reflecting on ourselves. Maybe by doing a liberal arts degree.

philwelch 16y ago
Pretty much everyone I love is alive and healthy today because of science. I myself am alive and healthy today because of science.
- sketerpot 16y ago
  Hell, you can even start pointing at particular bits of science. For example, there would be mass famine without the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia synthesis.
  - evgen 16y ago
    Of course, without this process producing a lot of available nitrogen to use in making explosives during the first half of the 20th century we would probably also have avoided two world wars. Occasional famines and a lower upper-limit on human population or millions dead from guns and bombs... interesting set of choices.
    - piguy314 16y ago
      Eh this is the classic guns kill people vs. people kill people argument. Not having guns or bombs isn't going to stop a war. Some of the bloodiest wars in history were fought using swords and spears.

duncanj 16y ago

Don't you understand? We're not really learning how to critique The Bell Jar from a absurdorealist point of view, we're learning how to use our minds!

callahad 16y ago

There's a flaw in assuming that an undergraduate liberal arts education is terminal. For instance, "between 1986 and 1995, more people earning PhD degrees in the earth sciences graduated from Carleton (50) than any other four-year college." And that's from a tiny liberal arts school with a total population of ~2,000 students.

celoyd 16y ago
There’s a lot of fuzziness about what “liberal arts” actually means. To me it means something like a general education including both sciences and the humanities. In this sense there’s nothing the least surprising about getting a liberal arts education and a degree in the earth sciences. But I see it in a lot of contexts where it seems to mean fluffy humanities and only fluffy humanities.

fizx 16y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

eavc 16y ago
The irony of this is incredible. You're reaching to label this as an example of confirmation bias. What's the term for trying to make data fit a preconceived idea, again?

eavc 16y ago

As someone with a philosophy degree and many years of formal training in classical music, I give this piece a hearty thumbs up. While the author clearly values the liberal arts (um, it's McSweeney's), there's something to be said for actually getting things done in the world. A lot, actually. What the author is parodying is less the degree itself but more the miles wide and inches deep approach to education and life that many intelligent people are fond of taking. I've been guilty of this, and satire is usually born of familiarity, so I assume the author has been as well. The point is, recognize that pursuit of education as amusement and status symbol is a hobby done for you and none other, and if you want to make some kind of impact outside of your own head, you're going to either have to get deeper and more focused or get more pragmatic.

CoreDumpling 16y ago
As someone with a computer science degree and several years working experience in software development, I feel an urge to play devil's advocate here. In terms of "getting things done in the world," how is making iPhone fart apps any more of a contribution than, say, publishing a screed in a tabloid? I'm trying not to set up a straw man here, so I'm deliberately choosing lowest common denominator activities. I don't think it's fair for us technical folk to rest on our laurels simply because we have mastery over some very specific kind of knowledge that has a great deal of useful applications. We have to get out there and get real things done, too.

Tichy 16y ago

The irony is that usually there are no asteroids headed for earth, so it is debatable how useful the astronauts and nuclear warhead constructors are.

rbanffy 16y ago
Keep in mind we seldom really need them, but, when we do, we need them really, really bad.
- DrSprout 16y ago
  Actually, by most accounts we did fine without them for 200,000 years.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    We did just fine without them for a good couple dozen million years. It's just that we won't be able to do without them forever ;-) In fact, I like to tall my son the dinosaurs only died because they had neither rockets nor nukes.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      You realize that Armageddon was just a Hollywood movie, right? :-) I am not sure if the same thing would be feasible in the real world, with current technology. Nor am I convinced that we will eventually be able to escape our dieing sun, but I keep my fingers crossed.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        Unless we have a good couple years of advanced notice so we can gently push it in another direction, nukes are the best option. If you spread the thing wide enough, less of it will hit you. If the pieces are small enough, chances are few of them will do any damage. It won't do much good if the thing is the size of a state, but mountain-sized rocks seem manageable this way.
    - 16y ago

TotlolRon 16y ago

This is total bs. The ONLY thing that can stop an astroid is Bruce Willis. And aerosmith.

jarek 16y ago

Just to confirm... the typo in the title of this submission is on purpose, right?

borism 16y ago
what typo?
- jojopotato 16y ago
  Asteriod is the typo in the submission. Either that or there is some joke I am not getting.

balding_n_tired 16y ago

Ah, Grinnell, alma mater of Robert Noyce. Actually, I'm not sure what the point is. The fantasies with which underemployed recent BAs make the 40 hours pass? A take-off on the brand of thriller in which Joe Normal gets sucked into international (or interplanetary) intrigue and danger? Revenge for the balderdash the author was forced to write last year? But wasn't the lead in _The Eiger Sanction_ an art history professor who did CIA hits in the off-season to support his Picasso habit? Yeah, Clint Eastwood's a bit long in the tooth, but I'd back him against Bruce Willis for asteroid destruction any day of the week. (Cf. _Space Cowboys_<liberal arts mode>, another profound exploration of the human spirit</liberal arts mode>.)

anonjon 16y ago

Why do people in engineering/scientific fields get a free pass make fun of my philosophy degree? I'm getting kind of tired of hearing jokes about how I should be working at McDonald's and that because I have a non-science degree I can never contribute anything to society. That's bullshit. I'm in a masters program right now for computer science, and that it is a ton easier than the bachelor's in philosophy was. My first thought is that these people majored in the sciences because they were terrible at abstract thought and could never work beyond memorizing equations. These people are useless as they will never make the breakthroughs that the greatest scientists have made. (Einstein's approach to relativity included plenty of mathematics and science, but it was also based in thought experiments). Secondarily, people have a tendency to mock and belittle anything that they don't understand. By definition, they do not understand most areas of the liberal arts (too abstract). So you get shit like this thread. The original article was quite good, however.

cousin_it 16y ago

How I'd answer if I had a liberal arts degree: "If I make up a hypothetical situation where you wouldn't fit in, does it prove you're worthless?"

williamjames 16y ago

The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities, unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. In classical antiquity, the liberal arts denoted the education proper to a free man (Latin: liberus, “free”), unlike the education proper to a slave.

jfornear 16y ago
The modern liberal arts student avoids math and science like the plague.
- AmericanOP 16y ago
  In practice, the belief that a liberal arts education has equal value to a BS degree is anti-science.
jquery 16y ago
There's something to this. Modern society taxes (enslaves) the high earners (specialists) in favor of mostly giveaways to the middle and lower middle class (liberal arts majors) and to the very rich (bailouts). *note: originally I was writing this as a joke but it stopped feeling like one halfway through.
- searchergss 16y ago
  Dude, jokes aside. You forgot the masses that cannot even afford to go to college, and depend on your "giveaways"

wooster 16y ago

I'd just like to point out that Harvey Mudd College is a liberal arts college. As is Pomona College, where I got my (BA) degree in Computer Science. So, yeah, the post is funny, but some of us have both a liberal arts degree and an ability to do utilitarian things.

baddox 16y ago

What are the odds of actually stopping an asteroid? I suspect that asteroids small enough to be escaped by evacuation wouldn't be detected soon enough, and I highly doubt if we could do anything to divert or destroy a larger asteroid.

yetanotherlogin 16y ago

Few things are more tedious than reading science majors endlessly, smugly belittle arts subjects. "Oh ho ho, something I don't understand and haven't done and probably couldn't do, they must be idiots, let's constantly mock them". I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. Thankfully some of the comments, at least, show a more nuanced grasp of reality.

lionhearted 16y ago
> I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. A developed vocabulary is awesome, but you always got to consider who your audience is and why you're writing. If you're trying to persuade a lot of people, it's almost always better to choose the easier and more readable word instead of the bigger or deeper or more obscure word. I read a hell of a lot, and I had to look bilge up to figure out exactly what you're saying - you could've just said "trash" instead and everyone would've got your meaning. Likewise, "tedious" could be "boring", "smugly belittle" could be "insult", you could drop "endlessly" altogether since it doesn't add any more information. Likewise, "quite enough" doesn't convey more than just the word "enough", "nuanced grasp of reality" could've just been "perspective". Here's how I'd write it: > Few things are more tedious than reading science majors endlessly, smugly belittle arts subjects. "Oh ho ho, something I don't understand and haven't done and probably couldn't do, they must be idiots, let's constantly mock them". I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. Thankfully some of the comments, at least, show a more nuanced grasp of reality. ...becomes... > It gets old reading science majors put down the arts. It's easier to mock something than it is to try to understand it. Sheesh, I saw enough of that on slashdot and I'm disappointed to see it here. It's good that at least a few commentors are taking the time to share a perspective from the other side. So, you write less, it's faster, more people understand you, more are convinced, and you come across less arrogant. Anyways, I been there myself, I grew up reading lots of books and always used to choose the bigger word. Now I choose the simpler more readable way unless the bigger word is really necessary or conveys more.
- 16y ago

acg 16y ago

The real issue is the separation of Arts from Science. The best artists are scientists and the best scientists are artists. Was Da Vinci any more into liberal arts than science. Anyone who specialises in a single viewpoint and is unable to compromise probably isn't a candidate for saving the earth.

Semiapies 16y ago

Way too many people taking this far too seriously as an attack on liberal arts. It's just absurd humor and could be flipped for equally funny effect - some movie astronaut/action hero in a tense meeting of academics who all consider his input weirdly vital.

ajuc 16y ago
Of course it's joke, but when I tried to think of situation that would be analogical in importance and where astronaut/engineer would be so much worse fit than liberal arts, I couldn't. That probably just tells my imagination is limited. But not everybody has to be able to save the world when it comes to that. Singers and writers are useful, and they wouldn't fit in to asteroid scenario, neither.
- Semiapies 16y ago
  Or loads of "geeks" who know barely more than a layman about astrophysics.