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Useless degree. Seriously, what happened with college preparing you for life? I think this country would be much better off if people start studying more conc

by ardit33 19y ago

Useless degree. Seriously, what happened with college preparing you for life? I think this country would be much better off if people start studying more concrete sciences. Doing biology, math, physics, bio-chem, computer science, accounting... so we have the talent of actually solving real world problems, energy, polution, less co-2 emissions, alternatives to oil, better design and architecting of towns, less sprawl, etc. How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s., All they would be able to do is complain about how pollution is wrong to society, yet being unable to do anything practical about it. How does a society advance with only people being able to talk the talk, but not walk the walk? Studying Philosophy would be great if it is a minor, or a second major in school. Plus, you could learn a lot more by yourself, by reading books and such. While hard sciences are much more difficult to learn by yourself.

akeefer 19y ago
Before I went to college, I read a lot of philosophy, and I thought I was learning a lot. But there's a huge difference between reading Plato or Nietzche or Rawls or whatever else you like and having to write papers that critically analyze said works. For all its reputation as a haven for people who bullshit a lot, I've never had a paper more savagely ripped apart than by an analytic philosophy TA. It's an experience I never got in other departments, and it's something that everyone, especially know-it-all-type high school students, can really benefit from. Learning how to be wrong is an important life skill, and reading books just doesn't teach you that.
hollerith 19y ago
On the contrary: the hard sciences are easier to learn by yourself because it takes more self-deception to fool yourself into believing you understand something you really do not. When you do a math or physics exercise and get 20 for an answer, and the answer back of the textbook is 3, it takes a heroic amount of self-deception to convince yourself you understand the exercise. Then again the hard sciences are less likely to be taught badly because falsehoods about the hard sciences are easier to detect, so if you are more worried about false teachers than about arriving at false understanding through self-study, it tends to make sense to reserve the more difficult-to-get-right subjects like philosophy for self-study under the theory that if you want a job done right you should do it yourself rather than trust a bureaucratic educational establishment to do it.
aswanson 19y ago
How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s How is society going to advance with a bunch of calculating automata without any taste for what is worth solving in the first place? And just where is this advance taking us, by the way? Why?
deleted 18y ago
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by ardit33 19y ago

akeefer 19y ago

Before I went to college, I read a lot of philosophy, and I thought I was learning a lot. But there's a huge difference between reading Plato or Nietzche or Rawls or whatever else you like and having to write papers that critically analyze said works. For all its reputation as a haven for people who bullshit a lot, I've never had a paper more savagely ripped apart than by an analytic philosophy TA. It's an experience I never got in other departments, and it's something that everyone, especially know-it-all-type high school students, can really benefit from. Learning how to be wrong is an important life skill, and reading books just doesn't teach you that.

hollerith 19y ago

On the contrary: the hard sciences are easier to learn by yourself because it takes more self-deception to fool yourself into believing you understand something you really do not. When you do a math or physics exercise and get 20 for an answer, and the answer back of the textbook is 3, it takes a heroic amount of self-deception to convince yourself you understand the exercise. Then again the hard sciences are less likely to be taught badly because falsehoods about the hard sciences are easier to detect, so if you are more worried about false teachers than about arriving at false understanding through self-study, it tends to make sense to reserve the more difficult-to-get-right subjects like philosophy for self-study under the theory that if you want a job done right you should do it yourself rather than trust a bureaucratic educational establishment to do it.

aswanson 19y ago

How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s How is society going to advance with a bunch of calculating automata without any taste for what is worth solving in the first place? And just where is this advance taking us, by the way? Why?

deleted 18y ago

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