5 ms·

Those diverse experiences are exactly the purpose of a “liberal arts education,” something that’s derided here as bad job training. A degree in Shakespeare won’

by sudont 16y ago

Those diverse experiences are exactly the purpose of a “liberal arts education,” something that’s derided here as bad job training. A degree in Shakespeare won’t help with cache invalidation, but it’ll sure spice up the naming.

mullr 16y ago
Ha! One out of two isn't bad.
tel 16y ago
I think of the underlying faults with that point of view on liberal arts education, one stands above all others. As holder of an engineering bachelors, I'll anecdotally attest to the widely known problem that Undergraduate engineering degrees actively discourage building communication skills. This above all else is the heart of that linear thinking problem. Many graduating engineers in the US are communication challenged. They can't perform a principled arguments, write evocatively, perform convincing. They lack the skills to perform critical analysis of other communication, any sort of eye for subtlety, and flat out lack the appreciation of good writing. It's often explained away as if there is this single choice people make when they're young that they'll either be good at math/science or literature/history. Once you've made that choice, you're stuck socially, psychologically, practically. But that's okay, goes the argument, specialization is necessary and everybody is one-sided, really. So despite wide knowledge of this problem, schools combat it by deliberately watered-down english classes designed to not damage engineering GPAs. My alma mater required two english classes, both of which I got near perfect grades in by skipping class and writing half-minded, fantastical leaps of literary analysis on books I'd skimmed. I got perfect scores and remarks like "This is the best paper I've ever read". Literally. It also required a single semester "technical communication" course where we were introduced to business letter etiquette and the definition of genre. As a firm believer that writing something down is the fastest, most powerful method to clarifying your thoughts, I find it despicable that engineering colleges don't provide these challenges. I find it corrosive that the dominant societal perspective is that it's ok if you can't write because you're an engineer. I think this directly leads to the sort of creativity rot I saw, all the time, in classmates. My experiences may be anecdotal and localized to my college, which is one of the top engineering colleges in the US. I hope it is, and that this disgust is misdirected, but really I think it's larger than that. --- tl;dr? I'm completely convinced that a dreadful number of engineers are missing something central to anyone who wants to deal in complex ideas entirely because it's considered a liberal arts speciality. They're weak at techniques to critically and clearly articulate or analyze ideas aloud or in writing, the art and science of human communication. (I'll also note that so far a huge part of the advice of how to survive graduate school is learning to write. People tell me it with the look in their eyes that says they've seen so many people fail miserably because of this sudden, new expectation. I'm know my writing needs a lot of improvement, but I know that of many of the people in my graduating class, many would require a near complete literary reversal before they could actually publish.) </rant> (Edit: made it more clear that I'm not arguing with what sudont said. Written communication is hard.)
- sudont 16y ago
  Um: “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”. Tim Bray quoting Phil Karlton If you haven’t heard that quote, hopefully it’ll conceptually expand to where my post completely agrees with you. If it doesn’t, I completely agree with you. My arts degree helps me think laterally in the extreme.
  - tel 16y ago
    Ah, cool. Hadn't heard the quote actually, hah, though I was pretty sure you weren't completely hardline serious that you'd summed up the benefits of liberal arts education. You just tipped off a complaint I had (and have) building up inside. We're in the same boat, argumentatively. I'm just speaking (yelling, crying) from the other side.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I definitely agree with that: many of the skills I've used as a CS grad student came directly from my philosophy minor, not from my CS bachelor's degree. Being able to construct or refute an argument, writing 6-to-20-page essays, etc. Writing in CS isn't the same as writing in philosophy, but at least the philosophy classes gave me some grounding in it, which was totally lacking in the CS curriculum. The other big thing I got out of philosophy but not CS: how to frame and motivate a problem. In undergrad CS, you're usually solving problems that come prepackaged: someone has already posed this problem, developed the framework in which you're expected to come up with a solution, etc., and your job is to find and explain the solution. But in CS research, sometimes >50% of the work can be in convincing someone that something is a problem to begin with, and moreover that it's a problem they should care about, and your way of framing the problem is a good one. Only then will they even bother to look at your proposed solution to the problem!
bh23ha 16y ago
You must have had a truly great “liberal arts education”! I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college. In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment. Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college. But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong. And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.
- sudont 16y ago
  Ah, thank you for describing the condescending attitude I was talking about!
- rorymarinich 16y ago
  I agree with sudont, bh23ha; you have more than a streak of condescension with your response right here. But more than that, I think you're wrong, or disagree, with how idea of what a college ought to be. It's worth a conversation. I'm not strictly a liberal arts student, but my curriculum involves a series of liberal arts courses, required. I'm also in Communications, meaning that among the arts I study (art school) I'm getting a fairly diverse set of courses, ranging from film to screenwriting to poetry to interface design to a few other things that aren't strictly involved in my major. So even that study is more "liberal arts" than the average technical degree concentration. > I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college. I think you're assuming that everybody who's attending college is going there to learn a specific skillset that'll help them in their career, and work hard at developing those skills. I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own. I didn't enter college for Communications. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted. And in the process of searching I took a variety of classes — programming classes, religious studies, Japanese, an industrial design class — and each one helped me understand a little bit more about what I liked and what I didn't. What's more, I find that the classes I take that offer me nothing that I'll apply to my eventual business future tend to offer me unexpected flashes of insight. That religion course, for instance, taught me more about social experiences that human beings seek out than any social design course I've sat through; it helped me understand and come to terms with a phenomenon I at once point actively hated as a child. Similarly, a flamenco class I'm taking right now is unexpectedly teaching me a lot about my misconceptions of what music is and how it works socially. (If you don't know, the way flamenco musicians approach their work is much different than the way band musicians do, and the resulting society is vastly different and interesting.) For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being. I do agree with you that my major doesn't force hard work out of people like engineering majors do. I'm a mix myself: I work hard on my out-of-school projects but my classwork depends on how interested I am in the course. I breeze through a lot of things and do pretty well. But I think that's an advantage, too. I don't like that some technical colleges sap a student's soul and make it impossible for them to do stupid college things, or to experiment on projects with their friends. I have friends who want to do things which they simply can't because freshmen-level courses are taking hours and hours out of their every week. And I'm really sad about that, because I know that a lot of people who give up creative projects in college never pick them up again. College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

by sudont 16y ago

mullr 16y ago

Ha! One out of two isn't bad.

tel 16y ago

I think of the underlying faults with that point of view on liberal arts education, one stands above all others. As holder of an engineering bachelors, I'll anecdotally attest to the widely known problem that Undergraduate engineering degrees actively discourage building communication skills. This above all else is the heart of that linear thinking problem. Many graduating engineers in the US are communication challenged. They can't perform a principled arguments, write evocatively, perform convincing. They lack the skills to perform critical analysis of other communication, any sort of eye for subtlety, and flat out lack the appreciation of good writing. It's often explained away as if there is this single choice people make when they're young that they'll either be good at math/science or literature/history. Once you've made that choice, you're stuck socially, psychologically, practically. But that's okay, goes the argument, specialization is necessary and everybody is one-sided, really. So despite wide knowledge of this problem, schools combat it by deliberately watered-down english classes designed to not damage engineering GPAs. My alma mater required two english classes, both of which I got near perfect grades in by skipping class and writing half-minded, fantastical leaps of literary analysis on books I'd skimmed. I got perfect scores and remarks like "This is the best paper I've ever read". Literally. It also required a single semester "technical communication" course where we were introduced to business letter etiquette and the definition of genre. As a firm believer that writing something down is the fastest, most powerful method to clarifying your thoughts, I find it despicable that engineering colleges don't provide these challenges. I find it corrosive that the dominant societal perspective is that it's ok if you can't write because you're an engineer. I think this directly leads to the sort of creativity rot I saw, all the time, in classmates. My experiences may be anecdotal and localized to my college, which is one of the top engineering colleges in the US. I hope it is, and that this disgust is misdirected, but really I think it's larger than that. --- tl;dr? I'm completely convinced that a dreadful number of engineers are missing something central to anyone who wants to deal in complex ideas entirely because it's considered a liberal arts speciality. They're weak at techniques to critically and clearly articulate or analyze ideas aloud or in writing, the art and science of human communication. (I'll also note that so far a huge part of the advice of how to survive graduate school is learning to write. People tell me it with the look in their eyes that says they've seen so many people fail miserably because of this sudden, new expectation. I'm know my writing needs a lot of improvement, but I know that of many of the people in my graduating class, many would require a near complete literary reversal before they could actually publish.) </rant> (Edit: made it more clear that I'm not arguing with what sudont said. Written communication is hard.)

sudont 16y ago
Um: “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”. Tim Bray quoting Phil Karlton If you haven’t heard that quote, hopefully it’ll conceptually expand to where my post completely agrees with you. If it doesn’t, I completely agree with you. My arts degree helps me think laterally in the extreme.
- tel 16y ago
  Ah, cool. Hadn't heard the quote actually, hah, though I was pretty sure you weren't completely hardline serious that you'd summed up the benefits of liberal arts education. You just tipped off a complaint I had (and have) building up inside. We're in the same boat, argumentatively. I'm just speaking (yelling, crying) from the other side.
_delirium 16y ago
I definitely agree with that: many of the skills I've used as a CS grad student came directly from my philosophy minor, not from my CS bachelor's degree. Being able to construct or refute an argument, writing 6-to-20-page essays, etc. Writing in CS isn't the same as writing in philosophy, but at least the philosophy classes gave me some grounding in it, which was totally lacking in the CS curriculum. The other big thing I got out of philosophy but not CS: how to frame and motivate a problem. In undergrad CS, you're usually solving problems that come prepackaged: someone has already posed this problem, developed the framework in which you're expected to come up with a solution, etc., and your job is to find and explain the solution. But in CS research, sometimes >50% of the work can be in convincing someone that something is a problem to begin with, and moreover that it's a problem they should care about, and your way of framing the problem is a good one. Only then will they even bother to look at your proposed solution to the problem!

bh23ha 16y ago

You must have had a truly great “liberal arts education”! I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college. In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment. Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college. But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong. And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.

sudont 16y ago
Ah, thank you for describing the condescending attitude I was talking about!
rorymarinich 16y ago
I agree with sudont, bh23ha; you have more than a streak of condescension with your response right here. But more than that, I think you're wrong, or disagree, with how idea of what a college ought to be. It's worth a conversation. I'm not strictly a liberal arts student, but my curriculum involves a series of liberal arts courses, required. I'm also in Communications, meaning that among the arts I study (art school) I'm getting a fairly diverse set of courses, ranging from film to screenwriting to poetry to interface design to a few other things that aren't strictly involved in my major. So even that study is more "liberal arts" than the average technical degree concentration. > I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college. I think you're assuming that everybody who's attending college is going there to learn a specific skillset that'll help them in their career, and work hard at developing those skills. I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own. I didn't enter college for Communications. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted. And in the process of searching I took a variety of classes — programming classes, religious studies, Japanese, an industrial design class — and each one helped me understand a little bit more about what I liked and what I didn't. What's more, I find that the classes I take that offer me nothing that I'll apply to my eventual business future tend to offer me unexpected flashes of insight. That religion course, for instance, taught me more about social experiences that human beings seek out than any social design course I've sat through; it helped me understand and come to terms with a phenomenon I at once point actively hated as a child. Similarly, a flamenco class I'm taking right now is unexpectedly teaching me a lot about my misconceptions of what music is and how it works socially. (If you don't know, the way flamenco musicians approach their work is much different than the way band musicians do, and the resulting society is vastly different and interesting.) For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being. I do agree with you that my major doesn't force hard work out of people like engineering majors do. I'm a mix myself: I work hard on my out-of-school projects but my classwork depends on how interested I am in the course. I breeze through a lot of things and do pretty well. But I think that's an advantage, too. I don't like that some technical colleges sap a student's soul and make it impossible for them to do stupid college things, or to experiment on projects with their friends. I have friends who want to do things which they simply can't because freshmen-level courses are taking hours and hours out of their every week. And I'm really sad about that, because I know that a lot of people who give up creative projects in college never pick them up again. College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.