4 ms·

This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whateve

by lame88 7y ago

This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whatever rides the current economic wave.

linuxftw 7y ago
There's a lot more to life than technical/engineering fields. The pay is just complete crap. If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  One of the guys running DE Shaw has a psychology degree. One of their early hires had an undergrad degree in English romantic poetry. Pretty sure they're doing OK. IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering. Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
  - jki275 7y ago
    That's like saying don't bother studying so you can get to the NBA. For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      I consider virtually all the time I spent in higher education to be wasted. The actually educational pieces of a Ph.D. in physics; probably about 2 years worth of effort, using existing didactic techniques. Probably a year if you did it right -then maybe another year to work on a problem. Einstein getting his Ph.D. when he was 21 was considered normal once. "Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control. I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either. Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
      - jki275 7y ago
        No, it's called hyperbole. It's used to make a point.
Sohakes 7y ago
It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact some menial jobs require a degree nowadays. We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors. That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.
- codingdave 7y ago
  Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy. We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience. You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
  - lame88 7y ago
    Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.
lostmsu 7y ago
I disagree. Without significant advances in STEM the last 200 years would be pretty much identical to the 200 years before them, and another 200 before them, etc.
- majormajor 7y ago
  Did those advances come about because everyone grew up being told to study STEM so they could crunch numbers for marketing analytics all day?
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    No, I think the thing went haywire after the invention of the printing press, which enabled more people to access STEM, causing them to invent more things.
- lame88 7y ago
  Black people and women in the US got the right to vote just in the past century. What about that says STEM to you?
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    History is very complicated thing. But the quick spread of the trend would not be possible without communications and expanding transocean travel to name the least. Same applies to coordinated protest activities.
    - lame88 7y ago
      There are ripple effects with everything, and yes technology always provides disruption, but it would be absurd to say that technology accomplished these things.
      - lostmsu 7y ago
        I don't have enough information to either confirm, or deny that statement. Why do you think it is absurd?
faissaloo 7y ago
I don't think it is, I'd say that most uni courses don't give you anything you couldn't get with the internet.

by lame88 7y ago

This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whatever rides the current economic wave.

linuxftw 7y ago

There's a lot more to life than technical/engineering fields. The pay is just complete crap. If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.

scottlocklin 7y ago
One of the guys running DE Shaw has a psychology degree. One of their early hires had an undergrad degree in English romantic poetry. Pretty sure they're doing OK. IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering. Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
- jki275 7y ago
  That's like saying don't bother studying so you can get to the NBA. For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    I consider virtually all the time I spent in higher education to be wasted. The actually educational pieces of a Ph.D. in physics; probably about 2 years worth of effort, using existing didactic techniques. Probably a year if you did it right -then maybe another year to work on a problem. Einstein getting his Ph.D. when he was 21 was considered normal once. "Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control. I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either. Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
    - jki275 7y ago
      No, it's called hyperbole. It's used to make a point.

Sohakes 7y ago

It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact some menial jobs require a degree nowadays. We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors. That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.

codingdave 7y ago
Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy. We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience. You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
- lame88 7y ago
  Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.

lostmsu 7y ago

I disagree. Without significant advances in STEM the last 200 years would be pretty much identical to the 200 years before them, and another 200 before them, etc.

majormajor 7y ago
Did those advances come about because everyone grew up being told to study STEM so they could crunch numbers for marketing analytics all day?
- lostmsu 7y ago
  No, I think the thing went haywire after the invention of the printing press, which enabled more people to access STEM, causing them to invent more things.
lame88 7y ago
Black people and women in the US got the right to vote just in the past century. What about that says STEM to you?
- lostmsu 7y ago
  History is very complicated thing. But the quick spread of the trend would not be possible without communications and expanding transocean travel to name the least. Same applies to coordinated protest activities.
  - lame88 7y ago
    There are ripple effects with everything, and yes technology always provides disruption, but it would be absurd to say that technology accomplished these things.
    - lostmsu 7y ago
      I don't have enough information to either confirm, or deny that statement. Why do you think it is absurd?

faissaloo 7y ago

I don't think it is, I'd say that most uni courses don't give you anything you couldn't get with the internet.