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Anyone can major in Art History without a lot of effort. It’s not a differentiating credential for many jobs. CS is a very difficult major. It’s a differentiat

Anyone can major in Art History without a lot of effort. It’s not a differentiating credential for many jobs. CS is a very difficult major. It’s a differentiating credential for many jobs. That’s why the market clears differently. The quality of CS programs (and grads) may go down but there will always be a market for the talented. I think Finance and Accounting might be the more appropriate comparison. There is a lot of outsourcing and crap accountants, but the best financiers still do very well.

fock 7y ago
would sign that. Basically what you learn in a good CS program isn't trivially accessible or more or less "soft" knowledge requiring only a (very good) command of the language you already need for day-2-day communication. It requires logic and strict thoughts – while those things aren't necessarily making you a good coder, this are skills not wielded by the masses anytime soon because they require (for most people) to really sit down and learn. For art history you probably go there, look into your textbook and just start talking about random stuff associated with limited data and if you're audience isn't really into their code/peer-bias-bubble/.. there is a big range of "reasonable" things you can say. (saying that as a physics major with a lot of CS friends and random acquaintances which I regularly impress by just introducing random facts (they don't think a STEM-guy knows...) in conversation and giving them a techy twist...) As to the salary question: apparently a lot of people see academia as a sort of fancy tradeschool with guaranteed above average income and of course this is not the main objective of academic ventures and if everyone thinks that, some has to be the below-average-guy or gal. For the average person studying solely for the purpose of eventually making more money is just plainly stupid.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  >It requires logic and strict thoughts >art history you probably go there, look into your textbook and just start talking about random stuff associated (emphasis mine) >with limited data This is all really funny stuff.
  - fock 7y ago
    I don't really get your comment. Yes, I didn't write any assignments in art history nor do I exactly know, what you actually learn from art history, but guessing from checking other peoples assignments, talking to people and looking at their lecture notes in similar field (e.g. communication science, ancient languages and archaeology) I assume that you basically have to read up some facts and then can go to any lecture you fancy and start contributing in a more or less meaningful way. You can't do that in CS or physics or engineering – it just won't work. Note that I don't intend to belittle those kind of studies; if you put a lot of effort into it, you're most certainly reaching levels of conceptual understanding and a command of language I might never achieve in my life. If one gets "satisfaction"/"gratification" [whatever you need to keep going on a personal level (excluding modern day BS where these things are just used for justifying the continuing exploitation of labor)] from that, I'm all up to you pursuing it. Still, looking at the kind of person who idles similar studies while he/she's waiting tables at Burger-King, the whole idea of academic studies seems a little bit pointless (similar to the CS guys rushing college for the best paying IT-project management job) – though you probably also get to learn a thing or two about the way we live (contrary to the drones going for the highest-paying majors)
    - pasabagi 7y ago
      My comment was basically pointing out the irony of claiming that art history people say stuff with limited data, based on your obviously limited experience of art history as a field. > I assume that you basically have to read up some facts and then can go to any lecture you fancy and start contributing in a more or less meaningful way. This isn't true, unless you're an undergrad at a really bad university. The really 'unproductive' fields like art history tend to have a pretty asymptotic difficulty curve, since funding is almost impossible to find. That makes later stages really, incredibly competitive, unless you're basically willing to pay through the entire process. One thing to note about hierarchy of perceived difficulty of university courses, is that it almost always maps to how useful these courses are to industry, and almost never maps to how complex the subject actually is. Traditional Chinese literature, for instance, is horribly difficult. Computer science, on the other hand, is a subject where people actually try hard to be understood, and don't write using in bird-worm seal script. Nonetheless, if you are a computer scientist, people will assume you're smart, and if you're studying chinese literature, people will assume you're a goof.
minikites 7y ago
>Anyone can major in Art History without a lot of effort. Another day, another Hacker News comment asserting the inferiority of any non-technical subject based on zero experience or evidence.
- katanaman 7y ago
  I don't think we need evidence, it's like common knowledge. Medicine, engineering or CS students don't have really time to party around like the art history, journalism and liberal studies folks do.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    That is the cliche that I learned in college too, but it seems to be true. Could it be that history and business majors are the smart one because they still do lots of hard work (like 'us' math people) but do it fast enough to party a lot? Yeah, no.

fock 7y ago

would sign that. Basically what you learn in a good CS program isn't trivially accessible or more or less "soft" knowledge requiring only a (very good) command of the language you already need for day-2-day communication. It requires logic and strict thoughts – while those things aren't necessarily making you a good coder, this are skills not wielded by the masses anytime soon because they require (for most people) to really sit down and learn. For art history you probably go there, look into your textbook and just start talking about random stuff associated with limited data and if you're audience isn't really into their code/peer-bias-bubble/.. there is a big range of "reasonable" things you can say. (saying that as a physics major with a lot of CS friends and random acquaintances which I regularly impress by just introducing random facts (they don't think a STEM-guy knows...) in conversation and giving them a techy twist...) As to the salary question: apparently a lot of people see academia as a sort of fancy tradeschool with guaranteed above average income and of course this is not the main objective of academic ventures and if everyone thinks that, some has to be the below-average-guy or gal. For the average person studying solely for the purpose of eventually making more money is just plainly stupid.

pasabagi 7y ago
>It requires logic and strict thoughts >art history you probably go there, look into your textbook and just start talking about random stuff associated (emphasis mine) >with limited data This is all really funny stuff.
- fock 7y ago
  I don't really get your comment. Yes, I didn't write any assignments in art history nor do I exactly know, what you actually learn from art history, but guessing from checking other peoples assignments, talking to people and looking at their lecture notes in similar field (e.g. communication science, ancient languages and archaeology) I assume that you basically have to read up some facts and then can go to any lecture you fancy and start contributing in a more or less meaningful way. You can't do that in CS or physics or engineering – it just won't work. Note that I don't intend to belittle those kind of studies; if you put a lot of effort into it, you're most certainly reaching levels of conceptual understanding and a command of language I might never achieve in my life. If one gets "satisfaction"/"gratification" [whatever you need to keep going on a personal level (excluding modern day BS where these things are just used for justifying the continuing exploitation of labor)] from that, I'm all up to you pursuing it. Still, looking at the kind of person who idles similar studies while he/she's waiting tables at Burger-King, the whole idea of academic studies seems a little bit pointless (similar to the CS guys rushing college for the best paying IT-project management job) – though you probably also get to learn a thing or two about the way we live (contrary to the drones going for the highest-paying majors)
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    My comment was basically pointing out the irony of claiming that art history people say stuff with limited data, based on your obviously limited experience of art history as a field. > I assume that you basically have to read up some facts and then can go to any lecture you fancy and start contributing in a more or less meaningful way. This isn't true, unless you're an undergrad at a really bad university. The really 'unproductive' fields like art history tend to have a pretty asymptotic difficulty curve, since funding is almost impossible to find. That makes later stages really, incredibly competitive, unless you're basically willing to pay through the entire process. One thing to note about hierarchy of perceived difficulty of university courses, is that it almost always maps to how useful these courses are to industry, and almost never maps to how complex the subject actually is. Traditional Chinese literature, for instance, is horribly difficult. Computer science, on the other hand, is a subject where people actually try hard to be understood, and don't write using in bird-worm seal script. Nonetheless, if you are a computer scientist, people will assume you're smart, and if you're studying chinese literature, people will assume you're a goof.

minikites 7y ago

>Anyone can major in Art History without a lot of effort. Another day, another Hacker News comment asserting the inferiority of any non-technical subject based on zero experience or evidence.

katanaman 7y ago
I don't think we need evidence, it's like common knowledge. Medicine, engineering or CS students don't have really time to party around like the art history, journalism and liberal studies folks do.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  That is the cliche that I learned in college too, but it seems to be true. Could it be that history and business majors are the smart one because they still do lots of hard work (like 'us' math people) but do it fast enough to party a lot? Yeah, no.