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> While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS I find this interesting. Did you
by acchow 3y ago
> While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS
I find this interesting. Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction?
I found CS fascinating. Of course you get to choose your own path through CS and could possibly avoid most of the major breakthroughs, but to do it in earnest is revelatory. There is Godel’s Incompleteness restated/rediscovered through computation; the church-Turing thesis, Curry-Howard correspondence, graph theory, etc. I never did EE, but I did some math in my past and CS felt closer to pure math than anything else I’ve studied.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago>Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction? No, but we could always flip the question since we know you didn't do EE. ;) I did however slap on a math minor and find out I'm way better at abstract algebra than I have any reason to be. I'll sum it up as "I'm just more of a frog than a bird", but I don't really think that's it. I think relevancy selection is just an inherently hard philosophical problem and it's really hard to actually grok the internal or aesthetic kicks smart people get at different things. Dynamical systems tickle my fancy, so do group actions and finite fields and generating functions, the incompleteness theorems don't, go figure - at least not present day me, a depressed teenager me looking for philosophical solutions in all the wrong places ate that stuff up.