4 ms·

I took and engineering and science program in college. The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact f

I took and engineering and science program in college. The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction. It's served me well. To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.

vineyardmike 3mo ago
> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education. That said, not everything is about a job or work. Sometimes (usually) education is itself a goal.
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  > Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education That's the plan, but it doesn't seem to work out too well. > not everything is about a job or work Yes, if you are independently wealthy. Need to pay back those student loans!
- imtringued 3mo ago
  If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people? If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition. You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it. Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.
  - fwn 3mo ago
    It is worth noting that most of liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it gets much more expensive than anything a liberal arts teacher can come up with. I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy (or even just prestigious) education somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts. I do understand that the money is not just drained. Whenever I was on an American campus as a student, I was in awe at their extravagant setups. Lots of food, an irritating amount of sports, more like a small resort town than a place to do educational work. No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.
  - adrianN 3mo ago
    Arguably an educated populace is a corner stone of democratic societies. Too much of a focus on economic applicability of education is dangerous imo.
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago
  A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily. The other direction is possible but not so easy.
  - vineyardmike 3mo ago
    Did you read the article? As it highlights elegantly, "liberal arts" is about the educational methodology and structure, not the course material. You can learn STEM subjects in a liberal arts education. > fairly easily... not so easy. Yea, totally, STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning ;)
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
      STEM majors are inherently better overall. Are you trying to be sarcastic or funny? I can't tell. I've yet to find a liberal arts grad who even knows what a partial differential equation is.
      - defrost 3mo ago
        You might need to get out more, many BAs understand what differential equations are. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 and graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts. At Cambridge, Russell was introduced to philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
        SanjayMehta 3mo ago
        Never met him. Have you?
        defrost 3mo ago
        You'd have to be about my age or older to have met him, and, at least according to my mother, I did meet him in Wales and was bounced on his knee. Go figure. I learnt more about his work from his successors who were / are a mix of philosophy and mathematics majors, the majority fully aware of partial differential equations at the very least. Of the people my age, there are folks such as Dominic Hyde who majored in liberal arts while studying both math and physics alongside Jerome Gauntlett (who did not major in liberal arts .. although he has acted alongside Nicole Kidman) and others. They all grok PDEs. Closer to our mutual "home", HN on ycombinator, I understand that Paul Graham, the forum founder and co-creator of the Arc programming language, is yet another liberal arts major who understands what PDE's are. * https://hpi.uq.edu.au/profile/388/dominic-hyde https://hpi.uq.edu.au/profile/388/dominic-hyde * https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/j.gauntlett https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/j.gauntlett * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) It's a wide world, get out and meet more people.
alephnerd 3mo ago
That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I) Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment. In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.
  - alephnerd 3mo ago
    Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base. Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited). That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.
    - WalterBright 3mo ago
      I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work. I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes. Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.
      - 3mo ago
Brian_K_White 3mo ago
When I was an infant first couple years of college, us engineers knew we were the useful smarties. Art is nice and all but it doesn't grow crops or cure cancer. So the arts are just this luxury that we can only afford thanks to us non-luxury necessary engineers & scientists. Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc. Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  I haven't noticed that liberal arts majors are better at deciding whether to build a bomb or a bridge. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions by government.
  - Brian_K_White 3mo ago
    A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep. "You need flour to make a cake." "I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake." You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise. Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything. But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate. It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant. Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.
    - WalterBright 3mo ago
      > Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated. Being educated in things that are not true is worse than being ignorant. For example, advocacy of things like socialism that do not work.

vineyardmike 3mo ago

> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education. That said, not everything is about a job or work. Sometimes (usually) education is itself a goal.

WalterBright 3mo ago
> Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education That's the plan, but it doesn't seem to work out too well. > not everything is about a job or work Yes, if you are independently wealthy. Need to pay back those student loans!
imtringued 3mo ago
If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people? If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition. You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it. Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.
- fwn 3mo ago
  It is worth noting that most of liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it gets much more expensive than anything a liberal arts teacher can come up with. I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy (or even just prestigious) education somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts. I do understand that the money is not just drained. Whenever I was on an American campus as a student, I was in awe at their extravagant setups. Lots of food, an irritating amount of sports, more like a small resort town than a place to do educational work. No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.
- adrianN 3mo ago
  Arguably an educated populace is a corner stone of democratic societies. Too much of a focus on economic applicability of education is dangerous imo.
SanjayMehta 3mo ago
A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily. The other direction is possible but not so easy.
- vineyardmike 3mo ago
  Did you read the article? As it highlights elegantly, "liberal arts" is about the educational methodology and structure, not the course material. You can learn STEM subjects in a liberal arts education. > fairly easily... not so easy. Yea, totally, STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning ;)
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
    STEM majors are inherently better overall. Are you trying to be sarcastic or funny? I can't tell. I've yet to find a liberal arts grad who even knows what a partial differential equation is.
    - defrost 3mo ago
      You might need to get out more, many BAs understand what differential equations are. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 and graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts. At Cambridge, Russell was introduced to philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
      - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
        Never met him. Have you?
        defrost 3mo ago
        You'd have to be about my age or older to have met him, and, at least according to my mother, I did meet him in Wales and was bounced on his knee. Go figure. I learnt more about his work from his successors who were / are a mix of philosophy and mathematics majors, the majority fully aware of partial differential equations at the very least. Of the people my age, there are folks such as Dominic Hyde who majored in liberal arts while studying both math and physics alongside Jerome Gauntlett (who did not major in liberal arts .. although he has acted alongside Nicole Kidman) and others. They all grok PDEs. Closer to our mutual "home", HN on ycombinator, I understand that Paul Graham, the forum founder and co-creator of the Arc programming language, is yet another liberal arts major who understands what PDE's are. * https://hpi.uq.edu.au/profile/388/dominic-hyde https://hpi.uq.edu.au/profile/388/dominic-hyde * https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/j.gauntlett https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/j.gauntlett * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) It's a wide world, get out and meet more people.

alephnerd 3mo ago

That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I) Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.

WalterBright 3mo ago
At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment. In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.
- alephnerd 3mo ago
  Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base. Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited). That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.
  - WalterBright 3mo ago
    I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work. I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes. Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.
    - 3mo ago

Brian_K_White 3mo ago

When I was an infant first couple years of college, us engineers knew we were the useful smarties. Art is nice and all but it doesn't grow crops or cure cancer. So the arts are just this luxury that we can only afford thanks to us non-luxury necessary engineers & scientists. Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc. Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.

WalterBright 3mo ago
I haven't noticed that liberal arts majors are better at deciding whether to build a bomb or a bridge. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions by government.
- Brian_K_White 3mo ago
  A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep. "You need flour to make a cake." "I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake." You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise. Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything. But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate. It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant. Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.
  - WalterBright 3mo ago
    > Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated. Being educated in things that are not true is worse than being ignorant. For example, advocacy of things like socialism that do not work.