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>> which is a concern because an English professor finished these Occupations aren't necessarily a good signal for intelligence or domain expertise... even a p
by grinich 14y ago
>> which is a concern because an English professor finished these
Occupations aren't necessarily a good signal for intelligence or domain expertise... even a patent clerk will surprise you once and a while. ;)
- phaus 14y agoI agree. I once asked a mechanic in my military unit a question about a car problem, it quickly turned into an hour-long lecture on thermodynamics and ambient heat. The guy is absolutely brilliant.
- tptacek 14y agoI'm just trolling the STEM grads. I got the professor's permission to do that!
- jiggy2011 14y agoWas he just an English professor , or is there some important qualifier? Good troll either way.
- tptacek 14y agoPleading the 5th.
- stephencanon 14y agoAn English professor of computer science at Cambridge, no doubt. =)
- cobralibre 14y ago(Not necessarily responding to the parent comment directly.) The wall between STEM and the humanities is, if not artificial, quite porous, and it's in the interest of every intelligent person to bring it down. In general, there's been quite a bit of interest in quantitative approaches to the humanities lately. Try googling for J.E.H. Smith's proposal for a data-driven survey of world philosophy, or look into Franco Moretti's work on "distant reading" in Graphs, Maps, Trees. The latter was even profiled in the New York Times Magazine several years ago. I also like to trot out the example of Hugh Kenner, a protege of Marshall McLuhan who was one of the 20th century's great scholars of Modernism, particularly of Joyce and Pound — and who was also a contributor to Byte.
- sdevlin 14y agoEinstein did his best stuff while he was working as a patent clerk.
- zura 14y agoDepends on what patent applications one gets for review ;)