yes, and a significant portion of our famous scientists studied philosophy and then laid the foundations across multiple disciplines some of which many graduate

yes, and a significant portion of our famous scientists studied philosophy and then laid the foundations across multiple disciplines some of which many graduate students still don't understand even though they studied them. i know a whole bunch of people are going to argue pro specialization, but i think we need to rethink the way we teach. we've built efficient workhorse factories which we call universities, and some of the top tier ones are slowly moving away from that system. there are also a lot of known cases where crossdomain talent has brought a perspective which led to a whole bunch of problem solving. but i'm careful with conclusions here, because we know correlation does not imply causality. we're not teaching people, we're indoctrinating them, to a point where your sound reasoning is valueless, because you don't have a ph.d in the domain you talk about. what's tested in your university exams is not whether you're good at something, it's how good we can recite the things that have been taught to us. it's a system that carries from primary school to everything else. somewhat related is also this gem, someone posted on hn before http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html EDIT: you might wonder how that is related. one example: i struggled during the universities architectural classes. even though having grown up reading intel platform references and looking at disassembled c/c++ and delphi code i understood memory layouts, threading, pipelining much better than anyone else in the class. i also spent a lot of time learning basic mips architectures. the problem was that none of that really helped me to do well on the exams. the reasoning behind it, is that class is structure in a way so that once you learn the theory behind it, you'll have a reference point once you actually need to do something in that domain. that reasoning is in fact sound, but only if we assume that no one actually knows what they want to do. > In my experience, learning how the computer worked made it easier for me to learn to program it yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that?