10 ms·

This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical thinking

by jzwinck 12y ago

This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical thinking of the sort needed when we program computers is simply not developed as well as it is in CS, EE, and various other programs. As a third-year undergrad I took a 400-level course on logic from the humanities department. I remember being blown away by how inept the average students there seemed at first. They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. The way of thinking required to get through that class easily was one which most second-year CS students had, but not the student body at large. I came to realize I had been groomed for this class for years already. In a 200-level CS course we learned to use Karnaugh Maps. This was not optional. There is a difference between analyzing digital logic and writing papers outside CS. Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- bigdubs 12y ago
  Yours is "oh noetry".
radmuzom 12y ago
I sort of agree with your overall sentiment, but the reason you found the average student from humanities inept is because the good students generally opt for STEM courses - presumably because these courses allow you to make much more money after you pass out. I also happen to believe that the world would be a much better place if a larger number of bright students study humanities subjects - especially history and literature.
api 12y ago
I'm not sure about typical English majors vs. CS majors, but in a cognitive sense there is quite a bit of overlap in certain areas. Writing and high-comprehension reading involves the deep understanding and manipulation of language. So does programming.
- Alupis 12y ago
  Yes, but CS majors come out of school with some level of understanding about how computing works... not just how to write code.
- stuki 12y ago
  All "language" is not the same. To be reliably and consistently machine executable, a language needs to facilitate manipulations that are logically rigorous. While in a language for general human communication, emphasis needs to be on manipulations that are more fluid and aesthetic in nature. Facility with one does not necessarily translate well to another. Particularly in the English -> Programming direction, which makes it doubly dangerous to assume it does, when hiring for STEM type jobs. Extreme aspies and savants aside, most good programmers can communicate well in English, in the sense they can formulate their intent precisely. While the converse is much, much rarer.
gr3yh47 12y ago
in fact, the author attempt to tear down an argument completely of his own invention: 'But then I read Bock’s rationale, and that’s when I nearly lose a mouthful of Cheerios: Unlike English—and presumably other non-STEM fields—computer science “signals a rigor in your thinking,” an ability “to think in a formal and logical and structured way.” He said what?' from this the author decided to read that ONLY CS majors can learn logical thinking, but Bock's statement was really that CS inherently signals this because CS is entirely predicated on this type of thinking no matter where you learn it. I'm getting sick of these whiny stupid articles popping up on the front page, like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself. The amazon tantrum yesterday and now this eesh
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself" I assume it's all the English majors.
  - gr3yh47 12y ago
    xD
- vehementi 12y ago
  This would be a legitimate critique if Bock were saying "Here's how I screen through 100,000 resumes". Your interpretation would serve as a good heuristic. But that's not what we're talking about: he implied that, all things being equal, he would hire a B student majoring in CS over an A student majoring in English because of "signalling" when comparing two candidates he had to choose from.
  - tomp 12y ago
    But that's exactly what "signalling" means - and Bock has decided (presumably based on experience and statistics) that the positive signal of CS is and B student is stronger than the positive signal of A student of English.
  - dkuntz2 12y ago
williamcotton 12y ago
> They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers. What I do see used quite often is the ability to communicate to customers or other engineers in a clear, succinct and enjoyable manner using the English language.
- mathetic 12y ago
  That is simply because the top of the stack in our field is full of application developers and not computer architects. I fail to see how quantity becomes more important than quality.
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    What is your point exactly? It sounds like what you're suggesting is simply not practical (that all developers should be well-versed in all facets of software development, even those skills only employed by a minority of developers).
- lloeki 12y ago
  > All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers. Anecdotal irony: not 24 hours ago a colleague and I had to reverse engineer a hairy mess of deeply nested if/then/else clauses that should not exist that turned out to be composed mostly of tautologies. I definitely wish to throw books at some people, preferably of the steel-bound, razor sharp edged kind. Conclusion: you're not drawing Karnaugh tables daily in front of you, but having manipulated the fundamental rules of logic has trained your neural net and makes you much more effective at solving logic problems in a wink and not write crap code, and also simply able to debug stuff efficiently, if at all. I am regularly aghast at people drawing completely invalid conclusions from broken "common sense" logic propositions (A=>B therefore B=>A, or various other syllogisms).
  - godzilla82 12y ago
    I feel, that no amount of manipulation of fundamental rules of logic can help the people you are aghast at. The ones who infer the broken "common sense" logic propositions(a=>b implies b=>a). Also, I know a lot more of non CS people who have excellent analytical skills than the ones with a CS background.
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry. Just wait until you see the headline: "Join our startup to disrupt the poetry industry!"
jonnathanson 12y ago
I was with you until the last sentence, which packed a low and somewhat unfair punch. There's plenty to do with an English degree besides writing poetry. Law is a typical exit path. So are lucrative positions in media, entertainment, publishing, journalism, and public policy. To excel at these fields, one needs to be pretty smart. It's a different kind of smart from the kind you need in technology jobs. No question about that. But one is not inherently superior to the other. And practitioners of one path are not incapable of pursuing the other. There's a trend towards convergence, however, and formal logic has had a profound effect on the English curriculum in the last several decades. Hofstadter, Tarski, Quine, Levi-Strauss, et al., are becoming required reading in forward-thinking English curricula. Your typical English course isn't going to touch the type of logic discussed in your typical CS course. But advanced linguistics is, more or less, formal systemics. Unfortunately, you can encounter a fair amount of fluff on the way there. English education is in need of an overhaul, and it's starting to get one. But there should be no battle between the humanities and the sciences. Instead, we should do a better job bringing the average in the humanities up to par and rigor. We should also do a better job coaching students on career paths before we ask them to choose majors. If you're studying English because you like reading books, and you have no clue what you want to do when you graduate, you're in for a tough road ahead. If you're studying English because you want to get into Yale Law School, or write for the New York Times, or become the next Michael Lewis, that's great. (But in that case, you'd better be good.) Ultimately, what matters isn't the content of the two paths, but the application of them. CS is a directly practical degree. You can put to work what you learn almost immediately and unambiguously. You can trace a more or less direct path between the input (education) and the output (skill). English is more indirect. You can learn extremely valuable skills in an English program, but those skills aren't immediately applicable to any particular job. That's because English is a really old curriculum, which predates the modern job market. If you want to make something of an English degree, you'll need to develop skills above and beyond what you learn in the classroom. Generally speaking, schools don't do a great job teaching those ancillary skills. And so the English degree is not, in itself, sufficient for positions to which it's very well suited.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I think you're reading too much into it. I took it to mean that writing poetry (or, at least, doing it well) is something that requires many years of practice, and that isn't something anyone can just pick up. I didn't perceive a slight at all, it seemed like a very fair analogy to me. "Writing a novel" would be the same.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
> you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry. It may be technically true, but the dismissive "english/humanities is easy" narrative that is (or, in my day, was--it seems it still is) extremely popular in the STEM undergraduate community carries a kind of implicit claim of exactly that sort. Stating that something is easy necessarily implies the person making the statement thinks he could, with some relatively lesser effort than he applies to his current focus, achieve comparable results to those who focus on that something.
delinquentme 12y ago
A screaming example of academic signaling, but where the "signal" is only _just_ stronger than the noise. Karnaugh Maps: While I love vocab as much as any other kid out there. We're not calling them " colored-truth-tables " which is what the fuck it is. You're advocating that one is more rigorous than the other. However the only thing which is actually being conveyed is usage OF A TRUTH TABLE! Academics gleefully accept this more specific vocabulary as a proxy for context knowledge. Its a (fucking) shit workaround.
- gr3yh47 12y ago
  how so? CS is rooted entirely in the qualities he is looking for. English isn't.
tlogan 12y ago
It is interesting article. But I think that it emphasizes one thing which hurts companies growth. Let's put Google aside - because this is not about Google. The companies end up having hiring techniques and processes (and subconscious biases for hiring as result of these) which might work well before but they might do not work for today. This is very hard thing to solve and problems becomes obvious to outside world when companies try to get into new field / area. Some companies have head of recruiting reporting directly to CEO to fix these kind of problems. Some companies will do acquisitions.

by jzwinck 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bigdubs 12y ago
Yours is "oh noetry".

radmuzom 12y ago

I sort of agree with your overall sentiment, but the reason you found the average student from humanities inept is because the good students generally opt for STEM courses - presumably because these courses allow you to make much more money after you pass out. I also happen to believe that the world would be a much better place if a larger number of bright students study humanities subjects - especially history and literature.

api 12y ago

I'm not sure about typical English majors vs. CS majors, but in a cognitive sense there is quite a bit of overlap in certain areas. Writing and high-comprehension reading involves the deep understanding and manipulation of language. So does programming.

Alupis 12y ago
Yes, but CS majors come out of school with some level of understanding about how computing works... not just how to write code.
stuki 12y ago
All "language" is not the same. To be reliably and consistently machine executable, a language needs to facilitate manipulations that are logically rigorous. While in a language for general human communication, emphasis needs to be on manipulations that are more fluid and aesthetic in nature. Facility with one does not necessarily translate well to another. Particularly in the English -> Programming direction, which makes it doubly dangerous to assume it does, when hiring for STEM type jobs. Extreme aspies and savants aside, most good programmers can communicate well in English, in the sense they can formulate their intent precisely. While the converse is much, much rarer.

gr3yh47 12y ago

in fact, the author attempt to tear down an argument completely of his own invention: 'But then I read Bock’s rationale, and that’s when I nearly lose a mouthful of Cheerios: Unlike English—and presumably other non-STEM fields—computer science “signals a rigor in your thinking,” an ability “to think in a formal and logical and structured way.” He said what?' from this the author decided to read that ONLY CS majors can learn logical thinking, but Bock's statement was really that CS inherently signals this because CS is entirely predicated on this type of thinking no matter where you learn it. I'm getting sick of these whiny stupid articles popping up on the front page, like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself. The amazon tantrum yesterday and now this eesh

dllthomas 12y ago
"like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself" I assume it's all the English majors.
- gr3yh47 12y ago
  xD
vehementi 12y ago
This would be a legitimate critique if Bock were saying "Here's how I screen through 100,000 resumes". Your interpretation would serve as a good heuristic. But that's not what we're talking about: he implied that, all things being equal, he would hire a B student majoring in CS over an A student majoring in English because of "signalling" when comparing two candidates he had to choose from.
- tomp 12y ago
  But that's exactly what "signalling" means - and Bock has decided (presumably based on experience and statistics) that the positive signal of CS is and B student is stronger than the positive signal of A student of English.
- dkuntz2 12y ago

williamcotton 12y ago

> They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers. What I do see used quite often is the ability to communicate to customers or other engineers in a clear, succinct and enjoyable manner using the English language.

mathetic 12y ago
That is simply because the top of the stack in our field is full of application developers and not computer architects. I fail to see how quantity becomes more important than quality.
- thathonkey 12y ago
  What is your point exactly? It sounds like what you're suggesting is simply not practical (that all developers should be well-versed in all facets of software development, even those skills only employed by a minority of developers).
lloeki 12y ago
> All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers. Anecdotal irony: not 24 hours ago a colleague and I had to reverse engineer a hairy mess of deeply nested if/then/else clauses that should not exist that turned out to be composed mostly of tautologies. I definitely wish to throw books at some people, preferably of the steel-bound, razor sharp edged kind. Conclusion: you're not drawing Karnaugh tables daily in front of you, but having manipulated the fundamental rules of logic has trained your neural net and makes you much more effective at solving logic problems in a wink and not write crap code, and also simply able to debug stuff efficiently, if at all. I am regularly aghast at people drawing completely invalid conclusions from broken "common sense" logic propositions (A=>B therefore B=>A, or various other syllogisms).
- godzilla82 12y ago
  I feel, that no amount of manipulation of fundamental rules of logic can help the people you are aghast at. The ones who infer the broken "common sense" logic propositions(a=>b implies b=>a). Also, I know a lot more of non CS people who have excellent analytical skills than the ones with a CS background.

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry. Just wait until you see the headline: "Join our startup to disrupt the poetry industry!"

jonnathanson 12y ago

I was with you until the last sentence, which packed a low and somewhat unfair punch. There's plenty to do with an English degree besides writing poetry. Law is a typical exit path. So are lucrative positions in media, entertainment, publishing, journalism, and public policy. To excel at these fields, one needs to be pretty smart. It's a different kind of smart from the kind you need in technology jobs. No question about that. But one is not inherently superior to the other. And practitioners of one path are not incapable of pursuing the other. There's a trend towards convergence, however, and formal logic has had a profound effect on the English curriculum in the last several decades. Hofstadter, Tarski, Quine, Levi-Strauss, et al., are becoming required reading in forward-thinking English curricula. Your typical English course isn't going to touch the type of logic discussed in your typical CS course. But advanced linguistics is, more or less, formal systemics. Unfortunately, you can encounter a fair amount of fluff on the way there. English education is in need of an overhaul, and it's starting to get one. But there should be no battle between the humanities and the sciences. Instead, we should do a better job bringing the average in the humanities up to par and rigor. We should also do a better job coaching students on career paths before we ask them to choose majors. If you're studying English because you like reading books, and you have no clue what you want to do when you graduate, you're in for a tough road ahead. If you're studying English because you want to get into Yale Law School, or write for the New York Times, or become the next Michael Lewis, that's great. (But in that case, you'd better be good.) Ultimately, what matters isn't the content of the two paths, but the application of them. CS is a directly practical degree. You can put to work what you learn almost immediately and unambiguously. You can trace a more or less direct path between the input (education) and the output (skill). English is more indirect. You can learn extremely valuable skills in an English program, but those skills aren't immediately applicable to any particular job. That's because English is a really old curriculum, which predates the modern job market. If you want to make something of an English degree, you'll need to develop skills above and beyond what you learn in the classroom. Generally speaking, schools don't do a great job teaching those ancillary skills. And so the English degree is not, in itself, sufficient for positions to which it's very well suited.

StavrosK 12y ago
I think you're reading too much into it. I took it to mean that writing poetry (or, at least, doing it well) is something that requires many years of practice, and that isn't something anyone can just pick up. I didn't perceive a slight at all, it seemed like a very fair analogy to me. "Writing a novel" would be the same.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

> you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry. It may be technically true, but the dismissive "english/humanities is easy" narrative that is (or, in my day, was--it seems it still is) extremely popular in the STEM undergraduate community carries a kind of implicit claim of exactly that sort. Stating that something is easy necessarily implies the person making the statement thinks he could, with some relatively lesser effort than he applies to his current focus, achieve comparable results to those who focus on that something.

delinquentme 12y ago

A screaming example of academic signaling, but where the "signal" is only _just_ stronger than the noise. Karnaugh Maps: While I love vocab as much as any other kid out there. We're not calling them " colored-truth-tables " which is what the fuck it is. You're advocating that one is more rigorous than the other. However the only thing which is actually being conveyed is usage OF A TRUTH TABLE! Academics gleefully accept this more specific vocabulary as a proxy for context knowledge. Its a (fucking) shit workaround.

gr3yh47 12y ago
how so? CS is rooted entirely in the qualities he is looking for. English isn't.

tlogan 12y ago

It is interesting article. But I think that it emphasizes one thing which hurts companies growth. Let's put Google aside - because this is not about Google. The companies end up having hiring techniques and processes (and subconscious biases for hiring as result of these) which might work well before but they might do not work for today. This is very hard thing to solve and problems becomes obvious to outside world when companies try to get into new field / area. Some companies have head of recruiting reporting directly to CEO to fix these kind of problems. Some companies will do acquisitions.