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Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge
conoviator writes Bill Nye, one of the foremost science educators in the United States states that only the upper crust members of American science and technology (with degrees from top tier schools) understand science, particularly climate change. He opines that "regular software writers" dwell in the realm of the semi-science-literate. Nye rates science education in the U.S. an F. ("But if it makes you feel any better, you can say a B-minus.")
Wow, holy crap is this article being intentionally bad at characterizing what Nye said in the article. The "F" rating was for overall population in the USA (based on the high level of climate denial).
His comment about him writing that you need to be from a top-tier school is wrong, as well - he was taking about how we have top-tier scientists in the US (and gave a few schools as examples) and compared them not to non-ivy schools, but to farmers and CS majors who talk about climate change as if they're experts.
Read the linked article - Nye intimated nothing that the summary does.
He visited my university when I was still in school, and I had the opportunity to meet him. The man is an asshole.
He visited my university when I was still in school, and I had the opportunity to meet him. The man is an asshole.
He lived here in Seattle for many years before he became a Super Star, and many people here (including his ex-girlfriend) agree with your assesment.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Ok "regular software programmers." Go actually read the article, and then come back and read the summary again.
Now, Nye was trying to say that our technical work force is not trained in enough science. Maybe that's right, and maybe it's wrong, that would be a better discussion for Slashdot. Nye (or the reporter) obviously did a bad job here. At the same getting offended at being called less scientifically literate than the top tier of scientists doesn't help either.
I'd like to introduce him to my Uncle - doctorate in chemistry from Cornell, literally hundreds of publications and citations, and thinks global warming is bunk.
Your uncle might be correct. Do you have a doctorate from Cornell? No? Well then...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I've found this to be true also especially in Medical circles. I know a lot of doctors who have taken the fact that they are "Smart" aka studied intensely on a subject who then believe that they are world class economists, physicists, climatologists etc. When they are as much ideologues as your average indoctrinated grunt but have enough intelligence to frame their ignorance well.
It's not even limited to Climate Change. Look at almost any post:
"Scientists discover new form of metal."
"Pfffft, how did they overcome the ion bonding in the alloy. Can't be done."
No matter the subject there are a bunch of idiotic complaints about the quality of the research done.
I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU. I understand the performance difference between wifi B and N, but I don't know the protocol details. SSD drives are magic to me. I would guess that full knowledge of how a computer works would require advanced degrees in CS, a couple different maths, and electrical engineering, at the very least.
A much better place to start would be with a computer engineering degree. It is ultimately geared towards building embedded systems from the ground up, which requires a rather complete understanding of how the entire machine works. The most important part is not knowing all of the details, but knowing the overall principles, and how to find out the details when you need them. Everything you need to write the software is in the component spec sheets, and with a BSCE, you will learn how to build the hardware (and by extension how it works). The only missing piece of the puzzle would be a chemistry or microelectronics degree so that you would understand the chem involved in making the silicon.
Given my educational background, and a short amount of time to bone up, I could speak to just about any part of a computer systems design from the basic silicon to hard drives to LCD / CRT displays to wireless networking card hadrware. On the software side, I can explain just about every working part of a basic operating system, all the way to high level algorithms, advanced compiler design and multi-threaded/multiprocessor/networked systems design.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.
Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.
You're paraphrasing Dijkstra, but missing his point. Astronomers, in general, know a heck of a lot about optics. His point wasn't to excuse ignorance of how computers work (he worked on the design of the STANTEC ZEBRA and wrote an incredibly scathing review of the IBM1620, for example, so clearly knew his way around the design process), it was to point out that this is a building block.
I'd consider any computer science curriculum that doesn't cover logic gates up to building adders, the basics of pipelining, the memory hierarchy and virtual memory translation at a minimum to have seriously skimped over computer architecture. The better ones will include design and simulation (on FPGA if budgets permit) of a simple pipelined processor.
I would challenge anyone to show me a CS degree that doesn't have any of what you mentioned. This meme/fad/bullshit has been running for a long time among hardware degrees, that we CS grads never see such things (and I love their faces when I show them otherwise.)
The thing is, and this is what I've personally observed, that CS detractors claim we do not know those things listed above because we do not know the basics of electrical engineering. For example, knowing the exact working of a capacitor by reciting the laws of physics (and interactions) that make its work possible. Or reciting what a Thevenin's equivalent is.
Of course we do not fucking know (nor should we need to). And then we spend most of our careers working at higher levels of abstractions, so we won't recite out of heads how to construct a digital adder with a carry bit, nor remember how we built a basic ALU in our undergrad studies 10, 15, 20+ years ago.
But that does not constitute any evidence that we never see anything regarding computer organization and architecture (a fundamental subject that all CS students must pass to graduate.) And making assumptions like that can only to "conclusions" that are not only stupid, but malevolent.
There is a degree of truth that many CS degrees have lowered the requirements and put too much emphasis on higher-level programming languages to the detriment of lower level ones. But that is not the state of the field in general, nor a characterization of all who work in the profession with that degree.
YMMV, but people who make that kind of ridiculous assumptions are just carrying a big chip on their shoulders and need to make shit out to feel good about their career choices. It is not just ignorance, but arrogance.
Considering the way he and Al Gore were savaged for blatant scientific fraud over at WUTWT in Al Gore and Bill Nye FAIL at doing a simple CO2 experiment, his opinion doesn't carry much weigjht. If somebody is going to tell us we are scientifically illiterate, at least find somebody with more chops than Science Fair Baking Soda Vulcanoes.
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