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'Why Liberal Arts and the Humanities Are as Important as Engineering' (wadhwa.com)
Engineering professor Vivek Wadha writes: A technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible. With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
The article, presumably written by a liberal arts major, extols the importance of "critical thinking", yet is just a string of conjectures based on no evidence, displaying a clear lack of critical thinking.
In before the anti-intellectual comments about "snowflakes" and "gender theory majors" commence.
You don't need a music, arts, literature or psychology to have empathy. Further, there really is a war on the middle class jobs - construction workers, plumbers, electricians, etc.. We've basically stereotyped these jobs as the low-class when the majority of people with degrees can't wire in a new light switch or change their car tire.
As far as music, most tech people are musically inclined. They go together. But liberal arts. A wasted college course. Wasted money.
Because if it weren't for liberal arts majors, the STEM people wouldn't be able to go home after work and watch Netflix.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
True enough. Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans. Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth. And that's why social sciences as taught in academia are pretty much worthless these days.
Fortunately, you don't need to be a history major (or minor) in order to learn these things, there are plenty of excellent books and online lectures, and I encourage everybody to listen to them. But listen critically and distinguish between indoctrination, advocacy, and scholarship.
We all know the liberal arts and humanities are degree programs that have little value outside dusty lecture halls. This is just an effort to try and save themselves against the coming tide which does not favor BA degrees. You want to spend a few hundred thousand on a degree in navel gazing at a private college that is your problem. Do not make it our problem.
The liberal arts and humanities are not valuable as accredited taught subjects, unless they are attributed as history classes.
A musician is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
I've been 3D-printing a lot of the music I've composed. So far no one wants to listen to it. If you want a sample, PM me your phone number and I'll send it to you on my quantumfax with teleport enabled.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The humanities teaches nothing accept discrimination and indoctrination because it has now relegated itself to an "in crowd" echo chamber and is becoming more and more anti-science as time has gone by.
It pretty much creates the premise that only "accredited" people are allowed to discuss human issues with any authority which is total bunk. The goal seems to be taking possession of humanity/liberal arts as an idea away from everyone else that did not attend. Every person unto themselves, regardless of race, minority/majority, religion, politic, ethnic, or whatever "label" you can think of has a right to represent their own ideas about humanity and life. It is a natural extension of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy except it is now a formally indoctrinated fallacy.
You want to be a philosopher then go be it, Academia needs to keep its pie hole clamped on the subject as it no longer caters to all possible philosophers and only says that "certain ones" should be allowed the right to speak.
Well, there are many engineers who are accomplished musicians and are also well read. What you study at university, forms a basis for life-long learning.
Hands up don't shoot.
"Humanties" is a broad scope label used to group a lot of fringe items together. Does someone with a degree in political science history really know squat about the human context of 3d printing? No. But human context is "humanities" and 'political science history' majors is also "humanities" course, so this vague grouping phrase can be used to bind the two.
They're essentially unemployable, outside of academia, because employing them represents overhead in the commercial context.
And really the teachers know squat about 3D printing, let alone the human context of it, so they're teaching generic psychology and generic political science and generic art, and generic history. So these people are not 'trained' in the human context of any of this thing, as the summary suggests.
You hire a graphic artist to do an icon, and he didn't understand the transparency layer because he was taught to paint and photograph, not the specific skills needed for this operation. So we hired another, and he did, because he'd learned the skill on the job, it wasn't his arts education that gave him that skill, it was his employer that had trained him.
No.
In for-profit capitalism, humanities are unimportant. Inhumanities are. The goal is not "usability" (though it may fall out as a side effect) but rather stickiness, which is a polite way of saying addictiveness. It is true studying the humanities may help in for-profit capitalism, but only if they are applied to the goal of manipulation rather than the goal to "help us".
The liberal arts and humanities could be as important as they once were but not as the perverted ideological joke they are rightfully seen as now.
To succeed in liberal arts you have to be tripping. From The College Fix
2 teams: lib arts majors vs engineers. Go!
You want liberal arts and the humanities because you _can_ teach critical thinking. If you're dealing with someone that doesn't get that naturally you need a subject simple enough they can grasp it. Liberal arts fits the bill. Maybe they won't grasp everything, but unlike Math there's value in being 50% right.
As for why you want to train people to think critically, well, if you don't like dictatorships & fascism then you want an electorate that thinks critically. I mean, ever notice how one of the 1st things a dictator does is go after the intelligentsia?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Tanking enrolment means less profit for the university.
http://sappingattention.blogsp...
Only enrolment in Gender Studies remained stable. No surprise there. They cry the loudest to get "diversity programme" running. There are lucrative (although parasitic) jobs for that segment.
Science and Engineering are how we live. Liberal Arts and Humanities are why we live.
Quit with the "mom and dad, this is why funding my six figure women's studies degree wasn't a waste of your time even though I"m fully unemployable and spend all my time outraging over every trivial thing on twitter" bullshit.
that has been on the table for 50 years. FIFTY YEARS yet there has been nothing to actually apply it to.
now what they need is MARKETING ETHICS as that's where it really is needed, the act of selling something thats not as self driving as self driving and so forth - there is actually no need to ponder should it hit a deer or a truck in a case it had to choose.
also marketing ethics about ai. ai just means information technology now. fucking excel sheets are sold as AI. anything making binary choices is being now sold as AI.
so these AI ethicists, robot rights experts etc - they're just selling bullshit. they want a cheque and way to get it is just to bullshit. that's what we need critical thinking against in the media.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The difference is an engineer probably reads about Rome and a number of other things any time they want. But a history major will never engineer anything.
I'd rather be on an island with a bunch of engineers than a bunch of history majors.
We all know the humanities are just to keep the marching morons occupied while the nerds make the world work.
I hate to agree with Ben Stein, but about 40 years ago (while finishing college at beer drenched Michigan State) I read a short essay in Playboy and never forgot it...
If I recall correctly at my advanced age, the claim was that before World War II when far fewer Americans went to college, many students from wealthy backgrounds studied liberal arts because they would not really have to work or else they already had nice careers waiting for them because of their birth.
After World War II and the G.I. Bill explosion in college students, many students from modest backgrounds wanted to study liberal arts so they, too, could have the traditional polish of the wealthy. But Stein claimed this was a fallacy - that those working class background students assumed that the intellectual, liberal arts background caused those in the upper class to become successful, but actually they had the liberal arts education precisely because their wealthier backgrounds allowed them the luxury of not really having to learn a trade.
Of course, we will always need English professors, historians, philosophers, et cetera, but not nearly at the quantity produced by colleges each year.
Looking back, I had a great time at a big, fairly average college in the late 1970's, but now I realize it was only because my late father had worked so hard, lived cheaply, and invested for many years. But as a straight economic investment in my future, it did not really pay off. Of course I have no one to blame for my choices but myself.
Tom from Traverse City
Snow noted the divide, and suggested that "Literary" types needed to learn science, while noting that "Scientific" types already knew, or at least valued, Arts and Literature.
The debate has now been going for over 50 years and shows no signs of resolution.
While I'm not sure that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics should be the touchstone, I would argue that any graduand that can't demonstrate both a knowledge of the scientific method and an appreciation of art or literature should be required to do so before they can graduate.
I'd also like to see something like Ethics 101 and Aesthetics 101 as compulsory subjects.
I'm realistic enough not to actually expect any of these things to happen.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
The commercial application of "humanities" is called "marketing," and yes, it is very relevant to the modern world.
Aaah Yes, the better way to breed socially acceptable and controllable little socio- and psychopaths.
sigh.
Who knew! Upper management consists of people with little technical skills and good people skills! And if you want to be one of those people, by all means, don't get an engineering degree and get a social science degree instead.
But let's be clear about this: these people are by and large not successful because they understand the Enlightenment or good design, they are successful because they understand Machiavelli and politics, something that success in a social science environment prepares them for.
Whoa, what a jump. CEOs and heads of product engineering don't "work hand in hand" with people, they lead and direct.
Well, that is certainly good advice. Add to that the notion that government shouldn't pick winners and losers among academic fields and instead let the market decide.
Don't worry. liberal arts and humanities majors, you are _also_ important and valuable members of society. Ok, so maybe you are not as smart as the engineering majors, but that's ok. You are _emotionally_ intelligent, and that is also a valuable trait. And true, your deep understanding of the human condition has not prevented you from going down a path that pretty much guarantees you will never be able to buy a house, but you can compensate for that by finding a line of work where your mastery of human interaction will in fact be appreciated.
And yes, I would like some fries with that, thank you for asking!
That their liberal arts degree isn't making them as much as their STEM pals.
I do not disagree that art should inform things like engineering. But the culture surrounding the liberal arts should be kept in a separate institution. In NS there was a Tech school called TUNS. It kicked ass and took names. Many of its students went on to graduate work in places like MIT. It was primarily an engineering school with not much straying from that core.
But it had a problem. The tutiton was ~$3500 (at the time about average for any Uni in Canada). But $3500 didn't cover the cost of educating an engineer. Whereas there was a nearby school called Dal that had mostly art students who were also charged around $3000. The budgeted cost to educate an undergrad art student at the time was around $1500. This left lots of room to pay for things like medicine ($35k) or dentistry ($50k). It also left room for them to take over the financially struggling TUNS.
TUNS was crushed under the bureaucratic crush of Dal. Computer services were taken over by Dal and (literally not joking) renamed Borg. But worst of all the cultural policies of fairness and inclusion were dumped on the school. So mandates of having mostly locals attend (so as to foster the next generation of local engineers) was turfed and the school was overrun with foreigners who rarely stayed one day after graduating. This was also good economics as foreign students are charged far more.
But no longer was the school even focusing on the best and the brightest but wafting around on the whims of the politically correct far left wing people found in the liberal arts programs.
So I see having liberal arts and technical educations being a terrible mix. If you want the best and the brightest forming generation after generation of you local engineering and science community, then let practical efficient(ish) schools do their own thing. If you want an 8th rate joke of a tech school to emerge, then follow the lead that was set in Nova Scotia, Canada.
> For instance if you thought Trump had no chance of winning the last presidential election, then your model of the universe was grossly wrong.
That's an interesting comment. What if, last year, you said that a growth rate of 3% was impossible, asserting that we'd have "annual average of about 1.9% well into the next decade."? How wrong would your model of reality have to be, to say that for at least the next five to tend years that can't happen, just months before it hits 4%?
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
https://www.bea.gov/newsreleas...
How about if one were President and said 6%-8% unemployment is the new normal, "jobs just aren't coming back." How wrong would you be?
Now go make my coffee
Democracy is over-rated when the voters support wrong or abhorrent ideas. There's a reason why the US is a republic, not a pure democracy.
It's kind of funny his profession is the only one one has to go to school to have the capacity for insight, but all the rest can be learned through self-education like books and lectures.
Liberal arts and history can be learned by sweat of brow and a library card. I agree we need both, just stop ponying up for four years of overpriced basket weaving or historical debate club. If you want to drop that kind of coin go to med school or become an engineer. Get an instrument and start facing down audiences and you'll learn more in a year than in four years of a music major in the liberal arts college. Get a book on orchestration and read it during your copious downtime if you want to cover all that.
... the first two words in the story.
We can replace
- Artists and musicians with AI. E.g. for music we have already a study that AI can create better music than humans.
- We don't need psychologists to motivate people. It is actually called brainwashing and it is highly unethical. This is what is used to get people hooked into apps and services which harm their lives.
- History major to see importance of usability? Just record a video of people using your app and watch it and you will see why usability is important. Much more efficient than listening lecture from Roman Empire.
STEM degrees are great when you want to create things and understand phenomena.
The liberal arts degrees are important because they supply the rationale for doing so in a context that extends beyond "pushing the boundaries of the state-of-the-art". I wouldn't expect an engineer or a scientist to understand the impact of their work on society, but fortunately there is a large number of people who do.
Taking Facebook as the example - The ethics were clearly understood from the outset. It wasn't a fuzzy or difficult line to comprehend. The real problem is free markets have no rules. If Zuckerberg didn't beeline to the bottom then someone else would've.
Presumably Facebook will subsequently strongly advocate for certain rules to be cast into law as suits them.
Humanities asks questions. Engineering provides solutions. That's pretty much the difference right there.
"A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine."
Right, because these self-centered dopes imagine they're going to command engineers to 3D print whatever they can imagine.
The first thing I picked up on my way to an engineering degree was a liberal arts degree for completing the general education portion of my engineering degree. The path to becoming an engineer doesn't leave you ignorant of the humanities or liberal arts...
I'm thinking maybe people just don't like the idea that only getting an arts degrees is falling short of getting a science degree.
It's indeed true that "important" and "paid well" are not necessarily the same. Those who make smart or wise observations may not be paid so well and that could be a problem.
For example, solving "how" to make automated military tanks may skip over the question of "why" because those solving "how" are paid too well to bother.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh the humanities!
Got ya GOD, but they started with me... and folks that toss names at me only are telling me they only understand that!
Anyone who knows anything about life (in the REAL world) realizes that only starts hassles & it's to be avoided!
Not to be used indiscriminately... but, there's no shortage of what I call "Internet Iron Men", cowards who toss names but have nothing to back their words! Hence, why I stomped Ol Olsoc & this Zontar down hard...
Idiots will drag you down to their level & beat you with experience... I got caught in the trap, I admit it... but I don't take it if I don't merit it!
I apologized to others in those posts, no question there, but those two are asking for it you must admit!
APK
I even clicked on the link to read TFA in its entirety --- 'enlightenment', 'history', 'rise and fall of roman empire' are mere decorative items to spruce up an empty article.
ShanghaiBill, the author of GP, was correct in pointing out the obvious.
Back a long time ago, my economics professor started his economics 101 for engineers with following statement:
Engineers are the camels salemen ride one.
This is still true today.
As to liberal arts and humanities being necessary to create better products, that might be true, if those branches would offer any systematic or useful approaches to apply them. Those sitting around and just discussing which reality is more worthy are just a wast of time.
Which is why, several decades ago, university students had to read ancient Greek and Latin; to understand the Greek and Roman examination of civics and history.
Modern-day ethics mostly teaches "do no evil" policies and sometimes teaches "be cruel to be kind" thinking. Together, they are good introduction to the human context.
Liberal arts are as important as engineering, indeed. Where would we be without our artists, our philosophers, musicians, playwrites and humanists? But if you do pursue liberal arts, please don't expect to earn the same amount of money as STEM. On the other hand, a four year liberal arts degree is generally more fun, a bit easier and you get laid a whole bunch more. Fact.
If you can possibly manage it, consider a combined STEM + liberal arts path. The technical term for it is "renaissance".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Please somebody mod this off-topic spam down. (Note how he replies to a highly-rated comment in an effort to increase his own visibility.)
Thanks!
When I did my engineering degree the university forced me to do a series of modules on something they called "sociology of engineering" or something similar. That was back in 1979. It was a complete waste of time.
A problem with liberal arts is that whatever its merits, it frequently isn't applied.
Consider medicine... we value people with medical degrees, right? But what if you don't use it? I mean, you don't do anything with it at all.
It is all well and good to say that some CEOs in tech were able to use it to help their product design. But that is a very obscure and rarefied context. What about everyone else in the company?
Ultimately, you're going to be left arguing it does in "mysterious ways"... that there are subtle influences that help all sorts of things in ways that you can't really prove one way or the other.
You could do that with theology though as well... that's where this argument goes.
And I could show you lots of company heads from times gone by that said as much about their faith in God or whatever as helping them with their company.
I'm not disparaging liberal arts, rather I'm suggesting that they take a greater interest in applying themselves. Instead of going always for this "holistic person" concept, they should look at how language can help an individual... how art and history and philosophy, etc can help.
I'm not saying don't teach roughly the same thing. I'm saying teach it in a different way so that it has a better chance of being used.
Because if it isn't used, it is useless. The most amazing machine for doing whatever has zero value if it isn't used. The most amazing information about whatever is useless if it isn't used.
It MUST be used or it is useless.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches
Why is that the more there are nontech persons in a dev team the less the applications are usable ?
The right sentence would be a psychologist is more likely to know how to trick people into thinking "right" ( = like the psychologist)
They are ideological jokes here in Sweden. As part of any engineering degree they even force you to take some humanties classes.
Proof: https://student.portal.chalmers.se/en/chalmersstudies/programme-information/Pages/SearchProgram.aspx?program_id=1466&grade=3&conc_id=-1&parsergrp=1
You're studying "ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING" and here in study period 2 is your important course on "Gender and technology".
but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design
This is complete nonsense.
There are just as many people with empathy who study useful subjects as there are who study arts and humanities. And just as many sociopaths and crazies, too. Writing turgid prose, discordant music, and making self-indulgent art or design does not imbue someone with empathy. Nor do "deep" and ambiguous creations mean someone is enigmatic, insightful or more intelligent - it often means that they are confused, unable to communicate clearly and don't really know what it is they are trying to put across. Just as scientists are often accused of being.
Most of the artists I know will tell you "I do it for myself, not for other people" when asked to explain their work. That is not the sign of an "empathic" personality.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I think you're right that a little humanity goes a long way. I also think that it's the technology that buys us the freedom from toil (e.g. tilling the land by hand) so there's room for self-expression, humanities, and so on.
But I do not think that humanities alone is the answer. In fact, where engineering is firmly rooted in the real world, something like sociology or even economics is not necessarily. There's no metaphorical hard grinding block that will grind your misguided theories to dust like it would a poorly-made bridge. It's been well-known that economics moved from descriptive to ideologically-declarative a while ago. Sociology with its "critical theory" even moved completely "post fact". Yes, they do blithely admit this themselves.
Which means that they're just social clubs for highfalutin' unemployables (with their identity policics, microtriggers, social justice war talk, and so much other bullshit), for they've gone completely unscientific. No facts, no science.
So I think that for the humanities to be useful again they'll have to clean house*. Better do it themselves, even if it means denouncing 40 year career track professors with lifetime achievement awards. Because if they don't excise the rot themselves, we'll have to do away with entire university departments, rescind each and every paper coming thence, and then nobody in their right minds will want to restart the same thing for fear of having it go off the rails right again.
And yes, the rot has been with us for well over half a century now. So to propose uncritically that we'll need humanities for our humanity and it's "just as important" as engineering, which actually does work, means that the proposer is either completely unaware of the problems in the humanities, or he's got an agenda. I'm not judging which, but I do know something's rotten here. Quite a lot rotten.
* Obligatory obscure reference: Yes, tacnukes would be just the thing, IMO.
why then, can't everybody do everything else as well?
We do not have a lot of people that can be good at either. Both areas require dedication and talent. Sure, we should make sure the rare people that have it do get into the respective fields, but that will be 10% of the population, if that. The real problem we have at this time in both IT and liberal arts is far too many people that are bad at it and should never have gone there.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Of course there are successful people that studied liberal arts in college. College is an IQ test. To get into college one has to have scored well on the ACT or SAT, which are IQ tests. To even take the ACT or SAT one has to do well in the IQ test that is high school. IQ is genetic, if one's parents are high IQ then they will quite likely have a high IQ, and their children will likely have a high IQ. People might have their IQ lowered from things like malnutrition, abuse, genetic mutations, injury, but we know of nothing that can raise it much beyond that of their parents. College doesn't make people more intelligent any more than playing basketball makes people taller. Tall people do well in basketball, intelligent people do well in college, those that do well in both can be professional athletes and make millions of dollars every year.
If someone has an IQ high enough to do well in the IQ tests that are high school, SAT or ACT, and whatever else colleges use to filter out applicants, then they are likely to do well in the IQ test that is college. If they do well in college, regardless of the field they specialized in, then they are likely to do well in the IQ test that is life.
Let's also flip this around, point out the successful people that didn't finish college. The college drop outs that went on to found successful businesses got there because they were intelligent enough to realize that college wasn't the goal, making money was the goal. These dropouts from prestigious colleges got where they were by passing all the IQ tests that got them to the level of being accepted to a prestigious college, they were likely to do well if they finished college or not.
Is knowledge important to success? Absolutely. People need to know something to do well in business. They need to know a lot of somethings about a lot of subjects. People can get this knowledge through college. People can also get this knowledge with experience, apprenticeship, self-study, and reading books at a library. I learned a lot of things at college but mostly what college is to me is a suggested reading list of materials, and a series of tests to show I read the books, then I get a piece of paper from someone showing satisfactory understanding of the reading materials. I could have done the same thing with an apprenticeship, creating a portfolio of work, and getting letters of recommendations from past employers. The difference is that on the job training, under some mentors that see value in training the next generation, is far better preparation for work and it costs far less to obtain. In fact people pay other people to learn on the job.
College is overrated. We'd be far better off if fewer people went to college and instead took on apprenticeships and other forms of on the job training. Employers are starting to figure this out and are learning to look for experience, good references, and other measures of IQ besides 4 years of gathering debt in college reading books and drinking beer.
They are hamburger flipping degrees. There is little or no real need for them.
They are opposite ends of the useful spectrum. (art history gets a special mention there)
Art is part of life, nevertheless being only an artist if it does not serve others is useless IMHO. ..... People that makes us laugh, nurses, doctors, engineers, technicians, ... .... all this should be also a part of education
As a Mechanic and Computer Engineer (I have both degrees) I am also well versed in psychology, business, music, public speaking, I am able to draw and I am polyglot. Most of the smart and technical people I know are good in at least one of those too, but they are SCIENTISTS First.
The most important thing about any REAL science degree, is that it teaches you to think logically and makes you be able to discriminate between incorrect and correct arguments. I can take any subject and understand it with more or less dedication, as most smart people can. This is something that people that only studied arts are mostly incapable.
We need more useful people, not less. Useful people are complete and are able to deliver needed products and services to others (I am not talking about shitty services for connecting your ass to your smartphone, but something that makes life better for people).
Plumbers, electricians, farmers, cooks, cleaners, cloth makers (not crappy fashion)
This does not mean that art should be taken out, art, philosophy, history, geography, music, painting, sports, games
It's been my experience working at a large engineering company that my coworkers are more learned in the liberal arts than liberal arts majors. Several of my coworkers are excellent musicians, students of history, voracious readers of literature and nonfiction. I would be willing to wager that my coworkers are on average more knowledgeable about liberal arts and more "intellectual" than the English or art department of any of the nearby high schools.
THAT is why Liberal Arts are important. Engineering requires creative thinking and clever problem solving, in addition to a deep-seeded desire to go through constant bureaucratic bullshit from brain-dead MBAs.
How many people are clever enough to learn how to be a good engineer?
How many people are clever enough to learn how to be a good liberal arts -teacher?-?
How many engineers are needed in our society?
How many liberal arts -teachers?- are needed in our society?
So as every work is important in a society even the ilegal ones, that does not mind equal pay, that is what is under this kind of argument because if teachers would earn as much as engineers then there will not be enough engineers because they are not idiots. They are the clever ones.
... as it is the foundation of the scientific method.
Also someone who can apply critical thinking to scientific or technological problems can also apply it to other subjects, what he may be lacking is knowledge.
Sadly there's a spreading trend in humanities to teach "critical theory" instead of critical thinking, and the former is the precise opposite of the latter. "Critical theory" is political indoctrination, pure and simple. The Lindsay Shepherd affair at Wilfried Laurier University is a prime example: Lindsay wanted an open discussion and students to come to their own conclusions but her superiors wanted indoctrination with their political agenda.
Tl;dr:
Teaching students to chant "Hail Hillary" is not critical thinking.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
No one can be this blind.
Also liberal arts is applied all too liberally. You've got actual arts and you've got nonsensical riffraff all bundles together.
On top of that, if you would remove the entire genre then youd simply have more artistic and creative engineers...because the artists and musicians would flow into those fields.
No, pure liberal arts are for people that have not been pushed to their full potential, or feel like squandering their talent.
I read a short essay in Playboy
Yeah, sure you did . . . ;-)
Those two are responsible for we having cars, better medicines, computers mobiles, MRi and most thing that are very useful. Everything is important but those two aren't that important. There's levels of importance in the world.
I know ShanghaiBill as an expert on things about China. I know you as a local wingnut.
I've been posting on Slashdot since long before *either* of you and I wouldn't expect anyone on Slashdot to read the summary after a headline this stupid.
Now get off my lawn!
> but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design.
This is a common theme I've seen from people with liberal arts degrees. They explain to the rest of us how we just can't feel the same way they do! We just wouldn't get it.... They, along with their special sense of empathy, will tell the rest of us how and what to think because we're too cold and calculating to treat others like people! They gotta justify their over priced degrees somehow and it appears feelings are the only domain they can claim anymore.
It's weird seeing this again. I used to date someone with a psych degree years ago and she used to say a lot of things like this. I used to argue with her about how she doesn't own the "right" way to feel and that people don't have to agree with every little thing she thinks and that, no, that won't magically make the world a bad place if people disagree.
and vote manipulation, all to service right wing political ends on a fairly innocuous article /. is a joke.
The question is, what jobs are there out there for people with those degrees?
Because if it weren't for liberal arts majors, the STEM people wouldn't be able to go home after work and watch Netflix.
We would be able to but we would not want to.
"Quit teaching all humanities" is your POV, because you're upset about something? Wow. That's nutty. Perhaps you need to study some humanities.
I don't respond to AC's.
Liberal Arts and the Humanities are indeed as important as Engineering.
However, Liberal Arts DEGREES are not as important as Engineering DEGREES.
Yes, it's important to have art and music and an appreciation for history, but I really would like someone to be ACTUALLY TRAINED AND CERTIFIED when they start calculating the load-moment on that bridge they're building.
-Styopa
They really can't be compared. That isn't to devalue the humanities, but these two mindsets, though complimentary, require distinctions to be made, applied philosophy and applied technicality are not one and the same, and that mode of thinking is a large what is wrong with tech at present. This sounds like more nonsense millennial generalization, to me. Sorry, neither human nature nor the world at large are that one-dimensional, and there is no magic formula. The fact of the matter is: a great deal of life is letting chips fall where they may.
... start making all these alleged "amazing things".
"A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible."
Then why does everything absolutely SUCK and has actually started SUCKING MUCH MORE in recent decades?
I dunno. This is some seriously vintage spam, it is. RAM Drives for NT? That's a real blast from the past.
if everyone received an ACTUAL education then who would bag groceries and serve coffee at starbucks?
besides someones got to fund these for profit colleges by massively over paying to get a BS degree in womyns studies with a minor in basket weaving and whitewater rafting.
"which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do" Citation please
"but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design". Citation please
"psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer" Psychology isn't a humanities or a liberal art.
"A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine" Nonsense
People are forced to decide on what they want to do for their lives young without content or world experence. Interest develops and knowledge is aquired as we mature. Entire development twisted. ;)
Yeah, STEM graduates haven't been trained to "think critically". This moron should lose his tenure if that's how he is teaching his engineers - having a design for a building, road or airplane subject to "critical thinking" doesn't happen until the CEO/CFO has the chance to review the blue prints, right? Load of crap. Liberal Arts is for people who are numerically challenged as well as for those who aren't but don't do well in the structured education that is most common in STEM. It is hard to teach Ordinary Differential Equations if the kid doesn't understand Algebra, while it's fairly easy to teach European Medieval History without knowing much Greek history. (not knowing Roman history could be a bit of a problem..). Fact is, there are more technical graduates (STEM) than there are well-paying positions for them to fill. Same as with Liberal Arts, but the LAs have the advantage in that after 4 (or 6, LOL) years, they don't expect to be offered a living wage. Well, the bright ones don't.
Because a good Barista is damn hard to find.
- -
__
The problem isn't that LA and Humanities are unimportant. The problem is that supply massively outstrips demand. ~4 million degrees are issued per year in the US. That's an ocean of candidates you can get lost in. Graduating into that ocean with $40,000 of non-dischargeable debt and no actionable career plan is not a reliable recipe for success.
Ethics, anyone? The liberal arts types are the intuitives and the perceivers. They are a balance and the conscience of our societies. They put the big picture together. They are the ones that see the dangers of unrestrained technology and the intrusions into our lives. They are the ones that read Asimov and hold the 3 laws of robotics to be sacred and they should extend to artificial intelligence. The anthropologists, sociologists, historians, etc. are necessary. Especially historians. "He who fails to learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them."
I don't know about you guys, but I think a virtual assistant that cries when I call her names or beat her would be hot as fuck.
Despite what you'd expect, some of the articles in Playboy are top notch. It's stuff you'd expect to see in the New Yorker, not a skin magazine.
You can tell this was penned by an exclusively liberal arts student
A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches.
Psychology is under the STEM blanket, even if it's not hard science.
A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
3D-print that sound. 3D-print that 2D painting. Even asking a potter or sculptor to design a 3D model for a print might result in something the sculptor could have chiseled in less time with better details. That assumes they even know how to use modeling software.
tl/dr--he misses the reason why a&h are good, which is "It can't be turtles all the way down."
Engineering solves a problem, does the useful task, accomplishes some goal. These are all good things. Engineering does this sort of thing in an engineering domain--that is, we (engineers) deal with stuff you can plan, design, execute, measure, control, and so forth. Objectively observable stuff. So, engineering is useful because it produces other things which are useful.
Engineering is a means to an end (which is usually a means to another end, turtles, etc.)
Liberal arts, humanities, etc. can do that sort of thing as well, which seems to be the point Prof. Wadha is trying to make. That a&h can produce something that we can all measure and agree exists, so are useful in the same way as engineering. Social scientists can define and measure empathy; empathy makes better design; better design makes better products; therefore art is good.
Means to an end.
Prof Wadha misses the larger point of a&h: You gotta have something that doesn't keep justifying itself by facilitating the next thing. Well, you don't *have* to, but if you don't, then you're just chasing your tail. At some point, you have to answer the question "What's it all for".
Arts and Humanities (the one at hand would be philosophy) aren't necessarily a means to an end; they *are* good in and of themselves. "Pure" science can be similarly good. The whole point of being a self-aware person (or "human", but the times, they are a-changin...) is that you do or experience, or be something that is axiomatically good--not good because of something outside of itself.
Fulfillment doesn't come from doing something that gets you something that gets you something that... You can ride that train for a while, but eventually you figure out you've been running in circles.
Something that has no purpose outside of itself, but is still good must therefore be innately good.
Of course there are things that both have purpose and are good by themselves (friendship, perhaps?), but it's easier to identify those that stand alone.
Art is a particularly good example of this kind of thing. "Pure Science" us a less strict example--these things *might* make you some money one day, but we do them because they are good. Knowledge of the universe is good because it is good. Whether we build something with that knowledge or not.
This is the point of engineering, agriculture, medicine, etc. To make it possible for us to be human and do and be those things that are in themselves good.
Disclaimer--I am an engineer.
As an aside, I take issue with the statement "You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools; turning engineers into artists is hard." Engineering is a hell of a lot more than using software and graphics tools! And art is a hell of a lot more than slapping paint on canvas.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
We need food service workers too. The robots won't be ready for a few decades. Then we'll need humans to feed the inputs into the line - sorta like how humans feed fresh shrimp into peelers and de-veiner machines today. Those machines, designed by an engineer, are pretty cool.
Now, someone with a liberal arts degree who can do real math or code or design, THAT is someone who can change the world, if they can pull that liberal stick from their ass and actually get something done.
Just to be clear: technologists are in a "war" (very stupid word, but whatever) with all forms of toil or unpleasantness.
If you're working instead of playing, we want that to stop.
Your biggest problem is supposed to be that the maintenance bot is late to come fix the grape-feeder bot that is making a funny noise. You're laying there on the couch trying to enjoy the grapes it's putting into your mouth, but that whining belt noise is harshing your buzz. FUCK THAT. I want that to be the most dramatic and annoying problem that you face, in your whole life. Unless you decide that you want to voluntarily take on more problems, despite your sickening wealth.
That really goes for everyone's jobs (the goal is 100% unemployment) but we get to some jobs before others, because our own skills of automation are still so limited. We aren't singling anyone out; we're just doing as much as we know how to do.
Ideally and theoretically, though, we'll eventually put ourselves out of our jobs too. But that'll be the last one we do. If the bots we make to replace us can't take things on from there, then it means we're not really done yet.
sounds like a typical anti-humanities screed with some class war trappings.
contrary to your assertion, humanities degrees were not for the wealthy to avoid learning a trade. Pray tell, what trade is there in math? physics?
What actually happened was a concerted effort to turn universities into trade schools. The lie you learned all of those years ago and still believe was that it was the type of degree awarded rather than the school attended. Attending an ivy league school is no guarantee of an elite position, but they are primarily attended by the elite. Put another way, being elite correlates with attending ivy league though not necessarily the converse.
You are old enough to know that a university education used to be broad, not specialist. Professional writing used to assume the reader was acquainted with French, Italian, Latin and Greek. That they had a working knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology. That they knew something of the history of western Europe.
Now this is decried and universities should turn out individuals who will be productive workers for the elite. Extraneous classes should be stripped from the curriculum. Universities should teach the minimum necessary to gain employment. As a result, more and more universities devolve into diploma mills.
And yet... it turns out engineers *do* need some of that nasty liberal arts education. Strangely, those who put forth effort in technical writing and speech classes are more able to leverage these skills in work place advancement. Which, at least some of the time, results in feedback to their alma mater and funding from their increased pay checks.
So it does vary from place to place where they are in the cycle with some at least promoting communication skills.
This argument has been going on for ages. The "Humanities" these days is just a smokescreen for various social movements, such as "women's studies," "black studies," and less obviously named courses. Even philosophy has been co-opted to the social justice stable.
The old humanities, which involve literature, history, languages, cultures, etc. are worthwhile, but not the way they are pushed, which involves "majoring" in them, meaning learning absolutely nothing about science, technology, or mathematics. Media reporters tend to be humanities majors. Just how does majoring in French literature prepare you to report on solar energy?
The so-called humanities concentrate on pre-scientific and ascientific ideas, which were perhaps appropriate for the Greeks, but need a little updating for the modern world.
The new humanities are just another name for the social justice movement.
Someone who avoids small errors on their way to the grand fallacy. It applies to any field of endeavor.
You can have engineering without humanities. Can you have humanities with the unbridled riches that science and engineering has unlocked?
woosh
indeed
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I come at this as an engineer with a designer in the family, but I don't think people are giving enough credit to the value of good design. Yes, theoretically, you can learn about art and design from self study, but that's the same attitude of those who say they can write software through self study: yes, you can, but unless you're a one-in-a-million genius, it probably won't be any good. A well trained designer is not that different from a well trained software engineer: four to eight years of theory and training reinforced by years of professional practice, continuous study of new and historical techniques, etc.
My general criticism of these kind of articles is that they tend to just blend all the humanities together as if they're all the same, much like how they just lump STEM together. Much like how you wouldn't ask a civil engineer to design a microprocessor, saying that an English major can design an interface just as well as an actual designer or asking a musician to organize large quantities of government data as effectively as a library archivist is just as silly.
Engineering, Science and Math has lead to every major advancement humanity has ever made, Liberal Studies and Humanities, has lead to hurt feelings and cuddle parties.
Long before Ben Stein:
"“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
--John Adams
Food comes first. This gave rise to agriculture. Sex and love are important, but there is not much progress - prostitution provides some. Then we want some clothes - a whole fashion industry serves. Next comes shelter, which the construction business provides. After that the priorities are not so clear: health care, transportation, entertainment, security, religion, politics.
You will notice that engineering serves some of the industries that provide for our needs, but we have done with far less engineering during the stone age. Humanities are important: learning foreign languages helps when you're in aonther country.
Programming a computer serves no useful purpose, but otherwise he shows great wisdom.
Well, whaddaya know! We found the one guy who actually read the articles!
were also talented artists and/or musicians. Their hobbies have included painting, clay sculpture, and playing in orchestra or other bands. The best artists I have known, were "only" artists, but that wasn't a limitation of their abilities, but rather a limitation of their education or of the brainwashing they received about how they lacked the "smarts" to be anything but an artist.
If you are reading this and are pre-college, and have talents in the arts, and believe (or are being told) you are somehow lacking the smarts to pursue engineering, then I encourage you to reconsider. The people telling you this are probably HS counselors or others that are not engineers. They do not know engineering except by proxy of the students they've encouraged in that direction. Their failure isn't in the students that pursued engineering and washed out. Their failure was in the students they encouraged to do pursue liberal arts instead, that could have been great engineers.
One of the very best engineers I've ever worked with was--when she was in high school--a mostly C's student that drew horses in class instead of taking notes and did not know what she wanted to pursue if she went to college. Her father suggested she pursue mechanical engineering and lacking any other particular ambition, did just that. She discovered college classes weren't as crappy as in HS and she did her homework, got good grades, graduated and got a job at NASA designing cool shit.
She regularly cites her creative talents as giving her an edge in her design work. When she was just staring out and needed to think through a mechanism design, she made paper crafted models with tape and paperclips to gain understanding and validate her ideas, and later discovered this wasn't an uncommon practice among engineers at NASA.
I know all this because I talked with her about education paths when we were both mentoring a HS robotics club. She was incensed at the teacher running the club that would direct the "artsy" kids to create the posters and design the t-shirts for the club, rather than have them focus on the robotics. The teacher was setting those kids "artsy" kids expectations low and perpetuating the stereotyping that participating in a robotics club could have overcome.
Liberal arts are important to society and artists are certainly important to society, but being an artist and making a living are, except for a rare few, not the same activity. Whatever spark of creativity and originality that exists inside you is valuable and usable in engineering.
but like science you better be prepared to put up or shut up. There are some opinions that are just so obviously wrong they don't deserve consideration. Somewhere along the line we started acting like everybody's unsupported opinion had value (right around the time economists started buying into the Laffer curve I think). Academia of all stripes isn't like that. If you've got some fresh new insights by all means, bring them.
OTOH the sort of crap that used to fly in the 1950s that was used to excuse "Manifest Destiny" and the like is rightfully being called out as bullshit. Not that folks in Texas (who've managed to change references the American slave trade to make it sound like the slaves were paid laborers, I kid you not) got the memo. But folks like Aronra of Youtube fame are still going to call them out on it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If the only thing you think about the great works of art is that they might make you design something better, then you're doing it wrong. Art is not here to make you a better engineer. To think that it is misses the point entirely.
The phrase "as important as" has never be spotted in a document at a reading level above sophomoric.
True story: if 2 g of beta cells in your pancreas die, without extreme intervention, you die too. Gram for gram, the most important cells in your entire body? (Everything is better with the Betteridge treatment.)
Quora: Which element is the most important for human survival?
Hint: if you're reading Quora, you're doing it wrong.
1.8: Essential Elements for Life
Selenium is a good bet here, punching way above its weight class: just 2 mg in the body is considered essential for life. Good lord, that makes selenium a THOUSAND TIMES more important than beta cells.
So that's my haul from 5 minutes of pinhead masturbation. Was it as good for you, too?
>we will always need English professors, historians, philosophers
No. We need English teachers, not professors, "historian" is a synonym for a "propagandist" and philosophy should be a hobby of physicists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
To quote the chair of my old Classics department:
"A liberal arts education prepares you to fully enjoy a life it will never help you to afford". Equally apropos, "Majoring in philosophy prepares you to seek the answers to life's big questions -- like, 'do you want fries with that?'"
Personally, I find that a liberal arts education has value and is worthy of pursuit. However, unless you have a head start in life, or are prepared to suffer, you may not want to actually major in something soft, or at least not end there.
Studying literature helps you to understand that words matter and how to parse text for meaning. That's valuable if you decide to become a lawyer, but then you're making money from having studied the law, not from having read Milton. Likewise, studying history ought to help provide ample examples of decisions having long tails of consequence.
Whenever this topic comes up, I find it helpful to reference John Adams:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
At the macro level, he's talking about the struggle for independence, followed by the struggle to build a functioning state that can support a vibrant culture. At the micro level, he's saying that a family's arch is usually begun by a struggle in one generation get their children educated with the hopes that those children will study practical arts and sciences that will get them employed. They can then, hopefully, build a fortune that would allow the third generation the opportunity to study more "frivolous" topics.
the tl;dr is that if you're the first in your family to go to college, you're probably better off not majoring in anything with the word "studies" in the title.
I dunno about equal importance, but the pathetic amount of humanities in most engineering degree requirements is sad.
Actually both engineering and general humanities are sadly lacking in history, and ripe to bite on the first apple dangled by a charismatic demagogue.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
before he went off the rails, writer and artist Jose Arguelles, in his book "The transformative vision", wrote about a swinging back and forth from the world of Psyche, the world of the inner self, and Techne, the world of technique and artifice. our age is the triumph of technique, and the subjugation of soul, or intuition. we now have enough technique to either destroy all life on earth down to the insect level, or create a perfect paradise. technique does not itself tell us how to use it. only our souls can guide us. liberal arts, the academic pursuit of soul, is essential, to counteract the influence of techne. our next age, the Aquarian Age, will see a balance between the 2 worlds, along wiht a return of a more female equal or more matriarchal social structure. yes, he predicted the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, and the 2012 event. to a technologically minded person, ie almost ALL of us, these obviously didnt occur. but, to someone tuned into nonrational and psychic streams, these events DID occur, and we ARE transforming. its really messy, ugly, violent, but within it are the seeds of a great future. i will completely dismiss any attempts to rationally argue against this. its just a feeling...
Classically, the "liberal arts" were seven specific fields of study, five of which were forms of math: the "trivum" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, plus the "quadrivium" arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics, i.e. cyclical functions, like trigonometric ones) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics, i.e. mostly calculus).
Today they seem to be treated as a synonym to the "humanities", and I'm at a loss as to what exactly those are supposed to be other than "not a (physical) science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field".
Psychology seems to be counted sometimes, but that's a physical science, a level of abstraction up from biology. Sociology, which seems to always be counted as such, is likewise a level of abstraction up from ecology (societies are basically human ecosystems), which in turn is definitely also a physical science on par with biology even though I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "STEM" blowhards here wanted to count it as some "soft, leftist" field because of its environmentalist connotations.
Mathematics also isn't a physical science, or even an application thereof as engineering and technology are. But I guess math gets lumped in with them because the physical sciences use lots of math?
So how about fields like political science and economics, which use extensive math in things like control theory, voting theory, game theory, decision theory, and so on? Those aren't physical sciences, not even to the extent that sociology is, because they're talking about prescriptive rather than descriptive topics: what kind of actions it would be rational to take, not just what kind of action people do in fact take. You might call them "ethical sciences" (at least I would like to). But they're definitely not physical sciences, which seems to exclude them from STEM even though they rely just as much on math?
What about linguistics, which is not just anthropology of language but an abstract field with close connections to mathematics at times? Linguistics and mathematics seem to have about equal claim to the field of logic.
And what about philosophy, which like mathematics and linguistics is a highly abstract field, and like mathematics is extremely rigorous in its logic (sharing at least as equal a claim to that field as math or language do), yet largely unconcerned with the empirical observations of the physical sciences, and lays the groundwork of the "ethical sciences" as much as it does the physical ones?
The arts are definitely not physical sciences, or any kind of science at all. So are those "the humanities"? Do you just mean "the arts" when you say "the humanities"? If so, then don't go lumping linguistics, philosophy, the "ethical sciences" like economics and political science, and some actual empirical physical sciences like psychology and sociology in with it. Those are all their own separate things, and really don't belong in one category with each other (any more than mathematics belongs in the same category as the physical sciences and applications thereof in engineering and technology).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yeah, you keep telling yourselves that when at work you have to say "Would you like fries with that, sir?"
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
A classical liberal education was to teach the children of the ruling class how to rule. I firmly believe having liberal education as widespread as possible is necessary for a democracy to function well. That obviously can't mean everybody joins the ruling class or becomes rich. Most people still have to make earning a living their priority.
Liberals arts is important but it's never urgent like earning a living.
Bzzzt! Logic was taught in Digital Circuits 110 in freshman year. You know nothing, Pope Snow.
I hate to defend assloorie but I can say with certainty that wasn't what he was referencing. I am not discounting that is something he'd LOVE to happen, but there's a simpler answer here: He's being fucking racist. He cannot explain the meaning of his statement without it. You already know the last time that shitheel was a Democrat was 1964 when there was a thing known as a Dixiecrat. With an exception of one or two congress cretins, they all became republitards because white people are better or some shit like that. When people say racist shit, they're racist. Pretty fucking simple.
I don't know about that AC, but that was the case at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott AZ campus circa 1996. The only non-engineering/math class I managed to make something better than a D was in World History because I wore a kilt to class and the proff was actually A True Scotsman. I also understand that times change, but whatever what happening in the 90s has colored the opinions of Gen X to this day. I took history classes as well, 3 years in high school and 3 semesters in college and I still can't tell you what was so bad back then. What subjects are taught within that class are up to the persons in charge and you can selectively leave out details which annoy the status quo. If your proff wanted dissent, well, you were a lucky bastard or you agreed close enough to not piss him off. Many of us didn't get that luxury.
Then how do you explain all the humanities majors who can't seem to stay off Facebook, arguably one of the biggest examples of technology gone astray?
... a lot of customers do want fries with that.
I agree 110% with the article. Your ability to repay the student loan should dictate how much you may borrow.
What trade is there in math?
Seriously, you do know that computers are a relatively new invention right? Did you know that computer rooms existed before "computers" did? It was a room filled with people doing math problems all day.
Shoulda been a cherry farmer?
In order to save myself vast amounts of time, I'm gong to stop my responses at the first blatantly dishonest thing in your posts.
You demanded citations backing up oolorie's claims that you called bullshit and he provided them. Now you go scurry off back under your bridge. Why am I not surprised? Why don't you just man up (please ignore the hetero-patriarchy insult) and admit you are wrong?
Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do.
Are you kidding me? Have you seen the content of modern humanities courses?
They are so full of "pomo, deconstructionist, everything is a social construct" BS that humanities grads are the very LEAST qualified people to be able to think critically, of any humans.
K-12 and universities seem far more interested in pushing a far left indoctrination than in actually teaching anybody anything useful.
There are more Marxists teaching at universities than there are republicans teaching at universities.
Utter liberal bullshit.
*Are Not
FTFY.
Youâ(TM)re welcome.
The author is an engineering professor.
Like fuck he is. He's a journalist with a B.A. in "Computer Studies" and an MBA in marketing. All this "engineering professor" stuff is just him marketing himself.
Pwned! LOL
So basically what you say is gospel based upon the fact that it came from you. You demand that other opinions be accompanied by proof of their validity as they are by default "bullshit" since they conflict with your preconceived ideas of truth. When confronted with the proof you demanded, it is arbitrarily too "difficult" to review the proof you demanded and not worthwhile anyway because it is "generated bullshit" with only a "grain of truth."
Yeah, it's REAL obvious who is the one who is full of shit.
How is saving people's lives parasitic? I only know a few gender studies grads, but they all make over $500k a year and regularly keep military veterans from committing suicide. I don't understand how that's parasitic.