Hacker News Reader

> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school.

Half of the top ten engineering schools are public: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

The top ten liberal arts schools are all private: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

>> "...work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year..."

Mostly agreed, except that as someone who studied drastically, overwhelmingly too much for the FE exam (which turned out to be super easy) that if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.

> if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.

Easier for Mechanical and Civil engineering students since more of the sections are a basic part of their curriculum.

As an electrical engineer, the EE sections were laughably easy while I had to study quite hard to get enough points in the dynamics, thermodynamics, and materials sections to pass. I did well, but I really had to work my ass off for sections that I never used again.

Whereas practically all of the other engineering disciplines simply blow off the EE section as you can pass without getting any points at all in it.

Depends where do you want to work as an engineer high end RnD (ie real world leading stuff) does place a lot of emphasis on University, grade and who your supervisor was in some cases.

yeah but now you talk about academics, thing broken beyond repair on its own

Err no was thinking of places like CERN, JET, NASA or Research based out of Universities like MIT or CIT

I don't know about the US, but at the same public government-subsidized university in Canada, Engineering/CS costs 3x more than humanities.

Well there's something to be said about helping people up to a certain level, but there's also the point that we should be encouraging people to kick ass at what they are good at. So instead of having a bunch of average people we can have a bunch of people that excel at different specialised tasks and so we are better off for it.

> in reality we should be allocating more education resources to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit

Why? Turning good engineers into great engineers is arguably a much more marginally efficient use of social resources than turning average telephone sanitisers, estate agents or PR managers into good or even great ones. The engineers (or software architects, biotech researchers, Wall Street quants etc) are the ones that create innovations and companies that build on them - whereas the marginal improvement of spending the same money on weaker students is - at the very best - them not ending up in jail or doing a job well that should have been automated in the first place.

Which works better depends on if you're in a class based authoritarian society or a democracy.

Clearly we're headed back to the middle ages as fast as we can, in general, at least economically. Is it better to pretend otherwise hoping we'll change direction or at least the lies will pacify the general public, or knowingly step on the gas to get the suffering related to the transition over as quickly as possible or hoping the general public will rise up?

Suppose we have a democracy, or perhaps a freedom preserving autocracy of some sort (e.g. Singapore). How does it benefit anyone to turn a good street sweeper into a great one who vaguely half remembers Shakespeare? Could you lay out the mechanics in concrete terms?

(I.e., no vague platitudes like "a knowledge citizenry is necessary in a democracy", but instead concrete steps like "vague memory of hating shakespeare => recognizing that bushbama is lying with higher probability => voting better". Critical thinking rather than slogans.)

If you don't see the relevance in understanding Shakespeare for making decisions in your life, then you weren't properly taught Shakespeare.

tl;dr; no argument but have a platitude.

His one sentence was too long to read?

What's the most recent decision in your life for which understanding Shakespeare was relevant?

What does it mean to "understand" Shakespeare, by the way? (If I read or watch the plays, is that sufficient? Or is there more to it than that?)

If you understand it (that is, study its writer's themes, methodologies, culture, etc..) you generalize the information and integrate it with your decision-making abilities. Your question is a bit like asking "When's the last time eating ham was relevant to a decision I've made." You can't trace the source of relevance through those kinds of generalizations. You can only know your own personal history: that you've previously integrated the information.

It's the same way you can't look at someone and say "your decisions don't directly involve ham. Maybe you shouldn't eat ham anymore."

Shakespeare isn't strictly necessary for this, but there is value to be gained from studying literature, and Shakespeare is just the most accessible and popular academic literature.

Addendum: For what it's worth, I use my experiences studying shakespeare quite frequently, particularly when analyzing things like tragedy, taboo, or social conflict like drugs and politics. If there were some better way to deliver that experience, I would support it as well.

Lets approach this via another tack, since you seem to want to drop more platitudes.

Suppose you have two humans - one who integrated shakespeare, one who didn't. (Or make it two samples of humans to reduce statistical noise, if you prefer.) Beyond quizzing them on lines from plays, what measurement can you make to determine which human/group of humans "integrated" and "generalized" shakespeare and which didn't?

If no such measurement exists, I'd assert that rather than shakespeare, we need invisible dragons to breath the fire of knowledge. http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm

I don't think you know what a platitude is.

> what measurement can you make to determine which human/group of humans "integrated" and "generalized" shakespeare and which didn't?

What measurement can you make to determine if someone is intelligent or not?

You solve that, and I'll get back to you.

What measurement can you make to determine if someone is intelligent or not?

Any of a variety of IQ tests, to measure directly. But that might be cheating, analogous to asking directly about Hamlet.

So instead, ask them to perform any of the variety of real world tasks that are highly correlated with IQ (e.g., "here is a device you've never seen before, figure it out"). Measure their income - the theory of IQ claims income will be higher in the more intelligent group. Measure their criminality, risky sexual behavior or drug use; these will also be lower in the high IQ group.

I wouldn't claim intelligence existed if I couldn't make claims of this sort.

Your turn.

So, being unable to trace it, you don't really know whether studying Shakespeare, or other literature, affects your decision-making at all -- and if it does, how much. I agree that much of knowledge you pick up is something you can't trace. But do you get any from studying literature?

On the other hand, I can think of plenty of ways reading books (and watching movies, etc) has changed my decision-making abilities. I could name examples. Likewise with playing sports, playing musical instruments, getting really sunburnt, interacting with old people, etc -- some of which I've spent less time doing. Studying literature, on the other hand, and finding out, oh, its themes are X, Y, and Z (because duhhh) making up some completely nonsensical psychoanalysis has not, in any identifiable way.

There are other things you could do with your time. Is it better to study Shakespeare, or to watch reality TV?

Studying Shakespeare is not "finding out, oh, its themes are X, Y, and Z (because duhhh) making up some completely nonsensical psychoanalysis."

That's like saying studying math is "finding out, oh, number can be manipulated, and making up some completely nonsensical rules for manipulating them."

It largely constitutes a controlled dataset. Like shooting at bull's eye's rather than random shit.

> Is it better to study Shakespeare, or to watch reality TV?

You have to do both to know that, don't you?

But I'm not arguing that learning how to do math is useful for making decisions later in life (aside, obviously, from e.g. financial decisions that involve making calculations).

I would argue that classes that study literature actually harm peoples' abilities to make decisions later in life. Letting people make pretend arguments without a testable standard of truth is a terrible idea. You can see people act in public today that do not care one bit about whether what they believe, or what they say, is true or not, and you can see them claim that there are "multiple perspectives" on matters that are, in fact, questions of fact. Some people are quite good at writing stuff in a way that gives them 2^n directions in which they might equivocate, should somebody argue with them. They are a product of this system.

In your penultimate sentence you have in fact, hit the nail on the head. If you want to know how the politics of a society operates, the classes and praxis you are deriding are actually a pretty good way to find out.