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Comment by denniskane | Hacker News Reader

So by this logic, MIT, Caltech, GaTech, Carnegie Mellon, as well as every community college that focuses on real world training is doing a fundamental disservice to our civil society.

I disagree, to say the least.

If everyone were an engineer, that probably would not be such a terrible thing, but if everyone were a novelist, that probably would.

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I am both. Actually, MIT trained me for both. Everyone ought to be both, a little bit.

If you want to throw around oughts and shoulds, I would confine those to the rational/empirical side of the spectrum because that is the very foundation upon which a society may be constructed.

Now, once that society is constructed, all of the other stuff is nice to have, but I would not describe those things in morally imperative terms like that.

> If you want to throw around oughts and shoulds, I would confine those to the rational/empirical side of the spectrum

Oughts and shoulds are the foundation on which rationality in decision-making is founded, but cannot be reasoned to or empirically tested without assuming an axiomatic ought or should to start with.

Eh? No, humanity is not constructed on a rational/empirical basis. For example, most people want children; this is not rational, it's simply the way humans are constructed. We enjoy music. We need sunlight to be happy. We have a desire to live; none of these things are rational, they just are. We have deep-seated fantasies about our position in the world; we imagine ourselves to be heroes in a long-running saga. We cleave the world along the planes of this narrative into 'good' and 'evil'. We hate, despite assurances that the contrary is better, to be told what to do.

Unless we respond to this, our human side, our efforts will always fall dead. We can't construct a society that doesn't acknowledge our humanity and expect that people will want to live in it.

I know well rounded people who took liberal arts classes in many of those places. MIT has an English department.

Indeed, this dichotomy is one of the problems. There's no reasons "real world training" is mutually exclusive with liberal arts. There's no reason we can't teach you to be a mechanic and let you read Chaucer.

Did she call for utilitarian topics to be banned from academe? Of course not. She argued against what she sees as a trend of them taking precedence over everything else.

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