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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

For sure. Let me clarify a bit -- I used this specific course as an example, but I am talking about the novel field of Progress Studies in general. The entire _field of study_ that this course introduces suffers from the problem I described above.

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I think a totally whole human being should know something about art, literature and mathematics. Does that mean that any field of study that doesn't include mathematics is deficient? No, it means that any person who doesn't cover more than one field of study, even cursorily, is deficient. Any piece of human knowledge can only be understood in the context of every other piece of human knowledge... but it's fine for a field of study to have a limited context, if for no other purpose than to make it easier for librarians to organize books associated with it.

I mean, this is like a CS program that doesn't teach you about algorithms. Studying progress and not taking into account social movements such as the labour movement that were the necessary driving force is really underwhelming.

But this is not a program, this is a single course. Not all CS classes are about algorithms either.

Yes, and the criticism was about the field in general.

Also, an introduction course to CS should mention algorithms.

Yes, an introduction to CS course should include algorithms too.

But this isn't an introduction to history course. It's a course about the "story of unprecedented human progress in the modern age".

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