<p>Just think, an actor can BS his way through psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and graduate students in educational philosophy. Amazing.</p>
<p>This reminds me of an interesting conference at Santa Fe Institute twenty odd years ago between economists and physicists. Economists, known for their “arrogance” among other faculty members, tried to “impress” physicists with econotalk and mathematical modeling. What a mistake.</p>
<p>After listening for a while, Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson bluntly asked " you guys really believe that ?" Larry Summers, yes, that Larry Summers, became defensive enough to accuse physicists of having a “Tarzan Complex”.</p>
<p>The moral of the story is to know your audience well. Dr. Murray, based on the three articles alone, would never have committed such an error.</p>
<p>As I have said before, one’s major is a better indication of ability than college attended.</p>
All conversations on CC must repeat every three months or this place implodes.</p>
<p>BTW, CG, I just got my degree in organic chemistry, which by any measure you’d include in your definition of the “super”-disciplines, and I can tell you right now that I’m not more intelligent in part, whole, or average (and neither were my classmates) than most other subsets of my student body, and I did so at an elite school.</p>
<p>People who are just getting into science, in high school, or lack some kind of socialization skills I often find have the same opinion your expressing at some point, but almost all of them grow out of it and realize how ridiculous they are being.</p>
<p>I know that science is taught better and has been more fully developed philosophically as a working frame than just about any other discipline, but that does not mean that those who study it are smarter or more intellectual by any stretch and to suggest that just wreaks of 16 year old egotism.</p>
<p>modestMelody…I don’t know about that. I skimmed the thread, so I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but in all of Asia and most of Europe it’s no secret that those that study the sciences, math and engineering (successfully) are smarter than those who study something more liberal artsy. Now of course, that could just be there and we could be different. Here in America, since we are very averse to saying some people are smarter than others, you get the typical response that “there are many different types of smart”. However, the economics of it seems to line up more with the international view of smartness:graduates with technical degrees make twice as much on average as those without them. Now granted getting paid more does not equal smarter, but it seems that you’re certainly getting a skill when getting a technical degree that is rare, for one reason or another, otherwise the pay wouldn’t be so high. </p>
<p>Also, your experience at Brown is not typical of those at most universities. First off, at Brown you don’t apply to an engineering or a science school you just apply to Brown. Therefore everyone is at the top of their game and free to choose what they wish to study. And even though it may be argued that the smarter ones would choose the tougher majors since they are more lucrative, this logic may not hold here. Since everyone is already very smart, distinguishing the differences would be tough. Furthermore, Brown students may be willing to study a less lucrative major like history even with the raw smarts to study something “harder” because they are a lot less likely than other college students to worry about short-run financial compensation. This is probably because in the long run, most Brown students (regardless of major) do very well for themselves.</p>
<p>The economics argument is ridiculous and has nothing to do with valuing those skills more and everything to do with technical expertise applying directly to industries which are making lots of money. Drug companies are obviously going to pay more than say, being a teacher. </p>
<p>The access argument is stupid-- any one who is smart enough to get into any of the top schools in the country can get into a science program somewhere that they could be quite successful in and successful after. They have access, they choose to go elsewhere, whether that’s before or during college.</p>
<p>The bottom line is science students often have a problem with egotism and love to chat up how they have more hair on their chest because X weed out class is so traditionally difficult and because non-science people are often squeamish about science whereas science people tend to think too highly of themselves to realize that they sound just like the economist who does a terrible study and whose techniques are totally unsound and controls are crappy and who the physicist laughs at when they’re talking about 95% of things in this world other than science.</p>
<p>I’m all about science-- I love it, I’m proud of my degree, I know that it was quite difficult to attain, and I think we need a lot more people studying science in the US. However, as someone who had a dumb attitude about this stuff when I was 16 but long grew out of it, I have little sympathy to simplistic, stupid social analysis that young scientists often come up with to justify how great they are to the world.</p>
Wrong. Even if the industries are making a lot of money, if everyone say graduated with a degree in chemical engineering, the salary of those working in the drug industry would go down because there would be a far bigger potential workforce. If there were less college graduates and K-12 education were valued the same, guess what? Teachers would make more. If you don’t agree with me-look at it this way. Walmart is making loads of money, even in this recession. However, do workers at Walmart make anymore money than those working at Sears? Nope. The skills (which are few) are the same so almost anyone can do it and therefore the compensation is low.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I respond to this with what I said earlier:
Since it would still probably be in their financial best interest to attend Brown and their personal interest to study what they like, we are still going to observe what I suggested.</p>
<p>Also, if lets say you are to be correct that it’s immature egotism, why then do you think these views are held highly in other parts of the world? Are they all immature and love to stroke scientists egos?</p>
<p>It’s my opinion (though I could be wrong) is that the reason why you changed your mind was because you attended a school where regardless of what you were majoring in (even if it wasn’t tough) you had to be on top of your game to be there in the first place. Therefore, it may seem logical to say those that choose to study liberal arts courses are as smart as those who choose to study tougher courses. Contrast this to places in Asia where to be at the top schools you had to already cosign yourself to a major in something in the hard sciences, math or engineering.</p>
<p>I’ll address this point only. If I’m spending money in a growing, developing economy in art history where there is a limited ability to comprehend what precise job that’s aligning me for versus spending money in a developing economy in a degree that will allow me to get job placement in the Intel plant down the block from my house (and the only other jobs available are service related or low-level, unskilled manufacturing), I’m gong to do science no matter what and that’s the only thing that will be respected.</p>
<p>When I’m in an economy where that is less of a problem, things change.</p>
<p>More than that, even if that were the motivation and its a legitimate one, it doesn’t mean you have to be inherently smarter to do sciences (you don’t). It also doesn’t mean that people are choosing science because they’re more intellectual, it means they’re choosing science because that’s where the job is after college that made college worth going to.</p>
<p>Separate from that, the value of a general education is not appreciated elsewhere as much as in the US, traditionally, and that’s something that many systems are now adopting/changing abroad because they see this as one of the key differences to why students at American colleges are so successful coming out and so much more broadly prepared.</p>
<p>Modestmoledy, but I’m not just talking about poor countries in Africa. Or even India. I’m also talking about China, South Korea, Japan and most of Europe. Surely you’re not going to tell me that they are “growing, developing economies”!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I do agree with the last part of your sentence but the rest of your paragraph really isn’t true. It is so easy to fail out of engineering school at most schools that aren’t like the one you attended. Go look at the engineering forum at CC if you don’t believe me or if you think they are all whiners look up the statistics. It is much more difficult and not even people majoring in the liberal arts would say otherwise. And it’s not as if the engineers are underqualified either! They almost always have higher (and never lower) SAT scores and high school grades than the students at the college of arts and sciences. Now you could say that this difficulty doesn’t arise because it requires a smarter individual but then that really begs the question of “what is smart?”. Contrast that with someone majoring in the liberal arts. Sure you may not get good grades in the classes (I know that from first hand experience) but you won’t fail unless you have other (non college related) problems going on. In fact, at a school like mine and yours, you won’t even get a C unless you just do abysmally poor, and you know that. Not saying that C’s are giving out in the techie courses liberally either at my school, but they do exist and are given out to about 10% of the students.</p>
<p>I mentioned that earlier on post #33. Even in North America we were not always this PC about it. Some years ago I came across a study by Harvard psychologist Anne Roe called “The making of a scientist”. It was published in the early 1950s. In the study, she tested a group of prominent scientists (biologists, physicists, and social scientists) on a high-end IQ test she devised. If I remember it correctly, she also administered it as well as a regular IQ test to a group of PHD students in Columbia, making it possible for her to norm the high-end test with a SD of 15.</p>
<p>The results are not very PC, to say the least…You will never see a study like this done today, I can almost guarantee it.</p>
<p>I also find it interesting that Dr. Murray, educated at Harvard and MIT, has no difficulty admitting that he is not smart enough to understand the math,
There is an element of truth to this, but like several other comments on this page, it is overstated. The 2 top universities in China are Beijing University and Qinghua University, roughly analogous to Harvard and MIT respectively. Beijing University has a tradition of humanistic scholarship. It’s not as if smart Chinese students never major in anything but the natural sciences. A few years ago, Beijing University established a new collegiate institute, called the Yuanpei Program, intended to foster creativity by adopting features reminiscent of an American-style open curriculum in the liberal arts. It encompasses both humanities and sciences.
[Yuanpei</a> College, Peking University](<a href=“http://yuanpei.pku.edu.cn/cate_en.php?cid=33]Yuanpei”>http://yuanpei.pku.edu.cn/cate_en.php?cid=33)
In the case of China, it really is. Or at least it has been until very recently. In their desperation to catch up to the West, many Chinese intellectuals from the late 19th century developed a certain “science envy”. They rebelled against traditional Chinese humanistic scholarship. As the country becomes wealthier and more relaxed, I expect the pendulum will swing back to some extent (and maybe that is what we are seeing in the Yuanpei College).</p>
<p>The thing about technical knowledge in careers is, it’s a little like sex. You’ve heard the expression, “you can only sleep your way to the middle”? It’s kinda like that for career technical people. The people at the top may or may not have strong science and technical educations. Even if they have it, after a few years at that level, they lose that edge. One thing they take to the top, and keep after they get there, is excellent communication skill.</p>
<p>And it’s not as if the enduring problems of philosophy are easy to understand, or solve. It may be that some smart people back away from them for that very reason. There are other ways of understanding the world that more easily lend themselves to testable, quantifiable answers. That doesn’t mean the human race is better off for neglecting the rest.</p>
<p>^^this thread is boring now. you want to know why asians tend to be better at math and science? there have been several studies done. look them up. there is also a book that discusses it. it’s called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. read it. read it</p>
<p>Did Gladwell get it right? Not everyone thinks so.
[quote]
Trying to account for the excellence of “Asian” students in maths (he refers only to east Asians), Gladwell manages a reverse-Weber manoeuvre. He contrasts the habits of good work and initiative bred by high-skill rice-farming to the sullen torpor of European peasants who, it seems, all “worked as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord”. His only example relates to Russian serfdom. Such crude and silly generalisations pepper Outliers.<a href=“Boyd%20Tonkin%20writing%20in%20The%20Independent,%2011/21/2008”>/quote</a></p>
<p><em>Yawn</em>
I have the ambition of a sea slug and I still got into MIT/Dartmouth/Duke/Notre Dame.</p>
<p>As for Asians, I heard that the reason why Asians tend to do better than other groups in schools in the United States isn’t because Asians are inherently smarter but because the really smart people from Korea/China were the ones who moved to the United States and had really smart children.</p>
<p>To get back to the Deresiewicz article, I interpreted the “talk to the plumber” thing as a metaphor. He probably does not care too much about literally talking to plumbers. And he is not really saying that an Ivy education will turn you into a snob who forgets the small-talking, back-slapping ways of your middle class (or lower class) roots.</p>
<p>The problem he’s addressing (maybe not too clearly) is that the Humanities in particular often have become too specialized and technical at elite schools. The focus has tended to shift away from enduring problems of general interest, and importance, to the business of living a good human life. It has shifted toward narrow technical problems (determining authorship, counting evidence of gender bias) or arcane critical theory.</p>
<p>We touch on some of these enduring problems often right here on College Confidential. What is fair when it comes to handing URM admissions? When we say College X is “best”, what do we really mean, and how do we know it is so without resorting to “that’s just my personal opinion”? Is elite education providing a good framework for thinking and talking about problems like this ?</p>
<p>I am sure you have a much better grounding in philosophy than I do. Remember St. Anselm’s ontological proof? Believe it or not, I still hear people debate this thing what, 10 centuries later? It is my suspicion that many lines of human inquiry has reached an evolutionary dead end, and became the plaything of the leisure class of a bygone era. So, like foreign travel, it has become “de rigeur” for the working class of today.</p>
<p>Empirical philosophy or science, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength. Just think space travel, MP3s, internet, etc. I know of no other area of human knowledge that has gone this far this fast. Why shouldn’t smart people choose them?</p>
<p>But it makes sense to go back to ancient ideas because they remain interesting and useful. Scientists continually discover new things in the world, but human beings and the basic practical dilemmas of life don’t change all that much. We have to keep re-learning about all that.</p>
<p>The idea of distinguishing different kinds of knowledge, for instance, is not all that new and PC. Aristotle distinguished technical, practical, and theoretical knowledge. The Deresiewicz critique is not really focused on our approach to theoretical knowledge. So, we can discuss the strengths or limitations of empirical science as a foundation for theoretical knowledge, but this discussion ignores his main concerns.</p>
<p>I think those concerns center on the balance between theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom. Plumbers have technical skill, engineers and scientists have theoretical knowledge. Practical wisdom is the sphere of knowledge where the plumber’s concerns and the professor’s concerns should intersect. The liberal arts can improve the quality of that intersection (where conversations occur, for example, about what makes a building more beautiful or useful). According to Deresiewicz, that ain’t happening as well as it should.</p>
<p>You know, I was rethinking it and I should make a few qualifications to my view:</p>
<ol>
<li>Smart people don’t go into science/engineering/math necessarily because they are smart. Its more like the people that go into science/engineering/math have to be smart in order to be successful.</li>
<li>To be at the top of your field in anything (except the really fake “fields” like gender studies, African American studies, etc) you have to be extremely smart. I would not say the top Physics Professor at Harvard is any smarter than the top English Professor at Harvard.</li>
<li>I meant to say in my posts that the avg lib arts major will not be as bright as the average techie major because of different standards in the quality of work required by the programs. I’m not sure if this was entirely clear.</li>
</ol>
<p>True, but you can always tell a lion by its claws.</p>
<p>Here are just a few additional comments. Developing countries tend to use science as the core of a student’s education rather than the liberal arts. This way they can try to “catch up” to the west while allocating limited resources efficiently. I prefer to use the term “science envy” to describe the social sciences instead. </p>
<p>I somehow can not get too excited over the Deresiewicz critique, maybe because I have seen a more “colourful” version some years ago by a Canadian Rhodes scholar. I am, however, interested how a different “type” of elite education would produce a different style of leadership. Last year, watching the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, I got the feeling that China is run by engineers and not lawyers. So, I googled and found that President Hu graduated as a hydraulic engineer from Qinghua and Premier Wen was trained as a mining engineer. Doe it mean that we should expect a different type of leadership as a result? Which system will have the edge in economic development?</p>
<p>After the financial market meltdown last year, I began to see Murray’s argument as particularly apt. Our leadership has shown not just questionable judgment but questionable ethics. I do not agree with Murray that the theoretical physicist type, however, are just “cognitive curiosities”. If Wall Street chooses to use their expertise, then the ones who have the power to implement their strategies must also have the intellect to understand the “math” involved, and I am sure they don’t. Does it mean we will have a wholesale change at the top? I am not holding my breath on this one. Instead, I expect to see us screeching from one disaster to another. People do not give up power voluntarily, especially when a political solution is to have taxpayers to bail you out.</p>
<p>I agree with most of what you say, BTW.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You should read Anne Roe’s “The making of a scientist”. The results will surprise you. I agree with everything else you said though.</p>
<p>By the way, just to get slightly on topic, as someone who is now a graduate of one such place, I’ve run into no troubles communicating to people of varying backgrounds.</p>