Virtues of a liberal arts education

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<p>I had a course in CV for my physics degree, in fact at my school Physics students took CV along with the math students, as well as a course in PDEs. But I don’t remember a required class in CV in my EE curriculum. Could be because I already had taken one. I think I also had a separate semester of probability and stats for engineers early on.</p>

<p>Of course all engineers have this, or something like this. But I personally don’t consider this to be the equivalent of 8 or 9 extra semesters of mathematics. IME it was tailored to the applications, and there some significant repetition of the same or very similar mathematical concepts for different uses. Along with a lot of analogs between digital and analog transforms and the like. YMMV.</p>

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<p>Didn’t imply to be equivalent to 8-9 semesters of extra math at all. Only a list for reference. There is also a semester of Numerical Analysis too. And of course, one semester of Probability and Statistics before Stochastic Process. :-)</p>

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<p>I think I confused you with another poster. My apologies. And yes, there was a lot of math, at least in EE.</p>

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<p>However, there are also students who were not that good at, or did not enjoy, writing about fictional literature (other than “that was a good book”); such students may end up disliking English courses for that reason, and therefore be deterred from taking more writing-specific courses than the minimum due to the focus on analysis of fictional literature.</p>

<p>It would be analogous to a situation where all math courses were combined with physics. Some students would do fine applying math to other subjects. But those who were not good at, or did not like, physics may get less out of the math courses because of that.</p>

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<p>STEM and liberal arts are not disjoint sets of subjects. Liberal arts includes science and math.</p>

<p>If you mean humanities and social studies (H/SS) when you write “liberal arts”, then those heavy in STEM or H/SS need to know enough about the other area to understand them, and not be misled or confused by (for example) politicians, special interest lobbying groups, advertising, expert witnesses in court hired by one side of a legal dispute, etc…</p>

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<p>Actually, I’m one of those very students you describe…especially if the topic was poetry analysis. However, even at the STEM-oriented magnet high school I attended, the expectation was that one should “suck it up” and figure out how to adapt rather than complain about English courses emphasizing areas one dislikes. </p>

<p>It’s one reason why a classmate’s failed attempt to avoid taking all 4 years of English writing/lit is understandable and yet, regarded as behavior worthy of jokes at his expense. Especially considering he ended up having his admission to two Ivies rescinded and having to take a full schedule of English courses to make up for what he tried to skip.</p>

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<p>On the other hand, you probably didn’t take any additional poetry analysis writing courses as electives. Some students might take more writing courses if writing courses on various themes and subjects were offered. Simply because many students “got through” writing courses the way that they are currently taught does not necessarily mean that it is the optimal way to teach writing.</p>

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<p>If the student’s profile were strong enough, should have applied to Caltech. Only requires 3 years of English (4 years recommended) and doesn’t require a HS diploma. :-)</p>

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<p>Actually, you’d be wrong about that. I did end up taking an elective course with substantial poetry coverage because I heard the Prof was good and wanted to get over my fear of poetry. While it did help overcome the fear…I’m certainly not going to win any poetry writing prizes.</p>

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<p>GSharpM7, I really enjoyed your post - I agree with so much of what you wrote. However, I am left with some questions - most importantly, how did you use “Bach’s Crab Canon to explain to two people why what they thought were opposing views were really saying the same thing?” I guess I’m not as well versed in humanities as I had thought!!!</p>

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<p>I think you are taking my comment too literally. In today’s world, it seems like science is taking the leading role with the humanities struggling to keep up (think stem cell research, nuclear weapons, genetic testing, abortion etc). Of course, history tells us that science, or empirical philosophy only took off in Europe after religious dogmatism started to wane. In the Islamic civilization, they decided to put a damper on scientific investigation because they believed it took away the focus from God, and they have been paying for that mistake ever since. So, you can make an argument that a certain degree of political freedom is necessary for innovation. In ancient China, on the other hand, the greatest philosophical advances occurred at times of political unrest…does that mean unrest is a pre-requisite for masterpieces? If so, perhaps we should create more of it? A very complex relationship, too complex for me to get a handle on without some serious meditation, that’s for sure.</p>

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<p>Absolutely. I used to say sciences the destination, humanities the scenery. If this is so, don’t you think a liberal education should have sciences as the core, with humanities as electives?;)</p>

<p>It is when folks put the cart before the horse that I raise my objection. That is how we get Greece instead of Germany. Entertainment can not come before production for long.</p>

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<p>You get no argument from me. I was a political science/Asian studies major with a minor in quantitative methods. I wish it could have been the other way around though.</p>

<p>Education is a life-long affair. Samuel Johnson’s ideal is impossible today, but that does not mean we should stop trying. Not approaching his ideal is not the real problem here; it is the attempt to re-define what is an educated person in one’s own image that I fine offensive, and self-serving.</p>

<p>Hi StillGreen, nice to hear from you again.</p>

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My original “English” heading was more focused on the “mechanics” of writing (grammar, sentence structure, etc.) and exposure to various writing methods and styles, i.e. being able to communicate the same idea in multiple ways. That will naturally translate to any writing purpose. It is just sad to see someone who is technically brilliant but cannot communicate on a basic level.</p>

<p>Having said that, you make a good point that students should also be exposed to other types of writing, e.g. business, technical, training etc. Yes, by studying literature, you will gain the skills needed to handle any type of writing, but it cannot hurt to have direct exposure also. Regardless of major, the key to success is writing, writing, and more writing. Technologies are fairly fleeting and will come and go (anyone remember PL/1, RPG, LISP, PROLOG, vinyl records, leeches, the abacus, stone tools, etc.?), but the ability to communicate is the key to success.</p>

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I just used the physical analogy of the Crab Canon where the people playing line 1 and line 2 are seemingly playing different music, but in reality are playing the exact same thing, just in different directions. I don’t remember the specific discussion (just that it was merger and acquisition related), but I bet it was one of those that ended in… “Great, then you two are in violent agreement!” Thanx for asking questions, they are so much more interesting than answers. ;)</p>

<p>[Canon</a> 1 a 2 :: Strange Paths](<a href=“http://strangepaths.com/canon-1-a-2/2009/01/18/en/]Canon”>Canon 1 a 2 :: Strange Paths)</p>

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<p>Wow! Thank you GSharpM7!! I just went to your Bach’s Crab Canon link. That was stunning!!!</p>

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<p>I was looking at that mathematical physics website that contains Bach’s Crab Canon and came across this quote very pertinent to our discussion of the value of humanities vs. sciences:</p>

<p>Quote:
“Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.
Gottfried Leibniz”</p>

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<p>Hi Canuckguy, I typed something arbitrary, just to see if you would still recognize me. :slight_smile: Glad to see you again. How come you always sound like a British gentleman? I know, I know,… You remind me of grammar school in the older days. :-)</p>

<p>““I used to say sciences the destination, humanities the scenery.””</p>

<p>"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.</p>

<p>If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). </p>

<p>Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf[/url]”>http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>"According to the computability-oriented view adopted in this paper, life after death is a technological problem, not a religious one. All that is necessary for some human’s resurrection is to record his defining parameters (such as brain connectivity and synapse properties etc.), and then dump them into a large computing device computing an appropriate virtual paradise. Similar things have been suggested by various science fiction authors. At the moment of this writing, neither appropriate recording devices nor computers of sufficient size exist. There is no fundamental reason, however, to believe that they won’t exist in the future…</p>

<p>By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer’s point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away."</p>

<p><a href=“ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/everything.pdf[/url]”>ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/everything.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>^Although I have my problems with the Brits, they have given me an education that was probably second to none at the time. For that I will be forever grateful. I suspect that is where my “acid tongue”, as my friends called it, originated. Mrs. Canuckguy thought I should have it “retired” because it is rather unbecoming. Her wish, of course, is my command.</p>

<p>Nick Bostrom’s paper is a confirmation why those in philosophies of science are the most impressive of all students in the humanities. A work combining philosophy, mathematics, and logic, imagine that.</p>

<p>Jurgen Schmidhuber’s article also dispels the theory that scientists can not do humanities. As I have said before, you can probably put a physics person in front of an English class in a pinch, but don’t ever try to put an English person in front of a physics class, unless his name is CP Snow.</p>

<p>In spite of all that I have said above, those two pieces gave me an eerie feeling. The last time I felt that way occurred while I was reading the European Existentialists. When they tried to tell me that life is ultimately absurd, I gently put down the book, took a deep breath, got up and walked away. After all, if life is meaningless, what is the point of living?</p>

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<p>As to the “Are we all living in a Matrix-like-simulation question?” there was a book written by mathematical physicist Tipler a while back called The Physics of Immortality. </p>

<p>If my memory serves me correctly, he put forth the premise that eventually we will all live forever since each of us will have our consciousness uploaded to a computer.</p>

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<p>““In spite of all that I have said above, those two pieces gave me an eerie feeling.””</p>

<p>More on these eerie stuffs. :-)</p>

<p>Bostrom’s argument is the cleanest I know of, in favor of a grand simulation which canbe nested within infinite layers of other simulations. He is being conservative to estimate that,
“In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).”,
because there is no particular time limit to break the threshold of (1), except for the lifespan of civilizations and there is no particular reason to support (2), which leaves the most probable outcome to be (3), i.e. we are likely living in a grand simulation.</p>

<p>So how close are we toward breaking the threshold of (1)?
“The IBM research shows that a model of the human brain—which has 20 billion neurons connected by about 200 trillion synapses—could be reached by 2019, given enough processing power.”, [IBM</a> Unveils a New Brain Simulator - IEEE Spectrum](<a href=“http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/ibm-unveils-a-new-brain-simulator]IBM”>IBM Unveils a New Brain Simulator - IEEE Spectrum) ,
which suggests that grand simulations of entire civilizations may only be several decades away, if we weren’t going to kill ourselves first with a WW3. Even today’s computer games are employing simulations with real physical laws, [PhysX</a> - Overview - GeForce](<a href=“http://www.geforce.com/Hardware/Technologies/physx]PhysX”>http://www.geforce.com/Hardware/Technologies/physx) .</p>

<p>A further extension to breaking the threshold of (1), is to let simulations self-improving and evolving into who knows what. Also from Schmidhuber,
“This inspired my Gödel machine — an agent-controlling program that speaks about itself, ready to rewrite itself in arbitrary fashion once it has found a proof that the rewrite is useful according to an arbitrary user-defined utility function (all well-defined problems can be encoded by such a utility function)… Gödel machines and the like will rapidly improve themselves and become incomprehensible.”.
Schmidhuber has also been trying to address the issues of consciousness and sentience,
“We have ongoing projects based on a simple principle explaining essential aspects of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, music, jokes……”, [Build</a> An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire](<a href=“http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/01/05/build-optimal-scientist-then-retire/]Build”>Build An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire – h+ Media) .</p>

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<p>““If my memory serves me correctly, he (Tipler) put forth the premise that eventually we will all live forever since each of us will have our consciousness uploaded to a computer.””</p>

<p>One difference between Bostrom and others, is that Bostrom’s argument can bypass much of the technological details in between and still provide a logical framework toward the possibility of a grand simulation, for which the details canbe filled as technology has evolved. Whereas Tipler’s argument has gone through many projections over technological development, where deviations may derail his argument. For example, Tipler constructed his argument with a closed universe while observations of accelerating expansion would suggest an open universe instead, [Nifty50:ACCELERATING</a>, EXPANDING UNIVERSE](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/nsfoutreach/htm/n50_z2/pages_z3/01_pg.htm]Nifty50:ACCELERATING”>Nifty50:ACCELERATING, EXPANDING UNIVERSE) .</p>

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<p>"“After all, if life is meaningless, what is the point of living?”"</p>

<p>Ummm… the point is staying alive to find out what is the point of living? Similar to how a TV series has kept the audience watching. :-)</p>