I disagree with you in one regard, I think you are taking the position of a young person who hasn't had much education outside of high school.
Take a look at it from the perspective of a 30 or 40-something with some college or a degree in another domain looking to transition into CS. In this case, the fact that formal CS degrees are, I dare say, polluted, with irrelevant crap is a waste of time, money and brain power. For example, my son, who happens to be studying CS at a major university was forced to take a class on Marxism. The only word I can come-up to describe this is: Demented.
I would prefer to see a system where degree programs focus on the material necessary to support the degree and nothing else. They could, as an aside, offer a parallel track where the student could take additional non-degree classes for general culture. These classes should not have any effect whatsoever on the degree. To continue with the example, if my son failed or dropped out of the Marxism class (he did not, he passed it with full marks) it should have no bearing on his overall standing in the CS degree.
I also disagree with the concept of a fixed timescale being required in order to gain understanding of a topic. There's plenty of evidence in support of this. Companies complain that traditional CS grads don't know how to write code. Yet they spend four to six years in school getting BS or MS degrees.
Frankly, going back to my son, if it weren't for the fact that we work on a number of real-world projects together his coding skills based on schoolwork would likely be substandard. There's a difference between learning to CS to pass tests and applying it in real-world environments.
My argument might very well support the opposite conclusion: Get through schools as quickly as possible, one or two years for a BS in CS and go to work. Medicine has residency and internship as part of the process for that very reason.
I would much rather hire someone who devoted a couple of intense years learning and two years full time directly applying and honing the craft than someone who takes four years to study and comes to me with no experience other than, perhaps, a few summers as an intern here and there.
Karl Marx was notably a philosopher who wrote about the alienation of labor which resulted from a highly specialized capitalist economy. He saw that workers were increasingly separated from the things they produced, and that people who would have once tended for the flock, shorn the sheep, spun the whool, and wove it into clothing were instead spending 16 hours at a machine, isolated from the final creation. He thought this converted people in mere cogs in a machine rather than fully realized creative individuals.
If you think that universities should just teach students tools that they need for some specific job, perhaps you would benefit from a course in Marxism, even if many of his ideas are today known to be wrong.
I know quite a bit about Marxism and modern incarnations of his ideologies. Have you ever lived in a Socialist/Marxist society? The only people who think this ideology is good are those who have never lived within the grips of such evil. Well, I have, and I have friends who lived in the USSR who did as well. When anyone talks about Marxism and Socialism everyone shakes their heads in disbelief.
For a bit of context, research and read The Gulag Archipelago. If you are truly interested, here's a intro:
BTW, as a matter of principle I never down-vote anyone on HN or elsewhere. I firmly believe in open discourse and free speech, which means I have to give particular care to opinions with which I might not agree. If you are getting down-votes, it isn't me. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone disagreeing with me so long as the exchange is respectful and intellectually honest.
How would this be bad form? If this is from a "major university" like you claimed, and if Marxism is bad, isn't it good to tell us this university so we aren't blindsided by it when we enroll our kids in it?
It's not like you'd be posting forbidden knowledge; most universities publish their required curriculum.
I am not going to be baited into bashing specific people or universities. Feel free to arrive at whatever conclusion satisfies your thinking. I don’t care.
No one is trying to bait you into anything. But when you make an extraordinary claim, you need to provide some supporting evidence. Obviously you care whether or not people believe what you wrote to some extent, otherwise why did you take the time to write it at all?
Who do you think you're going to harm? The University doesn't think there's anything wrong with what they did, because I guarantee the course requirements are publicly available.
OK, I retract "baiting". Still not going to publish anything more.
> you need to provide some supporting evidence
I don't.
> Obviously you care whether or not people believe what you wrote to some extent
I do, but...
> Who do you think you're going to harm?
My son.
> I guarantee the course requirements are publicly available.
Likely true. However the dynamics that lead to having no option but to take such a class without any balancing context --within the class or through a second class-- can only be had by experiencing the journey.
I realize what I going to say is a personal perspective and as such it is deeply biased:
To me, as a classically trained entrepreneur, neutral student of history and descendant of genocide survivors, teaching a distorted benevolent version of Marxism to kids while not teaching any of the massive downfalls, pain, suffering and death the utterly failed ideology produced is equivalent to, as an atheist, forcing religious dogma to atheists. There is nothing wrong with learning about both Marxism and religion. We should absolutely teach them, but they should be taught without distortion and in the context of other relevant knowledge.
If the goal is to indoctrinate, you exclude everything outside of the preferred ideology. If, on the other hand, the objective is to educate, you present as much of the human experience as possible, without favor for one or the other, teach students to reason critically and let them be.
As I suggested in my other response, if you are interested in a perspective on what has been going on in academia and how it happened, please watch this interview with an Oxford/Stanford/Harvard professor who chose to expose some of these issues and paid the price for it:
If you think that posting a comment on hacker news revealing that your son was forced to take a particular class that you disagree with is going to harm your son, you are being deeply paranoid.
I went back to school to finish my CS degree about 5 years ago. I was a libertarian until a few years before that, and until a year ago I was in grad school.
I was also one of very few Bush voters in a liberal leaning History department during the start of the Iraq war.
I don't need to watch a Youtube video designed to scare conservative parents to understand what is going on in academia.
It is most certainly not common at American Universities to require CS students to take an entire class devoted to Marxism. That's why I asked for evidence because it is an extraordinary claim. And it sounds like a claim designed feed the conservative paranoia regarding college.
Please stop accusing people of that which you know nothing about. It is OK to disagree. To go from there to ascribe intent and motive is, well, unfair at best.
Sorry but if you show up on a public forum and start making deragotory statments about the university system as a whole, and then refuse to provide any supporting evidence to back up those claims, I'm going to question your motive.
You seem to have a serious axe to grind with college in general.
> There you go, yet another conclusion about something you have absolutely no knowledge about.
From your public comments this is my conclusion.
You have an axe to grind with academia, because you believe that academia is indoctrinating kids with Marxist philosophy. If that's not what you believe, feel free to retract your statements.
Yes, instead you're going to bash all universities without any evidence...the only conclusion I can draw here is that your intended purpose is to sew general distrust in academia...that or you just grabbed a story from some chain email and are rebranding it as your own.
Have you considered the idea that speaking out could have negative consequences for my son, who still has a couple of years at that university?
They have already shown their cards in so many ways. One of my son's roommates during his first year (an 18 year old) both sold alcohol and drugs from their shared dorm room and consumed them in such amounts that it was common for him to vomit in his bed multiple times a week and generally be dysfunctional, much less study.
Both parents from the remaining two kids in the room brought this up to university authorities, including police. I physically went to meetings with them. The other parents did the same. We wrote countless letters. We wanted this kid to get help. He was here from another country, had no support system and was harming himself and others in incredible ways.
The university utterly ignored our requests. They told us the only option we had was for our kids to move to a different dorm room. Never mind the kid who was killing himself while dealing drugs and alcohol.
Fast forward to the end of the term, he takes a flying leap from the top of a flight of stairs and suffers serious physical damage. The university still does nothing, in fact, despite failing his courses they allow him to continue and enroll for the next term. He spends much of his time in bed, gains a tremendous amount of weight and his quality of life became unbearable. I'll stop the story at that point.
The university, did not care. We could have saved this kid's life. They had at least six people screaming at the top of their lungs for months when this problem started. They did nothing. And the kid paid the price. Well, I guess he was worth $60K per year, it must have been worth it.
This kind of thing --not this exact kind of thing-- goes on at many universities across the US. I am in touch with parents with kids in universities ranging from Berkeley to MIT. They all have stories of ideologically or financially (or both) wrongdoing. It's just the way it is.
For an interesting perspective, watch this interview with Niall Ferguson (the first half or so is relevant to this topic):
That was the only class available for several terms that would satisfy the degree requirement. Interestingly enough, that was the only class that was available every term while the others were not.
Even more interesting, they never mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his work, The Gulag Archipelago. Everything was painted through rose colored glasses. Pretty disgusting. Thankfully we have a home where education is deemed important. My son had already read many of the classics before going through college and was well equipped to deal with an ideologically biased situation. He also read some of Gulag Archipelago and knew the history of that work.
I recommended he be practical about this class. He did the work, wrote a bullshit paper, got an A and then proceeded to vomit. No harm done.
> I think you are taking the position of a young person who hasn't had much education outside of high school.
I went to college for almost two years, and re-enrolled in college late last year doing night classes. I also worked as a research scientist at New York University for around a year (2015-2016), though this was admittedly more in the working world than the educational world. My wife is doing college full-time. This seems like a weirdly dismissive response to me.
> For example, my son, who happens to be studying CS at a major university was forced to take a class on Marxism
I have never heard of this outside of stuff like the Drudge Report or Fox News; before I dropped out of Florida State University, I never saw Marxism as one of the required classes, and I changed my major from CompSci, to Physics, to Mathematics. Maybe your school is different, but I have seriously never heard of "Marxism" being a required class in any university.
> To continue with the example, if my son failed or dropped out of the Marxism class (he did not, he passed it with full marks) it should have no bearing on his overall standing in the CS degree.
Did you not actually read the comment you are responding to? I said pretty unambiguously that the classes that seem "useless" often end up informing your perspective in different ways. That was literally the whole point, and it seems like you kind of missed it.
To go with your example, it's entirely possible that the Marxism class would give a higher understanding of political theory and philosophy. While your son may not want to be a politician, him having a decent grasp of philosophical reasoning is probably a good thing.
>I also disagree with the concept of a fixed timescale being required in order to gain understanding of a topic. There's plenty of evidence in support of this. Companies complain that traditional CS grads don't know how to write code. Yet they spend four to six years in school getting BS or MS degrees.
> Frankly, going back to my son, if it weren't for the fact that we work on a number of real-world projects together his coding skills based on schoolwork would likely be substandard. There's a difference between learning to CS to pass tests and applying it in real-world environments.
I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear, but no one should go to college thinking that it is sufficient for being a decent engineer, just like having a skeleton is insufficient for having a body, or having an oven is sufficient for having dinner. There is a lot of self-learning you have to do.
College is about building fundamentals, and teaching you how to teach yourself.
> I would much rather hire someone who devoted a couple of intense years learning and two years full time directly applying and honing the craft than someone who takes four years to study and comes to me with no experience other than, perhaps, a few summers as an intern here and there.
And I'm glad people have this mentality...it's kept me employed, but when I've had to hire people, a vast majority of dropouts who work on experience (though not all) have a weak understanding of fundamentals, and while that's not a problem for some domains, it is a problem for mine.
> when I've had to hire people, a vast majority of dropouts who work on experience (though not all) have a weak understanding of fundamentals, and while that's not a problem for some domains, it is a problem for mine.
You are right. My statement was too simple. Experience is not enough. If someone spends 30 years doing the same thing without learning anything else they are not going to be a good hire for anything outside that box.
What matters is learning. That's what I look for. Does the person have a track record of constantly learning during the last ten years? What did they study? Did they try to get a handle on fundamentals? Did they stick to one thing, on domain, or did they learn and have experience in a range of domains? Did they enroll in any MOOC's? What were they? Can he or she speak about these topics with reasonable authority?
What I look for is an insight into who this person is as a professional. One of my typical questions is a short sequence: What are state machines? Give me an example of using a state machine? What's the difference between a Moore and Mealy state machine? Can you whiteboard examples of both?
I am not looking for the person to know the above with 100% accuracy and insight. I am trying to get to know the person and how they think. If, for example, they try to bullshit me, I learn something valuable. If, on the other hand, they say "look, I have never had to use state machines so I don't really know the subject but I understand they can be very powerful and useful and would love to have the opportunity to learn about them and apply the knowledge", well, that, to me, is far more valuable than them being able to parrot answers to my questions. Anyone can prep for an interview and ace it.
CS is an interesting field. When I started life as an EE designing and programming computers of my own design you used Assembler and maybe C and, if you were lucky, Forth. Virtually none of the things I do today existed when I went to school. And so comes the realization that, in my case, when it comes to CS, I am no different than a CS dropout. Virtually everything I do today I had to learn on my own. And that entailed a constant effort spanning thirty years that took me through CS theory, languages, frameworks, applications and new developments such as FPGA --which literally did not exist when I was in school.
Having navigated this journey I am forced to look at the person rather than the credentials. In fact, credentials very frequently lie about what the person is capable of. There are plenty of stories out there about major companies having trouble hiring recent grads because they don't know how to, well, do the work they need them to do.
Engineering in general is a domain that requires constant learning. Stagnate and you become irrelevant. CS can be particularly brutal in this domain.
So, no, it isn't about just experience but rather about what someone did during that time and what they chose to learn.
That is not what I said. No, of course not. But if you ONLY teach Marxism and NOTHING ELSE you are doing the world a huge disservice. Marxism and other ideologies should be taught. Definitely. And they should teach the good, the bad and the ugly. If you want to know what that means, read The Gulag Archipelago for perspective.
Education should not be about indoctrination. Sadly there's a lot of that going on. I am not some crazy right wing guy, not even close. I'm just sick of what our universities have turned into. Someone goes to school to study computer science and they are treated to a solid dose of rosy-glasses Marxism. Those who go into humanities are in for full-on indoctrination. This is a horrible disservice to humanity.
Again, someone please tell me where the intersection between Marxism and Computer Science exists. I've been in CS/Engineering for over 30 years and can't find it.
Why aren't kids reading the Greek philosophers? Plato's Republic is a BRILLIANT piece of work. Aristotle, Socrates. Move forward from that, read Descartes, Kant, Adams and others. So much to learn. So much perspective to acquire. But no, we force kids into immersion in some of the most destructive ideologies known to man. And for what?
Not go off on a tangent, but this is also what is happening now with the whole Climate Change mess. That poor girl from Sweden is being used in vile ways. One of the worst example of indoctrination I have seen in my life. The only thing I that comes to mind that is worse than that are kids indoctrinated into terrorism and hatred. What depths has society sunk to?
Before someone jumps on me. Yes, of course Climate Change is real. Nobody is saying it isn't. And yes, of course we added 100 ppm of CO2 in the last ~1000 years. The issue is, no, we are not all going to die in 12 years and, no, none of what they want to do will help anyone for tens of thousands of years. This is a mess and using children in pursuit of political objectives is a horrific ugly thing.
> Education should not be about indoctrination. Sadly there's a lot of that going on. I am not some crazy right wing guy, not even close. I'm just sick of what our universities have turned into. Someone goes to school to study computer science and they are treated to a solid dose of rosy-glasses Marxism. Those who go into humanities are in for full-on indoctrination. This is a horrible disservice to humanity.
I seriously don't know what university you're talking about. Florida State University's economics classes (which I was required to take) as of 2011 mostly talked about Milton Friedman's invisible hand and how communism doesn't work. I know it's the narrative on Fox News and chain emails that colleges have become this safe space for SJW snowflakes or whatever, but that really wasn't (and isn't) the case for me. I live in New York right now, and go to a New York public college, with New York typically regarded as a left-leaning state, and it's not like that filled my mathematics degree with a bunch of stuff about gender studies and race relations. My math degree is, unsurprisingly, still basically math.
> Why aren't kids reading the Greek philosophers? Plato's Republic is a BRILLIANT piece of work. Aristotle, Socrates. Move forward from that, read Descartes, Kant, Adams and others. So much to learn. So much perspective to acquire. But no, we force kids into immersion in some of the most destructive ideologies known to man. And for what?
My philosophy class in a public college actually went through all those philosophers, and in that order. The required philosophy class.
Your take on climate change is so ill-informed that I don't know that it needs a rebuttal.
> Your take on climate change is so ill-informed that I don't know that it needs a rebuttal.
You are wrong. I am more than willing to engage in a scientific, evidence-based conversation about this if you are willing to stay within those bounds. In fact, I should be able to prove the greater point by using just one graph, which is the data on ice core atmospheric sampling.
If you are willing to honestly look at the evidence and my conclusion I am equally willing to participate in a Q&A session to try to evaluate it.
There is NOTHING I would like more than someone showing me where my reasoning on this is wrong. I say this because the conclusion I have reached is not what I wanted. I wanted to learn that we could actually do something about this issue. I ended-up reaching the conclusion that the opposite is true.
Are you willing to help me evaluate my conclusion?
> You are wrong. I am more than willing to engage in a scientific, evidence-based conversation about this if you are willing to stay within those bounds.
Would those bounds include "not-bringing-up-climate-change-stuff-to-make-a-bizarre-point-about-some-16-year-old-activist on-a-post-that-has-absolutely-nothing-to-do-with-climate change-or-activism"? Because that seems like a pretty obvious bound to a normal person. Literally no one brought up climate change on this, you just wanted to make some bizarre point about...well I'm actually not sure, it kind of came out of left field.
> If you are willing to honestly look at the evidence and my conclusion I am equally willing to participate in a Q&A session to try to evaluate it.
It's not like the information is hard to find; why do these "climate skeptics" (or whatever you want to brand yourself) want to avoid doing any actual work? Back for like the two months that I called myself a "climate skeptic" around 9 years ago I did the same thing, and eventually I realized that I have access to Google like everyone else, and I have access to the findings by NASA like everyone else, and I can fairly easily find the papers like everyone else, that I really don't need some random schmuck on Hacker News to do my work for me, and after about an hour of research, looking through NASA's information, I changed my mind.
I suspect that instead you just want to be able to say afterward something like "I put myself into the marketplace of ideas and the global-warming activists wouldn't even accept me!!!!", presumably to put into a chain email or something like that.
You're an adult, you clearly know enough about the internet to do searches yourself, you don't need me (or anyone) to do it for you.
I don't really understand why you have to resorts to a personal attack. I'll ignore it.
I am not a climate change skeptic at all. Not even one bit. Skeptics are, to be kind, extremely ill-informed. And so are zealots. This thing has become so incredibly polarized that scientists are afraid to speak up and go against the grain in any way.
The reason I brought up Climate Change and the girl (who is a beautiful smart young woman and should be protected) is I was talking about indoctrination. What adults are doing to kids to further the extremist ideologies surrounding Climate Change is nothing less than child abuse, it's criminal. As a parent I am aghast that other parents allow their kids to be used this way. We have seen kids break down and cry in absolute fear at many of these demonstrations. This is very, very wrong. Again, I was talking about indoctrination and the most current example of how bad this can be just happened to be kids and Climate Change.
Here's my problem with what's going on out there. Two sides:
Skeptics: Well, they don't know what they are talking about and refuse to learn, research and understand. I can see a range of them not having the necessary background in math and science to be able to understand. I can't fault them for that, it's a combination of personal circumstances and the educational system. I don't know.
Zealots. Activists: They are being driven like sheep by forces for whom Climate Change has political value. They repeat what they are told without questioning and understanding any of it and share in the ignorance of the skeptics while existing at the other end of the scale.
In both cases the masses are being driven by a combination of fear-mongering and religious attachment to ideological camps.
Where is the truth then?
Climate change is very real.
We added about 100 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere in just a few hundred years.
There is nothing whatsoever we can do to "take back" the 100 ppm in anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
That last one is my conclusion based on looking at relevant, reliable and accurate scientific evidence and running through some very basic math. Understanding this aspect of the problem is very simple.
I realize this is a shocker of a conclusion but I feel it is important to understand that we have to be careful or we might just succeed at killing everything on this planet. Some of the proposals out there are down-right scary. There is no way we re going to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in 50 or 100 years. It will not happen. If someone claims they have a way to accomplish this they are going to collide head on with having to explain how it is that they are going to get around some of the most fundamental laws in science, such as the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Anyhow, if you (or anyone else) is interested in helping me understand if my conclusion is wrong I welcome it. I don't want to be right on this one, but I can't find a way to refute it. I have had conversations with other engineers and scientists, one of them being a PhD in Physics from JPL, and not one of them can find a hole in my reasoning.
Let's assume, for a moment, that I am correct in my conclusion. That we can't fix this for perhaps tens of thousands of years, if at all.
What would that mean?
Well, at a minimum it means we need to refocus the thinking and effort into research that will hopefully result in real short term improvements for humanity while understanding we are not going to fix the overall problem. We need to focus on the "brace for impact" reality. And we sure as hell should criminalize what's going on with kids, where teachers and others are actually convincing them they are going to die soon if nobody does a thing about Climate Change.
If I am right, the conversation needs to change quite radically. Politicians need to be ejected from this domain so that scientists can go to work on the reality of the problem without fear of losing their jobs, grants and careers. If I am right, and I hope I am not, we are wasting precious time stirring up a frenzy that could lead to truly terrible decisions.
I extend my offer again. If you, or anyone else, is willing to critically evaluate my findings I would thrilled. I am happy to start a new thread and present both data and argument. I repeat, I am actually looking for someone to tell me why and how this conclusion is invalid.
While going 1 on 1 over email is interesting and useful it is also very time consuming. I've done a lot of this over the last several years. It served a purpose when I wasn't sure, as people with equal or stronger scientific backgrounds than me asked difficult questions.
I have been thinking about this for several weeks actually. My conclusion at this point is that it might be time to get off the sidelines and present this to a much wider audience. To that end I am organizing my journey, findings and conclusions into a paper. At the moment I am thinking of publishing it through the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which I am a member. That part isn't set in stone though, there might be better options.
To be candid, one of the serious concerns I have is related to the just how vindictive and violent ideological mobs have become over the last decade or so. Going up against both climate change mobs (believers and skeptics) can have serious and permanent personal consequences for both individuals and their family. This is the real tragedy of our times and something that has turned this particular topic into what it is.
Saying anything against the mobs can make you radioactive, and life is over. I mean, just look at your reaction to a simple statement (not to single you out, I see this all the time). You have a set of conclusions that you are convinced to be correct and reject even as much as having a somewhat public conversation about the possibility these conclusions might be wrong. Now, you don't strike me as a vindictive violent zealot at all. However, those people are out there. Social media amplifies their voices and influence. That is precisely how they are able to cause tremendous damage to anyone who counters challenges the positions they have taken.
It reminds me of a recent case of the guy who raised around a million dollars to donate to children's hospitals. The mob didn't like him. They dug into his social media record and found a stupid thing he said when he was 16 years old. They pushed that hard all over the place. They then went to his sponsors and pounded them just as hard. The end result was that the sponsors pulled out their matching contribution and the entire effort was destroyed. Children's hospitals did not receive the much-needed funding because an angry mob attacked one person with such fervor and violence that they made it impossible for that to happen.
Climate Change is a hundred times, a million times, worse than this. The minute you have children marching on the streets all over the world you have to consider how personally dangerous it could be to speak up. Not because of the children, but rather due to the unavoidable fact that there are people and companies making millions, if not billions of dollars selling an ideology. If you screw with that you are dead, perhaps even literally.
I want to do the right thing, just not entirely sure how to go about doing so without the potential for great harm to those I love most.
Take a look at it from the perspective of a 30 or 40-something with some college or a degree in another domain looking to transition into CS. In this case, the fact that formal CS degrees are, I dare say, polluted, with irrelevant crap is a waste of time, money and brain power. For example, my son, who happens to be studying CS at a major university was forced to take a class on Marxism. The only word I can come-up to describe this is: Demented.
I would prefer to see a system where degree programs focus on the material necessary to support the degree and nothing else. They could, as an aside, offer a parallel track where the student could take additional non-degree classes for general culture. These classes should not have any effect whatsoever on the degree. To continue with the example, if my son failed or dropped out of the Marxism class (he did not, he passed it with full marks) it should have no bearing on his overall standing in the CS degree.
I also disagree with the concept of a fixed timescale being required in order to gain understanding of a topic. There's plenty of evidence in support of this. Companies complain that traditional CS grads don't know how to write code. Yet they spend four to six years in school getting BS or MS degrees.
Frankly, going back to my son, if it weren't for the fact that we work on a number of real-world projects together his coding skills based on schoolwork would likely be substandard. There's a difference between learning to CS to pass tests and applying it in real-world environments.
My argument might very well support the opposite conclusion: Get through schools as quickly as possible, one or two years for a BS in CS and go to work. Medicine has residency and internship as part of the process for that very reason.
I would much rather hire someone who devoted a couple of intense years learning and two years full time directly applying and honing the craft than someone who takes four years to study and comes to me with no experience other than, perhaps, a few summers as an intern here and there.