February 10, 2008

Metafilter: the best and brightest

It's an interesting experience "hanging out" with left wingers. They are absolutely convinced that they are the best and the brightest, the only ones who are truly wise and educated. Everyone who disagrees with them politically is either evil, mentally ill, or uneducated. (If not all three.)

A lot of their pose is fashionable cynicism. I never understood why or how it suddenly became fashionable to be cynical and sardonic, and I really dislike it. (For all I know, the whole point of it was to piss off old people like me. Every generation of young adults adopts new things in part simply because they scandalize the parents' generation.)

I do have to wonder, however, about people who are fashionably cynical about the validity of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Folks, there is nothing in science more certain; no principle of science more heavily tested. Every engineering device which uses energy (and that's most of them) is a physics experiment that tests the laws of thermodynamics. If there were any exceptions, any mistake, someone would have noticed by now. Yet here we have our self-nominated best and brightest saying that scientists are stupid and perpetual motion might have been achieved.

Probably some of that is simple trolling, but I think some of those people really believe what they're saying.

The College of Science at Oregon State required me and my fellow students to take a lot of humanities courses, something like 50 hours (I don't remember exactly). Yet we science majors, and the engineering majors, always used to grouse about the fact that liberal arts majors didn't have a comparable requirement to take and pass any kind of basic science or math courses.

It was only later in life that I realized the reason: if the Literature department required a Lit major to pass Physics and Chemistry in order to get a degree (or even dumbbell "General Science"), they'd never graduate anyone.

But this leads to a deep irony: grubby plebian engineers and science majors got a more well-rounded education than elite open-minded "best and brightest" lib-arts majors did. And I wonder if they really serve their students all that well, letting them graduate thinking they've got a well-rounded education, but in actuality having deep gaps in their knowledge. I think most liberal arts majors truly would benefit from a fundamental knowledge of science and math -- but then there would be a lot fewer liberal arts graduates.

Which, in the grand scheme of things, might be all to the good anyway.

UPDATE: I, myself, never graduated -- but liberal arts wasn't the problem. It's much more mundane: I ran out of money, and didn't want to use loans to stay in school.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:19 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 457 words, total size 3 kb.

1

Wow... Philosophy majors should not play physicists. "In an infinite multi-verse, if I can imagine a universe with no Laws of Thermodynamics, then there are no Laws of Thermodynamics."

Friction happens.

Posted by: Will at February 10, 2008 12:54 PM (P2D1U)

2 No disagreement here. I went to a "liberal" arts school. I stayed as far away as I could from the humanities classes--I discovered in a hurry that they were basically just indoctrination sessions. If you demonstrated enough fervent agreement with the professor, you passed. The math department, while personally liberal as a whole, at least ignored politics while in class and kept things serious.

I'd like to see what these self-proclaimed experts say about using nuclear reactors, about the one thing that *can* scale up enough to matter. I'd *really* like to see if they spew as much bile on polywell reactors (assuming they work) as they do on fission ones, just because of the word "nuclear"--that would be rather enlightening. I have a sneaking suspicion that attaining power over others through rationing or similar means is far more important to them than creating new usable sources of energy actually is.

Posted by: BigD at February 10, 2008 01:03 PM (JJ4vV)

3 I used to spew a lot of bile on Broussard reactors, because I happen to think that the late crank really wasn't thinking the whole thing through.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 10, 2008 02:15 PM (cFJHG)

4 "In an infinite multi-verse, if I can imagine a universe with no Laws of Thermodynamics, then there are no Laws of Thermodynamics."

In that case, I can imagine an universe with nobody who'd be stupid enough to believe such a thing... and retroactively the person who came up with this concept would cease to exist.

And everybody would be better off for it.

(ps- Will, don't get antsy, I know you're not the originator of that quote)

Posted by: Wonderduck at February 10, 2008 02:18 PM (AW3EJ)

5 I've heard from people at several schools where the Liberal Arts faculty thought it was unfair that science and engineering majors could just waltz in and take their upper-division courses, and their students weren't allowed to do the same.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at February 10, 2008 02:21 PM (2XtN5)

6 Switched from chemistry to political science mid-way. I'd taken care of all the basics all around - so about one class away from a minor in math, physics, and chemistry, though I ended up taking economics for the actual minor.

It's kind of depressing. My intermediate macroeconomics class was pretty crowded the first day, when the professor dropped her bomb; there would be a small amount of calculus involved in the course. A third of the class dropped immediately. As it turned out, we took a derivative twice, all semester long. Gah...

I'll say this, though - the economics professors I encountered were generally quite a bit more humble about the conclusions they could draw than their buddies in the sociology department. Most of them were perfectly aware that even their best models were the equivalent of a blind man flying a plane with a blacked-out instrument panel during a snowstorm. (Interestingly enough, they were generally unworried about global warming too - "my models are much better than their models, and my models SUCK, so theirs can't be all that good!")

But in the end, I felt a little bad about going through with the intellectual equivalent of totally slacking. (Not as bad, though, as the thought of a lifetime being a glorified short-order cook... didn't much care for organic lab, no, I did not.)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 10, 2008 04:24 PM (LMDdY)

7 I can imagine it being possible that, in an infinite multiverse, there might be one without the laws of thermodynamics. . .

. . .but I sure as *hell* wouldn't want to live there.  For there to be no thermodynamics, you'd basically have to throw out probability.  Which means the mathematics of that universe would be radically different from ours, to the point of the entire place being incomprehensibly inimicable.  We're talking Lovecraft shit.

Posted by: metaphysician at February 10, 2008 05:10 PM (9Lztf)

8

Will, don't get antsy, I know you're not the originator of that quote

Well, just in case. If you don't hear from me in a few days, you'll know why.

Posted by: Will at February 10, 2008 06:16 PM (P2D1U)

9 It's not quite liberal arts, but: As a grad student in computer science, I worked on a learning content management system, a thing that basically runs a class, providing problems, discussion, announcements, etc.

One of the advertising professors was having a problem with her 300-level (third-year college) class, so I pulled up the class and took the weekly quiz myself for the tenth week, to try to diagnose the problem.

Well, I didn't find the problem in the code. But I found a problem with the class: I scored a 9/10 on the quiz. This is not because I'm special; any American teenager paying any attention at all could have scored a 9/10 on this quiz.

I found myself having the same thought as J Greely encountered; I wondered how well a marketing grad student would do on any tenth-week quiz from any third-year engineering course. (I'll even be generous and let them choose...)

Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at February 10, 2008 07:46 PM (ird9G)

10 Now there ya'll go, makin' me regret mah librul artz edication agin.

Actually, I thought at the time, that everyone should have to take a bare minimum of History, Logic, and Government courses. Enough to know the history of our country in greater depth than they teach in high school (not just who and when but why & what, emphasis on major shifts around Civil War/WWI/Depression/WWII); a real understanding of government functions, including certain court decisions and trends; and an emphasis on logical fallacies.  Today I'd add a course in basic information technology, and case studies of the last 20 election cycles, and their campaigns. 

In other words, I wanted to turn out educated voters.  Given the political bent of too many academic institutions today though, it would turn out indoctrinated voters instead. (Which that appears to be the plan, anyway.)

Posted by: ubu at February 10, 2008 08:08 PM (zOUiP)

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