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by hga 5907 days ago
The less polite original title: "The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree".

Unfair since plenty of those with liberal arts degrees contribute to society in a way we geeks value, but still amusing.

1 comments

There are a fair number of geeks who were liberal arts majors in their earlier years. It's not a crippling setback. In fact it can be an asset when you need to communicate densely abstract technical topics to those of a decidedly nontechnical background.

I've met a fair number of philosophy and language majors who are programmers, web designers or system administrators. And a number of them have much greater mental flexibility than someone who got a four year CS degree for the job prospects but have never demonstrated any great degree of intellectual curiosity.

Some "technical" content comes from those backgrounds as well, which sometimes turns out to be useful. I'm in AI, and people sometimes run into pitfalls that a stronger background in some other area would've let them see much further ahead of time. Sometimes a solution that seems like it might work is one that you'd immediately spot holes in (or at least likely points of difficulty) if you were familiar with philosophical logic, or semantics of language, or something else of that sort.