Often the category is a language phenomenon. The language or the word spawns a philosophical debate but nobody realizes that it's just a poorly defined arbitrary word/category and the whole debate is actually centered around a language quirk.
For example what's the difference between a boat and a raft? At what point is a water vehicle a boat and at what point is it a raft? Any debate on this is simply a linguistic debate disguised as a philosophical one. There's a gradient from boat to raft and people are just debating about a positional problem of where the line of delineation falls. This example is obvious though.
Less obvious is the word "life." When is something classified as living and when is it it classified as not alive? Is a rock alive? Is a plant? Is a deep learning dall-e 3 alive? Is a human alive? Is a brain dead human alive? Seems like a deep philosophical argument but my point here is to say that this argument is as pointless as the boat and the raft.
This thread is the same thing. Pointless debate on whether CS is a liberal arts or not? It's a debate on linguistics. You're all just trying to debate about definitions of arbitrary words. Nothing interesting.
If you were stuck on a desert island, would you prefer a boat or a raft to rescue you? I'd pick boat everytime.
Words do have meaning and in a sense it's all we have.
Approaching CS as a series of abstract mathematical problems to solve can make you a very good programmer. Finding the right place in society to sell your .exe's is sometimes better solved by a programmer with a liberal arts education.
>Approaching CS as a series of abstract mathematical problems to solve can make you a very good programmer. Finding the right place in society to sell your .exe's is sometimes better solved by a programmer with a liberal arts education.
Liberal arts is like a business degree. You don't need a business degree to be good at business. In fact, the business degree is largely useless when it comes to business.
But this is besides the fact. The point is I don't actually care whether you call CS a science, a math, or a liberal arts major. It's not a profound question at all. It's more of a question I would classify as stupid. The debate around it occurs because although the question is stupid, it is deceptively profound... Similar to the question of, "what is life?"
> If you were stuck on a desert island, would you prefer a boat or a raft to rescue you? I'd pick boat everytime.
Again the point is the words have a fuzzy delineation. Where this point of delineation exactly lies is not an interesting or profound question, just like the question of whether or not CS is a liberal art.
I don't think that's what the author is doing. I think the author is arguing that the skills taught in liberal art degrees are often skills that people who do computer science need but don't value. Becuase computer science degrees answer the question of "how to build" not "what to build" but the value is in "what to build".
Apple has capitalized on the liberal arts aspects of tech. They were able to figure out how to make computers useful and desirable to the every-man thanks to it. Without it, computers would have mostly been relegated to the work environment.
I agree computer science needs to change. There needs to be a way to incorporate some of those aspects into a CS degree. If we want the full advantages of tech in our lives.
It’s sadly a repeating phenomenon that when anything too humanistic is proposed here, the argument is often dismissed. Here, as just linguistic or even just philosophical. The actual argument gets lost, and nobody here seems interested in the actual papers the author is referencing. To me, the meat of the argument is:
What do the fields/papers (whih the author IS referring to, very concretely) have to offer to the discussion about where the field of CS, and its business applications, should be going?
This way we don’t have to discuss category boundaries. The concrete implications of the arguments are there to evaluate.
That the actual substance is dismissed here out of hand is quite frustrating to me.
All that stuff is easy. Point of education isn’t to give you reading material you can self learn in a few months.
After all, you’d expect best performers in this field to all be from liberal arts colleges like Middlebury. And the folks there are great but it’s not like they’re superpowered compared to the Vanderbilt guys. So it isn’t some sort of game changer.
If all that stuff is easy then why avoid the discussion? You would think you could just tell us why the papers are irrelevant to current tech discussion, instead of just dismissing it with secondary arguments?
The stuff is easy. Telling you why it's not necessary in education is hard. But it's okay. I thought about it and I realized I’d entered a discussion I don’t care that much for. So I’ll apologize and step out. And concede if that helps.
I mean, it's an accurate characterisation of humans affairs, but I haven't heard any better ideas yet when it comes to figuring what goes into the categories of "good" and "evil".
Those are not binary categories. If stealing is evil, does it mean stealing food because you haven't eaten in 3 days belongs in the same category as genocide? If it doesn't, does it mean stealing is good? And that's just the easiest example.
Well, they may not be binary categories but it's stange that you don't think your particular example belongs to one of the two categories.
You don't think it's evil for people to have to steal food just to avoid starvation?
You don't think it's evil that people have to make the choice between stealing and dignity?
If I like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I like. If I don’t like the thing then it definitely belongs in the category I don’t like.
Unfortunately whether paulcole likes something isn’t the only way we categorise things. However just in case it really catches on, could you keep us updated as your tastes change, so we can stay current.
For example what's the difference between a boat and a raft? At what point is a water vehicle a boat and at what point is it a raft? Any debate on this is simply a linguistic debate disguised as a philosophical one. There's a gradient from boat to raft and people are just debating about a positional problem of where the line of delineation falls. This example is obvious though.
Less obvious is the word "life." When is something classified as living and when is it it classified as not alive? Is a rock alive? Is a plant? Is a deep learning dall-e 3 alive? Is a human alive? Is a brain dead human alive? Seems like a deep philosophical argument but my point here is to say that this argument is as pointless as the boat and the raft.
This thread is the same thing. Pointless debate on whether CS is a liberal arts or not? It's a debate on linguistics. You're all just trying to debate about definitions of arbitrary words. Nothing interesting.