Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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@Ben - I don't think it's the training that poisons some computer scientists like that. Many of them are broken going into first year. It's a subset of the type attracted to the discipline: intellectually brilliant, arrogant, utterly incapable of interacting with other humans. You meet people like that in biology - and in other fields too, I guess - but very rarely, compared with the high incidence of that personality type in compsci.
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So long as you stop just before you get to Barthes, eh? You wouldn't want those underprivileged kids to learn things above their station.
Another few pages of this thread and my eye muscles will develop repetitive strain injury.
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You also don't need it to read Law and Medicine books. Why aren't our buses full of people poring over those things, then just slipping in to ace the exams at the end? Because actually when you study things with rigor you need help.
Medicine: pretty obvious. Law (and others) : the qualification is evidence of your ability to to a job. Arts: the qualification is evidence that you read a number of books.
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Just taking the thread even further off-topic for a second, apparently Nabakov once set an essay question in the exam for his Russian literature paper at Princeton: list the contents of Anna Karenina's handbag. (This information is not given in the text.)
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Only if you have developed some expertise in how your particular experience relates to those of others.
And some expertise in realising when someone makes fun of himself.
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when I made a reference to Anna Karenina to illustrate a point in a cosmology lecture today, several of the students knew what I was talking about…
I'm struggling to imagine this. Levin and Kitty are Hadrons, Anna and Count whatshisname are Bosons?
Anyway, my basic point is that you don't need to spend money - particularly other peoples money - to read Tolstoy. In my case all you needed was a job with a long commute.
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I would love to see Danyl's undergrad transcript about now
Well there you have me. The most incriminating entry would be a second year religious studies paper called 'Primal Religious Experience'. In my defence, it means I speak with some authority.
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I'll tell my friend the oncologist that you think he should have skipped the BA in English & Psych. He'll enjoy that. And I know an astrophysicist with most of a BA in philosophy who is currently chortling at your argument.
What are you talking about?
@Ben:
So you think that science should drop "General Studies" altogether? Or should science students pay extra for that because it's that selfish, publicly worthless thing called a general education that you shouldn't be paying for? I'm led to believe that other faculties also have similar requirements, that students be "well rounded".
We certainly don't require our science students to be well rounded. Looking at Auckland and Otago, neither do they. I find most of them are though, because if someone is intellectually curious they'll read books of their own volition rather than pay a humanities lecturer to tell them what to read.
I think the most obvious reason that what you're saying is total bunk, Danyl, is from the end result perspective. None of the "practical" studies even need ongoing funding. Lawyers and Doctors and Scientists and Architects and Engineers etc, all get jobs fast, typically with very high incomes. Why the hell should I be paying for those people to enrich themselves?
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's the social contract. If training for these disciplines is subsidised then there's broader equality of opportunity. They then pay back the subsidies through their tax and that funds the education for the next generation. That's the basic socialised education model.
Your solution is simply to kill the Arts, or make it the sole domain of the very wealthy. You're advocating a highly classist access to the intellectual life of the country, which will couple with the highly classist access that already exists to the technical life that you think is so much more important.
I think the intellectual life of the country is already pretty class-based. I'm going to make a huge judgement call and moot that the proportion of people from low-income backgrounds that decide to go to university and study Foucault and Gramsci is tiny compared to all the children from privileged middle and upper-class backgrounds. A strong focus on arts in secondary school and access to public libraries is going to do a lot more for the intellectual dynamism of the whole country across classes than subsidising the children of the privileged to study Roland Barthes.
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We don't, because we don't believe in their value. And we are wrong.
But that's such a huge fallacy the base of my monitor is groaning under the weight. Can I not say that the field of DanylMclauchlanism is of vital importance, and that it MUST be publicly funded, and that the lack of public engagement on this subject is a terrible oversight on the part of our society?
Modern philosophers (generally speaking) aren't valued because what they say is incomprehensible. Noam Chomsky wrote about this: if he's interested in a subject in contemporary physics or mathematics he can read about it, or find an expert in the field to explain it to him; but advances in post-modern philosophy are simply opaque to him as a non-expert, and no one in the field can explain them in meaningful terms. All they CAN say, seemingly, is that their work is very, very important, and requires public funding.
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you actually need philosophers to defend science
But the public defenders of science in New Zealand are Paul Callaghan and Peter Gluckman, ie scientists.
Do we have any public philosophers, the way we have public historians, economist and even political scientists?
Specifically, if I search the online media (Stuff, the Herald etc) for people like Peter Gluckman, Brian Easton or Michael King then I get loads of hits. This is because these are/were local experts in their field who are - like I said - part of the national conversation. Can anyone name a local philosopher who carries similar weight?