It is a truism that learning takes time. The issue is that we punish people for taking time to learn thoroughly. Our training/education regimes are largely designed to turn out large numbers of semi-numerate engineers in a short time rather than to produce any number of fluent scientists of any period of time.
I think that’s because, when looking at the aggregate of society, it’s more efficient to bring people up to the level of semi-proficiency than it is to bring them to the level of expertise. If you have 100,000 hours of training to allocate, you get more bang for your buck to train 50 people to 80% proficiency than it is to train 10 people to the level of an expert.
The flaw, of course, is that “training hours” isn’t a finite, discrete resource. Any individual can opt to spend additional time of their own accord if they are truly passionate. The problem is, at the points in our lives when we have the most free time to spend improving ourselves (read: high school), we also have the least idea of what the hell we want to do with it.
I don’t think it’s only a matter of training time.
Having to learn for an exam requires you to learn the concepts in a few weeks instead of spending two years on it.
Quite often people forget things after they wrote the exam.
Distributing the learning over a longer time frame allows for deeper integration.
I agreed with the first two sentences, but you lost me on the last one. I may be misreading you, but if I’m not...
There seems to be a meme among certain groups of smart people (mainly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists) that engineers are ignorant. This is irritating to me, as a mechanical engineer who doesn’t seem myself as deficient compared against any of the mentioned groups. In fact, it seems to me that my education is broader and more complete than the mentioned groups.
I agree that society does not encourage learning things thoroughly, but engineering is not usually an example of that. There absolutely are a large number of engineers who don’t particularly care to understand things thoroughly, but I don’t think this is so different for people in other fields (especially CS).
You’re right that I shouldn’t discriminate against engineers ;-). I was more intending to make a distinction between, let’s say, professionally applicable Bachelors-level expertise and research-applicable postgraduate expertise. A BSc/BE can be used to train a civil engineer who builds bridges, but it won’t bring someone up to the level needed to do materials physics research.
It is a truism that learning takes time. The issue is that we punish people for taking time to learn thoroughly. Our training/education regimes are largely designed to turn out large numbers of semi-numerate engineers in a short time rather than to produce any number of fluent scientists of any period of time.
I think that’s because, when looking at the aggregate of society, it’s more efficient to bring people up to the level of semi-proficiency than it is to bring them to the level of expertise. If you have 100,000 hours of training to allocate, you get more bang for your buck to train 50 people to 80% proficiency than it is to train 10 people to the level of an expert.
The flaw, of course, is that “training hours” isn’t a finite, discrete resource. Any individual can opt to spend additional time of their own accord if they are truly passionate. The problem is, at the points in our lives when we have the most free time to spend improving ourselves (read: high school), we also have the least idea of what the hell we want to do with it.
I don’t think it’s only a matter of training time. Having to learn for an exam requires you to learn the concepts in a few weeks instead of spending two years on it. Quite often people forget things after they wrote the exam.
Distributing the learning over a longer time frame allows for deeper integration.
Only when they’ve got some minimal level of guidance, such as our Best Textbooks thread and a dependency graph of subjects.
I agreed with the first two sentences, but you lost me on the last one. I may be misreading you, but if I’m not...
There seems to be a meme among certain groups of smart people (mainly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists) that engineers are ignorant. This is irritating to me, as a mechanical engineer who doesn’t seem myself as deficient compared against any of the mentioned groups. In fact, it seems to me that my education is broader and more complete than the mentioned groups.
I agree that society does not encourage learning things thoroughly, but engineering is not usually an example of that. There absolutely are a large number of engineers who don’t particularly care to understand things thoroughly, but I don’t think this is so different for people in other fields (especially CS).
You’re right that I shouldn’t discriminate against engineers ;-). I was more intending to make a distinction between, let’s say, professionally applicable Bachelors-level expertise and research-applicable postgraduate expertise. A BSc/BE can be used to train a civil engineer who builds bridges, but it won’t bring someone up to the level needed to do materials physics research.
I appreciate that clarification. There are a small number of people (some affiliated with LW) who consider calling someone an engineer an insult.
I agree.