tl;dr: having a set of courses for everyone to take is probably a bad idea. People are different and any given course is going to, at best, waste the time of some class of people.
A while ago, I decided that it would be a good thing for gender equality to have everyone take a class on bondage that consisted of opposite-gender pairs tying each other up. Done right, it would train students “it’s okay for the opposite gender to have power, nothing bad will happen!” and “don’t abuse the power you have over people.” In my social circle, which is disproportionately interested in BDSM, this kinda makes sense. It may even help (although my experience is that by the time anyone’s ready to do BDSM maturely, they’ve pretty much mastered not treating people poorly based on gender.) It would also be a miraculously bad idea to implement.
In general, I think it’s a mistake to have a “core curriculum” for everyone. Within 5 people I know, I could go through the course catalog of, say, MIT, and find one person for whom nobody would benefit from them taking the course. (This is easier than it seems at first; me taking social science or literature courses makes nobody better off (the last social science course I took made me start questioning whether freedom of religion was a good thing. I still think it’s a very good thing, but presenting me with a highly-compressed history of every inconvenience it’s produced in America’s history doesn’t convince my system 1). Similarly, there exist a bunch of math/science courses that I would benefit greatly from taking, but would just make the social science or literature people sad. Also, I know a lot of musicians, for whom there’s no benefit from academic classes; they just need to practice a lot.)
Having a typical LWer take a token literature class generally means they’re going to spend ~200 hours learning stuff they’ll forget exponentially. (This could be remedied by Anki, but there’s a better-than-even chance the deck gets deleted the moment the final’s over.) Going the other way, forcing writers to take calculus probably won’t produce any tangible benefits, but it will make them pissed off and write things with science is bad plotlines. (Yes, most of us probably wish writers would get scientifically literate, but until we can figure out a way to make that happen, forcing them to take math and science courses is just going to have predictable effects on what they write and do you really think it helps to have a group of people who substantially influence culture to hate math and science?)
For the typical LWer, I’d go heavy on the math and CS with enough science (physics through psych) to counteract Dunning-Kruger, and some specialization, the idea being that math and CS are tools that let you take something you already know and find out something you didn’t know for free, the sciences are there to reduce inferential gaps and eliminate illusory competence, and the specialization gets you a job. This would be very good for people-who-are-central-examples-of-LWers (although I’m sure there many are people here who this would be very bad for), but I have trouble imagining that this would work for more than a few percent of the population. In fact, for everyone going into a field that doesn’t need a lot of technical knowledge, I’d look for the most efficient way to measure intelligence and conscientiousness (preferably separately), which looks very little like an undergraduate curriculum.
As a writer, I agree with you. I am horrible at math. In my life 2x3=5 most of the time. If I had to suffer and fail at Calculus when I can’t multiply some days I would certainly start writing books about evil scientists abusing a village for its resources and then have the village revolt against its scientific masters with pitchforks. Throw in a great protagonist and a love interest and I have a bestseller with possible international movie rights.
If a field doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge, why bother with college in the first place? I’m not so sure how useful your examples are since most creative writers and musicians will eventually fail and be forced to switch to a different career path. Even related fields like journalism or band manager require some technical skills.
Signalling, AKA why my friend majoring in liberal arts at Harvard can get a high-paying job even though college has taught him almost no relevant job skills.
tl;dr: having a set of courses for everyone to take is probably a bad idea. People are different and any given course is going to, at best, waste the time of some class of people.
A while ago, I decided that it would be a good thing for gender equality to have everyone take a class on bondage that consisted of opposite-gender pairs tying each other up. Done right, it would train students “it’s okay for the opposite gender to have power, nothing bad will happen!” and “don’t abuse the power you have over people.” In my social circle, which is disproportionately interested in BDSM, this kinda makes sense. It may even help (although my experience is that by the time anyone’s ready to do BDSM maturely, they’ve pretty much mastered not treating people poorly based on gender.) It would also be a miraculously bad idea to implement.
In general, I think it’s a mistake to have a “core curriculum” for everyone. Within 5 people I know, I could go through the course catalog of, say, MIT, and find one person for whom nobody would benefit from them taking the course. (This is easier than it seems at first; me taking social science or literature courses makes nobody better off (the last social science course I took made me start questioning whether freedom of religion was a good thing. I still think it’s a very good thing, but presenting me with a highly-compressed history of every inconvenience it’s produced in America’s history doesn’t convince my system 1). Similarly, there exist a bunch of math/science courses that I would benefit greatly from taking, but would just make the social science or literature people sad. Also, I know a lot of musicians, for whom there’s no benefit from academic classes; they just need to practice a lot.)
Having a typical LWer take a token literature class generally means they’re going to spend ~200 hours learning stuff they’ll forget exponentially. (This could be remedied by Anki, but there’s a better-than-even chance the deck gets deleted the moment the final’s over.) Going the other way, forcing writers to take calculus probably won’t produce any tangible benefits, but it will make them pissed off and write things with science is bad plotlines. (Yes, most of us probably wish writers would get scientifically literate, but until we can figure out a way to make that happen, forcing them to take math and science courses is just going to have predictable effects on what they write and do you really think it helps to have a group of people who substantially influence culture to hate math and science?)
For the typical LWer, I’d go heavy on the math and CS with enough science (physics through psych) to counteract Dunning-Kruger, and some specialization, the idea being that math and CS are tools that let you take something you already know and find out something you didn’t know for free, the sciences are there to reduce inferential gaps and eliminate illusory competence, and the specialization gets you a job. This would be very good for people-who-are-central-examples-of-LWers (although I’m sure there many are people here who this would be very bad for), but I have trouble imagining that this would work for more than a few percent of the population. In fact, for everyone going into a field that doesn’t need a lot of technical knowledge, I’d look for the most efficient way to measure intelligence and conscientiousness (preferably separately), which looks very little like an undergraduate curriculum.
As a writer, I agree with you. I am horrible at math. In my life 2x3=5 most of the time. If I had to suffer and fail at Calculus when I can’t multiply some days I would certainly start writing books about evil scientists abusing a village for its resources and then have the village revolt against its scientific masters with pitchforks. Throw in a great protagonist and a love interest and I have a bestseller with possible international movie rights.
If a field doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge, why bother with college in the first place? I’m not so sure how useful your examples are since most creative writers and musicians will eventually fail and be forced to switch to a different career path. Even related fields like journalism or band manager require some technical skills.
Obligatory SMBC comic. :)
Signalling, AKA why my friend majoring in liberal arts at Harvard can get a high-paying job even though college has taught him almost no relevant job skills.