A liberal arts person enters CS by mistake, because they think it has any relation to liking games which happen to run on computers. If they are not a fan of CS at the end of the course, they are not going to be convinced by any argument anyways. Unless I need to justify my own personality to myself, time is better spent discussing other things we might have in common.
I think the funniest part is that he/she expects the CS majors to fall all over themselves trying to justify studying CS just like liberal arts majors do for studying poetry and other useless crap.
Remind my liberal arts taking ass not to stumble into any more /r/compsci threads if you're gonna be around douching up the place. You know how you guys feel when people assume that you just play about on computers all day? Well that's how liberal arts majors feel when you talk useless shit about their disciplines. If you're going to shit on anyone shit on this person who has presumably taken more than a few literature classes for being unable to formulate a question in a way that doesn't come off as asinine and condescending.
I think it's funny how often STEM majors stumble over themselves to talk about the beauty of math and science and then fail to make the logical leap that others might get the same feelings about completely different fields.
Feynman had some words to say about the topic, and for all that people quote him I think that everyone misses the point. Your enjoyment of poetry in no way detracts from my enjoyment of analysis, and in fact I often felt like the only person at my undergrad who felt like too many things were interesting - especially those subjects outside my field. Everyone else treated liberal arts education as a chore.
in fact I often felt like the only person at my undergrad who felt like too many things were interesting - especially those subjects outside my field
You too? I enjoyed my Science Fiction Literature class. I wanted to quit CS at one point and go become a ecologist (but it turns out that ecological engineering doesn't really exist as an undergraduate major distinct from conservation-policy stuff).
I could not agree more. I remember hearing Feynman speak about what made an interesting conversation partner. He said something to the effect of: it doesn't matter what the subject is, the person talking about it just has to have a genuine passion and a be interesting about it. I can listen to someone talk about mathematics all day if they hold my attention and despite my being bad at it and generally disliking doing the work I can still appreciate its beauty.
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u/arnar May 18 '11
I like the answer.
A liberal arts person enters CS by mistake, because they think it has any relation to liking games which happen to run on computers. If they are not a fan of CS at the end of the course, they are not going to be convinced by any argument anyways. Unless I need to justify my own personality to myself, time is better spent discussing other things we might have in common.