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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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I don't think "technical" is really the right criterion here. I'm an engineer, which is plenty technical, but that doesn't necessarily say much about my ability to do any particular job. In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.

I mean, I know a fair bit of university math and have some basic university-level knowledge in a bunch of technical fields, with a bit more in one specific area. But the main thing my degree tells an employer is that I'm reasonably intelligent and capable of putting in the work to learn difficult things.

I've had plenty of colleagues without engineering degrees who were about as capable of doing the same jobs. Maybe my education prepared me a bit better (in fact i would argue this), but it was hardly some strict prerequisite.

That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession. My competence base is pretty broad and nonspecific, and a lot of what I actually need to know for my job is stuff I learned afterwards anyway, or could have learned through other routes.

So I guess my point is that there's a much more meaningful distinction between degrees that actually qualify you for a specific profession and degrees that mostly give you a foundation to build on. Whether they're technical or not doesn't seem like a particularly useful way of making that distinction.

Im trying to find a better term for what I mean. What I mean by technical is a program that is skill based and related fairly closely to actual career paths that a person might do in the future. So an engineering degree that’s math, physics and engineering skills taught with the aim of working in engineering is technical, but so is a business based degree that teaches the kinds of skills that would be typically used in an office setting doing business work — things like marketing, finance, accounting, business management, etc.

What im making a distinction against is the kinds of humanities degrees that are based on learning things that are not based on any kind of useful skills. At best provided that the school cared enough to require professors to do so, you might end up with marginal writing and research skills. Even then most of those skills would be more easily taught in the technical degrees. They’re mostly useless, and I can’t imagine that anyone would look at a guy with a history or literature degree and choose them over a person with a degree in some more “technical” degree focused on useful skills that can be immediately applied to my actual business.

I think you're significantly underestimating how much of required engineering is actually learned in university (or you're overapplying the American liberal arts college generalism to everywhere). A random mechanical engineer is going to know fuck all about DSP and I, as an electrical engineer, would be completely lost if I had to do a stress analysis of some motor part.

I am not. I'm saying that most engineers are actually not working in hardcore engineering in their subfield.

There are career paths as an engineer that actually depend on the technical specialization of said engineer but those are far fewer than the vaguely technical generalist roles that absorb engineers of various different backgrounds and some people of other backgrounds as well.

Engineering frequently works as a sort of finishing school for the non-retarded.

I’m not talking about hardcore engineering but basic stuff. Show a circuit to a civil engineer and they have no idea what’s going on. That is hardly ”hardcore engineering” (and frankly neither is basic DSP - it’s normal third year stuff).

agree. employers get so many applicants. they need some way to filter at scale.

That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession.

There is right now an interesting trend going on. First generation UK migrants sending their second generation progeny to study medicine in my EU country because it is relatively cheap and the tutors take bribes (and anyway are forbidden from failing them because the university really like the tuition fees). When they come back to UK they will be more capable killers than SAS and Spetsnaz combined.

In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.

I wonder how this is different than your IQ + your demonstrated ability to jump through hoops.

Universities love to say they "teach you how to learn". In my mind, this is cope. There is no indication that they are making an effort to do this, nor that it is even possible.

Universities love to say they "teach you how to learn". In my mind, this is cope. There is no indication that they are making an effort to do this, nor that it is even possible.

Regardless of their purpose , whatever it is, employers sure want it.

Yes, it has signaling value. So does an IQ test. But no one says that the process of taking an IQ test makes you smarter.

Really, we've been down this road a million times. I've never heard a convincing argument against Bryan Caplan's "The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money".

I think they are both true. his book is right but at the same time employers derive value from degrees.

I think its more that you demonstrate that you're capable of long term sustained effort at solving difficult abstract problems. Forcing you to do this does in itself teach you how to think.

This is both separate from demonstrating a willingness to jump through hoops and it is teaching something important beyond the object level.

Now, if you're getting a degree in something simple that doesn't require work or intellectual ability, that also doesn't have practical applications then that is probably more or less useless beyond the fact that you might have qualified for the education in the first place.

Good professors model critical thinking skills and ask their students to reflect on the material in a manner they may not have considered. Don't just memorize the formulars. Figure out what purpose they serve and think about how you might use them to make something real.

I think in general "teach you how to learn" may be cope in a lot of cases. But "teach you how to think" is absolutely not. Just from personal experience, a lot of the students I started university alongside were terrible at reflecting on the material. They became better due to interacting with it and receiving feedback from the professors.

I don’t doubt that good individual professors can have a positive effect, but these are quite rare. If there is a pedagogical philosophy, it’s not something that the university is promoting. Teaching is often an afterthought. In almost no cases is there a serious effort to educate educators, especially using any sort of evidence driven approach. College instructors are often just thrown into classrooms with no training. How can they “teach you to think” when they dont know the first thing about teaching?

That is what I love about electricity. You never need bother remembering anything if you have just basic math skills.

I think they do "teach you how to learn" but that really consists in widening the distance between checkpoints and motivating you to figure out how to learn by yourself. Some people can develop these skills alone but it isn't easy.

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