You're always free to stop at the level of abstraction at which you find a certain answer to be satisfying, but you can also keep digging. Why are flat shoes better? Well, it's to do with my gait. Ok, but why is my gait like that? Something-something musculoskeletal. Why is my body that way? Something-something genetic. OK, but why is that? And so on.
Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)
It is very silly to treat zero grounding the same as accepting core, proven concepts. Your PoV here is no different than saying "It rains because god is sad and crying" is an appropriate thing to believe.
If you want to say "god is responsible for creating the precipitation cycle", sure. But we don't disregard understanding that exists to substitute intuition.
Isn't that example pretty reductive, in that you have a directly-measurable output? I mean, the joint is either 45° (well, 90°) or it's not. Zoom out a bit, and the skill-set becomes much less definable: are my cabinets good - for some intersection of well-proportioned, elegantly-finished, and fit for purpose, with well-chosen wood and appropriate hardware.
Mind you, I don't think the process of improvement in those dimensions is fundamentally different, just much less direct and not easily (or perhaps even at all) articulable.
> the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired
That's not axiomatically true, like, at all.
The odds of being hired vary according to the supply of qualified applicants vs available positions. Tech companies with large profit margins will be able to offer higher wages than businesses with lower margins - and do so because they're competing with other tech companies, and (for the most part) not companies in other sectors - so assuming pay is a differentiator across domains can't be assumed. Over the long term, pay differential within a sector will motivate more people to become qualified for jobs within it, but at any particular moment cross-sector compensation isn't really relevant to the question.
This isn't to say the original assertion is true, as they don't offer any evidence, but it wouldn't be shocking to find out that a publishing company has more qualified applicants per job posting than any particular tech company.
My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.
Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.
I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.
Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.
> I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity.
I don't think most STEM majors would be outstanding English Literature (or whatever humanities program you prefer) majors, but I do think they could manage to obtain a degree. Very, very few humanities majors could get an engineering degree.
And yes, the writing classes they force engineers to take are largely pointless and not enjoyable. Everyone with a degree got through them though, and I have to imagine the percentage of STEM students who washed out on that and not organic chemistry, compiler design, differential equations, etc. is extremely small (it was 0 out of the hundreds of people I knew at my school).
> But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0].
Sure. Very few of these kids are going into publishing, because they'll have more lucrative options and will pursue them.
> I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.
That may be, but they're still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.
> Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
Lol, they are not "sought out" in any sense of the word. Philosophy majors at top tier schools are sought out because everyone at the school is sought out, not because they majored in philosophy.
And yes, I took a number of philosophy classes in college as an undergrad because they were easy (have you seen the analytical/symbolic reasoning required of EE or CS majors? It's a lot more difficult that what is required of philosophy majors).
> [50th percentile CS grads] are still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.
That's the crux of it, and right now it appears to me that the ability to write unambiguous natural language prompts - in a variety of contexts, not specifically heavy-duty dev work - is going to be increasingly valuable. The 50th percentile english / philosophy grad is better at that than the 50th percentile CS major - while, at the same time, the bottom rungs of the developer ladder appear to have been kicked out.
I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?
But, we'll see. We're living in Interesting Times.
And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.
Indeed. It then follows that the optimal arrangement will find a balance, ameliorating the flaws of system each with the strengths of the other.
Several Northern European countries (like the Netherlands, which GP finds congenial) pursue this, though pragmaticism (unlike ideology) never reaches an end-state, and remains a work in progress. The USA, from ~1933 until sometime in the 1970s, operated on this model. It's probably only possible to sustain in high-trust societies.
Nose strips are springy things which hold your nostrils / nasal passages a bit further open. In context, it appears GP means that nose breathing is expected. Sorry about your medical issue; I hope you had a good result.
> Trust is not rebuilt with meta-analyses. It is rebuilt in exam rooms, one patient at a time, by physicians willing to say... "Let’s talk about what the evidence actually shows".... If we can’t have that conversation, we are not practicing medicine.
I agree. But that conversation can't happen where appointments are restricted to 20-minute segments, and trust cannot be established within a system where patients are forcibly changed to different doctors / medical systems based on the business requirements of insurance companies.
The doctors I know (all ~10 I can think of off the top of my head) have left, or are trying to leave, direct patient care. They haven't been allowed to practice medicine, as so defined, for years.
(This is in the USA, by the way. If you live in a country with a different model, count your blessings and fight like hell to keep it.)
[Edit: Actually, two of my acquaintances included in the number above have switched (or thought about it - it's been a couple of years since I saw one of them, and I don't know if he pulled the trigger) to concierge care. Look it up, if you don't know what that means. It may be the last remaining rump of traditional medical practice, but it's not sustainable / scalable, and is arguably a prisoner's dilemma defection which hurts the system as a whole.]
> But that conversation can't happen where appointments are restricted to 20-minute segments, and trust cannot be established within a system where patients are forcibly changed to different doctors / medical systems based on the business requirements of insurance companies.
And the frequency of visits. The recommended one visit every three years for 18-64 year olds isn't going to build much trust.
The secret is to find independent doctors who have their own private practice and who have hospital admit privileges. Also physicians who take cash payment and operate outside a big health organization or who have affiliations with them but don’t answer to them.
You're right, but local independent physician business model is being destroyed by insurance requirements. I have an uncle who ran an office like that for 20+ years. He employed two nurses, a receptionist, and a full-time coder (for those of you who don't know, that job is the translation layer between medical services and insurance companies). I don't know the economic details, but lately he was spending too much of his own time arguing with insurance company medical "experts", and facing hiring a second coder. He closed his practice, and semi-retired. He's bitter, and doesn't think there's any route to physician independence beyond cash-pay / concierge care. (He's not a speciality that lends itself to that model.)
The danger is whether they keep up with the field or just continue what they learned in their time in medical school. At least with a major hospital they are surrounded by other experts in the field including a batches of newly trained doctors.
There’s an OBGYN we’ve long had a relationship with who takes on residents and cross pollinates with them for a win win knowledge transfer. They also volunteer overseas with charitable medical efforts. Those are probably interesting avenues for keeping up with things from the outside to some degree I imagine.
I know, which seems absurd to me. Like, TUIs are 1) a solved problem, b) performant, and c) right there, on every single computer in the world. (Someone please correct me, to point out that there's some weird OS somewhere that doesn't have a shell, so I can say "Yeah, but does it run Claude?")
Is there an engineering-based reason, or is it that the AI knows React, so it's easier to vibe, and damn the user experience?
Ha! Where I'm from a "dolly" was the two-wheeled thing. The four-wheeler thing wasn't common before big-boxes took over the hardware business, but I think my dad would have called it a "cart", maybe a "hand-cart".
Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)
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