• orcrist@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    You often find people who have advanced degrees who are good at one thing but horrible at many other things. This is most obvious if you consider the teaching quality of the average university professor. Yes they have a PhD, but it doesn’t mean their classes are worthwhile, and it doesn’t even mean they can write worth a damn.

    • Ashyr@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      This is why the humanities are so important to being a well-rounded thinker. I’ve known many an engineer who were mathematically brilliant but were incapable of determining who won a debate or even how to read literature with comprehension.

      I remember asking a young engineer to summarize a paragraph he’d just read aloud and he just read it over again. I asked him to explain it and he started rereading it again. He literally didn’t comprehend what he was reading. It was just an endless succession of words linked one after the other.

      There’s been a huge push for a priority in STEM fields and, I get it, it’s important work with rigorous requirements and expectations. It can create dangerously overconfident and blindly ignorant people.

    • Proxima@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Remember Ben Carson? A literal brain surgeon who said the Egyptians built the pyramids for grain storage.