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by chromacity12 hours ago |
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upvoteby tptacek12 hours ago|
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Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track.

It's not much more complicated than that.

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upvoteby com2kid11 hours ago|
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Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.

Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.

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upvoteby aworks6 hours ago|
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I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.
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upvoteby com2kid3 hours ago|
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6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

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upvoteby rcxdude9 hours ago|
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I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.
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upvoteby x3n0ph3n312 hours ago|
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It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.
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upvoteby chromacity11 hours ago|
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Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.
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upvoteby com2kid11 hours ago|
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You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.
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upvoteby robocat11 hours ago|
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Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.
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upvoteby x3n0ph3n39 hours ago|
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Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.
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upvoteby bpt310 hours ago|
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The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large.

I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.

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