Very cool, if true

Go here:
https://secure.delicious.com/settings/blogging/posting
username is your LJ username
password is your LJ password
URL is http://www.notzen.com/lj.php (or http://www.notzen.com/dw.php for dreamwidth)
blog_id is 1
out_cat_id is 1
out_hour is whatever you'd like it to be.

If you weren't on UK time then I'd need to set up some other stuff for you too, but as it is that should just work.

Oh, and I promise not to snoop on your LJ password as it passes through my server.

If you want the PHP for it, so you can use it on your own server then let me know and I'll stick up a link when I get home tonight.

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Oh - and PC Specialist built my PC. It seems to work very well :->

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thakil.livejournal.com

Is the humanities story really news? Surely we've always known that those who do sciences will generally earn more than those who do humanities?

Captcha: "1986; ndDirep". One feels that these are getting needlessly complicated. Still, at least its readable.

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nmg.livejournal.com

From the XKCD alt text:

"Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at 'Philosophy'."

The scary thing is that this seems to be true for the half dozen pages I chose at random...

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Yup - I think it's because the opening sentences tend to be an introduction, and start by telling you what general topic the thing you're reading about falls into.

So you work your way up a chain of more and more abstract pages, until you hit the root of all knowledge :->

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

http://xkcd-rss.livejournal.com/226525.html

No one is discussing the lost IQ points, but there's lot of examples of ending up at philosophy. Also, there's an edit war to make the crumb trail end up or not end up at philosophy.

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fearmeforiampink

See, I started with Abraham Lincoln, and thought I'd got stuck in a loop involving statistics. But had another look now, and I'd missed an earlier link in the statistics page to science. When I realised that, I did eventually reach philosophy.

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naath.livejournal.com

We found a few on IRC this morning that didn't ;-) nice Nerd Snipe from Randall there...

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

For more about virginity and virginity tests, see Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History". It's the most extreme "everything I thought I knew is wrong" book I've read.

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Thanks for that- added to my wishlist.

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heyokish.livejournal.com

It's a fabulous book, and I recommend it very highly.

(Padmini still has my copy, I think, if you want to borrow it...)

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Rarely has an article on the web angered me quite so much as that one on studying the humanities not making good business sense. Luckliy for my blood pressure, it's quite easy to pick apart using the skills that I learned doing a humanities degree* and that enabled me to get my current highly-paid job.

I'll start with a fatuous observation: the very first line of the article refers to the "economics" of majoring in the humanities. "Economics". And what sort of subject is economics...?

Fundamental flaw number 1: This study compares the earnings of the average humanities graduate to the earnings of the average of other types of graduates. What it doesn't compare is what the _same person_ would earn if he chose a different type of degree. Simply comparing average earnings of different groups is pretty meaningless if for example low-skill / low-ambition / low-talent students are more likely to choose a particular type of degree.

Fundamental flaw number 2: The study is obviously American, and is not applicable to other business cultures which may value the skills of humanities graduates rather higher. The United Kingdom falls into this category. I speak from experience as someone involved in graduate recruitment for one of the country's largest recruiters of graduates (one of the Big 4 accountancy firms). Officially, we don't mind what degree course someone did because they will be doing professional exams anyway. However, from experience I can tell you that someone with a humanities / arts background, so long as they also have good A-level Maths, is much more likely to have the skills we need than someone who did a science degree following purely science A-levels.

Fundamental flaw number 3: The average earnings figure for science and engineering graduates will be inflated by certain professions where a very specific degree is demanded, and supply and demand then work together to raise salary levels for that profession. Medicine would be the classic example, but from the article itself, it would seem that Petroleum Engineering would have the same effect. Conversely, almost all humanities subjects are non-specific in terms of later careers. Law would be the exception, although it isn't clear if Law counts as a humanity in the US.

Fundamental flaw number 4: The survey does not take into account the university studied at. Science and engineering courses are expensive and often are not run at all by lesser universities and colleges (that is certainly the case in the UK, and I would guess it is in the US too). So a disproportionate amount of arts and humanities graduates attend lesser universities. This will affect their earning potential - someone from Yale can expect to earn more than someone from some state college in Hicksville, West Virginia. However, the study does not take this distorting effect into account.

Fundamental flaw number 5: The sort of people who end up in well-paid jobs tend to be ambitious as well as talented. Guess what degrees those sort of people choose and which ones they avoid. It's not the degree that gets them the good job, but that sort of person may have been less likely to do a degree in, say Fine Arts in the first place.

Humanities degrees (or decent ones at any rate) teach you skills that are important in many careers, particularly business careers, like analysing data and being sceptical about obvious conclusions in reports. I'll mull over this and reflect on how much better off I would be if I had done a degree in computing or some such instead of a mere humanity when I drive home this evening (in my Porsche, to my six-bedroom house in the country). I hear Bangalore is lovely at this time of year...

* That would be the same humanities degree at the same university that the Prime Minister and five other members of the Cabinet, as well as the Leader of the Opposition studied. It doesn't seem to have harmed their earning potential.

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While I agree in principle with at least some of this, the percentage of the people studying The Humanities who study a PPE is vanishingly small. And while I'm sure that it goes a fair way to tip the balance, I don't think it's going to make a massive difference to most people.

"like analysing data and being sceptical about obvious conclusions in reports."
So, the same as a science degree then?

There are plenty of computing people out there who drive nice cars and have large houses - pay isn't generally as high as it is for, say, accountants, but the ones I know working in the city make an awful lot. Offshoring doesn't seem to have damaged the market for developers in the slightest, so far as I can tell - wages were going up rather than down when I saw figures a few months ago. Digs about Bangalore may help you vent, but they don't do much to bolster your argument.

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But computing jobs, and jobs where people sit in front of computers are much more likely to be off-shorable in the first place than the sort of jobs that need soft skills. Not all computing graduates are programmers - an awful lot of them with settle for the IT equivalent of the "Do you want fries with that job?" - IT support. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

There's a more sensible article that covers some of this ground but goes into more detail on the Times's website (pre-paywall, so accessible) here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6832285.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 . That showed that the top earning degree course was a humanity (or arts course as I would prefer to say) at a particular university, and also that some of the lowest paid degree courses were humanities / arts courses at certain universities. This supports my point that the original article's categories were far too vague to have any meaning.

If I was 17, and I saw that original article, I could have been influenced by it to avoid doing an Arts degree because the obvious interpretation is that "science graduates earn more". What makes me angry is that would have been bollocks for me and it is also bollocks for any other 17 year old.

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But computing jobs, and jobs where people sit in front of computers are much more likely to be off-shorable in the first place than the sort of jobs that need soft skills.

Oddly, this included a load of accountants at the Prudential a few years ago, which went off to India. I'm largely valued because any smart employer knows that software developers actually spend quite a low proportion of their time typing code, and much more dealing with end-users, discovering requirements, and doing design work. Which isn't to say that you can't do _some_ of that work, and there aren't a large number of stupid employers.

I'd certainly agree that a simple take-away from that article that "science = more money than arts" would be ridiculously simplistic, but anyone stopping their thinking at that point is asking for trouble.

(As an aside, I can't see how economics is an art, except insofar as it makes "black art" jokes easier. The division of education into "arts/humanities" and "sciences" strikes me as barking mad to be honest.)

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

Software development is, as Andy says, a LOT about communication. It's a creative art - but on which also requires a logical and systemising mindset.... a fascinating combination.

Offshoring has not worked well for high-end development, at least not anywhere I have worked/personally heard (anecdotal evidence, I'll admit). There are always issues, problems etc. that mean the hard stuff ends up back getting done on-site.

I've been a contract IT developer in London since 1996, so I have been a lot of places and seen a lot. The pay rates are pretty high, esp. for banking work (£6-700 per day not unusual) - though I will admit that rates were that back in 2001 when lots of thngs (esp housing) was a LOT cheaper. Still, a lot of folks bought then...

I have done extremely well out of my conscious decision to do Comp Sci as opposed to Biology. No big house (small flat in Guildford) - but no mortgage (no debts AT ALL of any sort), yacht in the Solent, fast motorbike, tons of music gear, multi-tens-of-thousands stack of cash [I was expecting a high-interest rate type of recession - hey-ho] and some investments.

I had an amicable divorce where I left behind about 30k of assets (share in a coupla boats and a car - the big house was solely his [he is a software developer too!]). Not stuff I usually dwell upon... but relevant to the discussion.

My dad is an engineer working mainly for the petrochemical industry and he says it has been ultra-busy for a good few years now - more work than they can take on.... their trouble is that younger guys are more an more specialised, so getting people that can do "the whole job" is getting hard.... maybe us software dude(ettes) can take heed of that, as it may well also become an issue in our industry...

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Computing is probably quite similar to accountancy in that there are low-end jobs which are basically support (or flogging netbooks in PC World) or bean-counting (and these are the ones that get off-shored or centralised) and there are high-end jobs which demand what educationalists refer to as 'higher skills'.

What you say about programming is very interesting - I strongly suspect that there would be a strong correlation between those developers who a) see it as a creative art and b) see it as "a LOT about communication" and those developers who end up in the high-paying computing jobs. Why? Because that's exactly the case with accountancy (well, not the bit about the "creative" - that's a word with unfortunate connotations in my profession...)

I'm guessing also that there is a correlation between certain computing degrees and those same jobs - you'll know much more about this than me. Is it the case that Comp Sci > [insert random IT degree from lesser university]?

from what you say, it would seem that 'software developer' (at least at the level you are at) could be a job like doctor or petroleum engineer that requires you to do that particular degree, and if not enough students do that degree, then the tight supply of the right sort of graduates is what pushes up the wages. (In my profession, it's different - entry to training programmes is relatively easy, but the number of chartered accountants is restricted by making the professional exams very hard to pass.)

I can sympathise on the fear of over-specialisation. While an ACA qualification (actually I'm FCA, which is Fellow rather than Associate) is a generalist qualification, that's something I finished 14 years ago. Any job I applied for now would be on the basis of experience. I haven't touched client work in almost a decade and the job I do now has probably three other people doing it in the UK (one for each of the other Big 4 firms). The thing is, there's a point in your career when you have to decide between what would be a good career move and what you want to do in terms of job staisfaction (and in my case, living in Cornwall).

Oh, and bad luck with the interest rate thing...

PS I hope I didn't come across earlier as dissing software dudes and dudettes. That really wasn't what I intended. Some of my best friends are software dudes or dudettes...

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It varies an awful lot. Comp-Sci and Development are actually quite different beasts. While both involve computers, Comp-Sci can frequently be about theoretical interestingness, and information theory, which day-to-day development tends not to involve unless you're working on very odd things.

The place I currently work actually has a general tendency to _not_ hire computing graduates. Those tend to be more interested in writing interesting software projects, which we don't do (we're a multinational financial company) and would be bored to tears with a lot of the work we do (the difference, say, between maths graduates and accounting graduates).

For people writing compilers, operating systems, etc. a deep interest in computing is essential - but many of those people have no interest in business processes. So they tend to work for chip companies, etc. We tend to hire people who have some aptitude for abstract reasoning and train them up in the bits of computing they need.

Computing has never been formalised in the way that other disciplines have (engineers, accountants, etc.) and there doesn't seem to be any relationship between degrees and later success (outside of the fact that qualification levels correlate to intelligence).

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"I'd certainly agree that a simple take-away from that article that "science = more money than arts" would be ridiculously simplistic, but anyone stopping their thinking at that point is asking for trouble."

But how many 17-year-olds know that? Especially 17-year-olds at the sort of school that doesn't send many pupils to top universities?

Lesser universities often think of Economics as a science subject. Some even give out something called a 'BSc' to their Economics graduates. While Economics uses and requires maths, I would say that it is closest to Philosophy among the other academic subjects. You could certainly argue that Economics is a narrow branch of philosophy (but then you could say the same about Physics).

I probably agree with you that the black / white science / arts division is a little silly though. At my college, there was definitely a tendency to look down upon science students - beautiful, talented and clever people* did Arts while nerds** did Sciences, or so the stereotype went. My college ranked second highest of all for Arts subjects degree results, but middle-of-the-pack for Sciences. I remember when the science library was moved into the main college library and someone wrote an anonymous letter to the college magazine complaining that they wouldn't be able to concentrate in the library because of the personal hygiene issues of the science students...

* I can only claim to be one of these.
** While I have decent nerd credentials, regardless of my degree choice.

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I don't mind hard science stuff being a science, and pure art stuff being filed under art. But it's exactly things like economics, which crosses over mathematics, psychology and sociology (and various other bits and pieces) that don't fit into this category well.

Economics strikes me as being a social science - it's the study of the ways that people deal with scarcity. Microeconomics being closer to psychology, macroeconomics closer to sociology.

(Feel free to point out I'm talking rubbish there. My understanding of economics comes from the internet, numerous books with titles containing the words "for dummies" and a couple of years subscription to The Economist.)

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'Social science' is probably the most common term for the faculty that Economics sits in at British universities. My university used the term 'Social Studies' instead, which conveniently allowed us PPEists to demonstrate that we were "beautiful, talented and clever" like the English students, classicists (sorry, "Literae Humaniores" students) and Fine Artists and not smelly nerds like the scientists...

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Lesser universities often think of Economics as a science subject. Some even give out something called a 'BSc' to their Economics graduates.

Don't the LSE offer a BSc in Economics?

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I rest my case...

(See 'Yes, Minister'.)

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seph-hazard.livejournal.com

That article made me feel faintly ill. What on earth do these people think education is for? Knowledge is not a business transaction. Ugh.

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momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com

> Why positive fantasies make your dreams less likely to come true

I've known this for years. Imagining success just causes me to retreat further into basking in the fantasy.

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

hmmm, I don't imagine all that well - no/very few emotional connections/impact (goes for recall too!) - imagining something good makes me want to move as soon as possible to action to bridge the gap between here and there....

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

... because for me, imagination is in no way an adequate substitute for reality. It's not even an ultra-faint outline sketch, the bare melody of a tune almost-inaudible in the far, far, distance... Without real, real-time sensory input, I cannot find an experience at all satisfying.

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octopoid-horror.livejournal.com

I realised some years ago that jobs where they wanted someone "with a degree" but it didn't matter what degree or how good a degree were really just saying "we don't want a school leaver, someone a little bit older please. Also please let them own a suit."

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Yes, there's a lot in what you say.

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octopoid-horror.livejournal.com

I like how discussions in newspapers about the relative worth of degrees kind of tiptoe around the fact that at 16 or 17, how the hell are most people supposed to know what they were going to spend their life doing?

When I was 17, I thought Metallica were awesome, t-shirts with rotting skulls on were cool and a job with a computer would be neat, in the future. Sure, some people have an idea at that point, but not that many, I'd suspect.

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I also had little idea when I was 17.

Some years ago, I started a competition in Plymouth called "You're Hired!". Think 'The Apprentice', but for 17 year olds. This was motivated in part by my own memories of lack of good careers guidance when I was that age (I made ultimately the right decisions, but it was partly by luck) and in part by an observation that while schools are good at identifying people who can do quadratic equations well, or good at playing the cello, or good at playing football, they aren't especially good at identifying people with skills that employers want. Skills like teamwork, initiative, problem solving, presenting etc.

After four years, this is now a competition that most 17 year olds in the city take part in. More here: http://www.youarehiredplymouth.co.uk/

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ladysisyphus.livejournal.com

As though money is the only reason to learn anything.

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It's not. But if you're going to spend 5% of your life and accrue a lot of debt doing something then you at least ought to make an informed decision about the long-term consequences.

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“You are making a really weird decision if you decide to send your kids off to study philosophy. It would be a better world if we all studied the humanities. But it’s not a good dollars-and-cents decision.”

I found this quote from the article on graduate earnings tellingly daft.

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I don't understand why it's daft. It makes perfect sense to me.

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By definition a “better” world would have a higher monetary value than a world that was less good. This works both ways, so a world which ascribes a higher monetary value to certain activities is prioritising what it deems to be better stuff.

If a world in which philosophy graduates were thought by society on average to be more valuable than engineers and accountants existed philosophy graduates would be paid more (within the current macro-economic paradigm where value is generally counted using money) (There are also issues with the poor quality accounting for GDP which mean that rational decision makers are blind to some of the consequences of their decisions).

What the guys is saying is that his version of better is at odds with what most people consider better when they are asked to part with actual cash money to back up any rhetoric.

I fall into his seductive daftness trap, because I consider a world with more philosophy and less stuff to be better but I still keep buying the stuff.

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By definition a "better" world would have a higher monetary value than a world that was less good.

I disagree. If something would be considered better by the poorest 60% of the country, but significantly worse by the richest 40% of the country, then it might be valued significantly worse on a purely monetary level.

Also, it may well be that individual actions act against the greater good, if we all agree that we'd be better off with more philosophers, but the philosophers themselves would be worse off. Nobody wants to volunteer to improve society by making themselves worse off, so society doesn't improve. That's just an iterated prisoner's dilemma.

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Sorry, “better” as defined by the democracy of counting dollars rather than the democracy of counting votes, which is how better is currently defined for most things (although, not I hasten to add how *I* would choose to define better).

I take your point on the philosophers’ potential for dis-utility. I suggest that they would find themselves compensated to the point where they felt they were themselves better off by making the transaction. Currently most of this additional compensation would come through an increase in salary (bringing about the situation where philosphers were paid as much as engineers)

I suspect that what is really going on in the economy as surveyed is, at least in part two equally talented individuals valuing different things more highly. One values the monetary rewards of becoming an engineer, the other values the intellectual fulfillment of becoming a philosopher and the overall level of life satisfaction for both individuals are the same.

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“better” as defined by the democracy of counting dollars rather than the democracy of counting votes, which is how better is currently defined for most things

Not by anyone I know, outside of some economists, and other friend weirdos (like libertarians).

I suggest that they would find themselves compensated to the point where they felt they were themselves better off

Who by? If they would improve society by making people happier, but this would take a generation to come about, and not be apparent to the general population in the meantime, I can't see the market-driven mechanism by which it would happen. In fact, the opposite seems to more generally occur. The pay of teachers has dropped compared to previously comparable professions, although everyone agrees that educated children are vital to society.

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I guess my point is that if people really, really and truly believed that the more philosphers version of society was better than the more engineers version they would pay for it. This does miss the point that money unlike votes is explicitly not distributed evenly.

There are examples all over the place of situations where people or communities have chosen to shift resources from the engineers to the philosophers (or from immediate consumption to investment in human capital). Some of these make me tearful with pride and admiration.

Depends what you mean by market driven but I’m thinking more about rational decision making here than purely market (in a narrow sense) decision making. We could, collectively decide to take some decisions out of the market mechanism. The key difficulty in your realistic scenario* is persuading people that they would be better off and they would be so much better off that it is worth the delay.**

So you have situations where 90% of the money and 10% of the votes want one thing and 10% of the money and 90% of the votes want something different.*** One of the questions the constitution should be able to answer is which situations do we have a democracy of dollars and which of votes and / or who decides how situations are placed in which decision making process.

*Although possibly exchanging philosophers for other less-materialistic workers, such as teachers or preventative health care providers, or renewable energy technology.
** It is evidence from these decisions that most profoundly persuades me that people are very often far from rational in their behavour.
*** The emergance in the UK of pay-per-view televised sport and the reservation of the crown jewels for free-to-air is an example of the kinds of multi-layer decision making that goes on here

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Plus, of course, as raised above, the people making these decisions are 17-year-olds, who likely have no idea which of these things would make them happiest in the long run.

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They certainly have a more limited experience of what makes them happy. This is probably the most important thing and one of the hardest things to get over to a 17-year old. Good careers advice would be a cheap way of increasing the future happiness of the population for a small investment. If I’d known, for example, that pracisting law wasn’t like LA Law or Rumpole I might have been less keen on taking a law degree and I was, realitively speaking, paying attention.

I think about how to help Bluebird, who is 13, make these decisions. It’s very difficult because even if you have good insight in to what you might like over the long term you don’t necessarily have good insight about the future state of your circumstances.

One of the things my mum is most grateful is that she decided to become a doctor. Looking back at her life being something other than a doctor might have made her more happy but when she really really needed to have money and prestige and power and the abilty to translate this into emmigrating to Australia because she was a doctor she was able to emmigrate to Australia. So, when I have conversations with Bluebird about her future career choices I’m not sure how to advise her when I don’t know if she might have a sudden need to be acutely valuable to society.

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