Planning on learning something critical to my academic happiness...

[alexr_rwx]

One of these years -- one of these years, I'm probably going to learn that the whole social-sciences-y side of computer science is a lot more interesting in the abstract than in practice. In practice, classes like "HCI" or "Educational Technolgy" or even the cog-sci classes... just end up pissing me off.

It's not that it's "interdisciplinary" between AI and philosophy and psychology... it's that it's at the tipping point of interesting-ness between all of these and it ends up sounding like noise. To me, anyway.

Let's just go write some code or open up some brains or something.

Comments

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

I think the problem may be that the true people who are interested in ALL three of those fields are hard to find. The rest of the people working in that area are those that couldn't cut it doing "hard" research in one of AI or philosophy, so they opted for the new interdisciplinary field.

Or I could just be talking out my butt, who knows.

Personally, I think the world could do more with some honest-to-FSM Renaissance men.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*nods* Smart people in the world are always welcome, whether they're specialists or Renaissance-y (http://www.costumes.org/history/renaissance/norris/book3plate19.jpg)...

(I might fall into the "can't cut it in 'hard' research" category, personally. This isn't to say that I feel dumb... it's just that I honestly don't see myself coming up with some amazing statistical insight that's going to fix Machine Learning. On the other hand, we have some pretty good "applications of ML" projects happening right now...)

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

I guess I've always preferred a breath of knowledge to a depth, so I'm not resentful of HCI/AI/Philosophy of Computing right off the bat. I think you're just running into ideas that people thought would be a cool but never really went anywhere interesting. Academia is littered with 'em, 'cuz you have to find a lot of bad ideas before you get a few good ones.

You stuck it out longer than I did, so don't feel at all bad. I gave up a LOT earlier and ran away to the wide world of making money selling silly things that people really don't need. It isn't nearly as intellectually fulfilling, but it pays better. :-\

Bleh, I could ramble on about scientific paradigm shifts a la Khun or however you spell it, but I have work in the morning.

learning smoothies!

[laurapatt.livejournal.com]

what's the big deal with interdisciplinary classes anyway? was there something fundamentally boring with pure disciplines and they had to be mixed with other pure-but-boring disciplines to hopefully come with a slightly tastier smoothy of a subject?
interestingly enough, while "educational technology" may be not so interesting, education classes by themselves are fairly interesting, pending a good teacher. one can only reasonably assume then that it's the technology that makes the class dull. Liberal Arts Win Again!

Re: learning smoothies!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Most things are probably interesting, given a good teacher. Or at least that goes a long way!

Once, I had an upsetting HCI class, with our friend Sean schizobovine suffering alongside -- but it wasn't nearly so upsetting when a very good teacher (Mr. Dr. Jeff Pierce (http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/jspierce/)) talked about usability issues in our "using AIs to build programs your mom would use" class.

(also: and it might turn out that disciplines come out of interdisciplines...)

Riff on a tangent to your post!

[sault.livejournal.com]

I remember how you once told me (perhaps in a fit of fatigue) that CS has not taught you anything more than the thought process behind sitting down and pounding out working code. I also remember that I didn't think learning a thought process was so shabby. It is also possible that I am remembering things to benefit myself.

Anyway, it seems that some interdisciplinary fields (perhaps HCI), while attempting to address pertitent and interesting issues, fail to do so because they lack a framework for discussion. The fields have terminology, which allows them to discuss abstractions and case studies, but they lack a thought process peculiar to themselves.

Also vik: 'Word,' I say in appreciation of the above acclamation for Renaissance men.

Re: Riff on a tangent to your post!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Speaking of fits of fatigue, I think this entry came out of one.

But responding to this comment in full... would probably take long conversations and position papers and maybe the founding of a new meta-interdisciplinary journal/conference/field of "what's cool in the intellectual world these days"?

I'm honestly not sure what's going on, is the thing. People talk about stuff as if they know what's going on (there are those who say that "Human-Centered Computing" is a Thing that's separate from CS or HCI or semiotics or whatever)... and they seem to think it an important distinction. I'm just getting a little weary of all the classification and re-classification... it smells like org charts.

How about "hey look, we made this item, and we found out that all of our moms can use it!" ?

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

"This is wine. This is salad. This is lasagna." "Yum!"

"This is my lasagna salad with wine dressing." "...um."

...

"This is cream cheese. This is sour cream. These are lemons." "...um."

"This is my lemon cheesecake." "Yum!"

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Well said, sir :)

[reality-calls.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't necessarily say that interdisciplinary classes are all that uninteresting-- My cognitive science course rocked!  And it was taught from a psychological basis by a professor of computer science who is one of the foremost experts in the world on neural networks, so, come to think of it, that probably had something to do with why I liked it so much...

Mike Mozer is an awesome guy, however, and I can't help but think that neural networks have a lot more to do with human psychology than do, say, support vector machines.  I mean, he can go over all these experiments showing how the lower-level processes of the human brain work and then he flips out his laptop and says, "And *here's* how you do this with a neural network!"  I guess he just does an excellent job of connecting the abstract with the practice, even if his neural networks don't tend to have too many marketable functions.

It CAN be done, though.

      "Live from the People's Republic"