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.

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!

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.

[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!"

[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"