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.