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

[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"