How can I make my future engineering education more well rounded, with regards to the liberal arts?

Why should it be? An engineering education should teach you engineering. The whole point of primary and secondary school is to lay down a liberal arts base that you can build on yourself for the rest of your life. You can take it from here. If a future humanities major asked me how to make their education more scientifically well rounded, I’d give them the same advice. (Consider yourself lucky. It is harder to self-study university-level science or math than it is literature, philosophy, or history, although it is certainly possible.) The roundedness of your education is your own personal responsibility and depends on how much you polish the edges on your own time.

Check out the book “How to Read a Book,” by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. It is a handy guide to doing this. It has an appendix with a decent reading list. Pick something and start reading.

A Facebook friend liked this article from Rolling Stone which reports on this AARP interview with Bob Dylan. The Stone lede caught my eye because it focused on something economically naive that Dylan said. Well, surprise surprise, Stone is terrible at journalism.

The economic comments are off-the-cuff and come at the bottom of the last page of an interview entirely devoted to music. Even Dylan expresses how much he enjoyed the interview because it focused on music:

I found the questions really interesting. The last time I did an interview, the guy wanted to know about everything except the music. People have been doing that to me since the ’60s — they ask questions like they would ask a medical doctor or a psychiatrist or a professor or a politician. Why? Why are you asking me these things?

So… the supposedly premier music publication entirely ignores everything said about music to report on the economically illiterate thing the celebrity blurted out in passing. That is idiotic. Apparently, AARP The Magazine is now the go-to publication for real music journalism.

Bob Dylan is a musical genius. I care a lot about what he says about music. However, his opinion on economic development in urban areas means nothing to me. It is especially sad when I happen to hear it and realize how lazily considered it is. Rolling Stone reports this as if he’s worth listening to on the matter and he clearly isn’t.

For the record, Dylan is correct when he says that it is private industry, not government, that creates jobs. However, he is wrong when he criticizes “big billionaires” for failing to do it. Government policies make doing so economically unviable. Why criticize one and excuse the other?

Dylan again:

We see crime and inner cities exploding with people who have nothing to do, turning to drink and drugs. They could all have work created for them by all these hotshot billionaires. […] There are good people there, but they’ve been oppressed by lack of work. Those people can all be working at something.

I agree, so how about we stop pretending the lack of work is all the fault of greedy businessmen? “Work created for them”–what patronizing drivel stuck in the 1920’s. Secondly, let’s not forget that instead of “turning to drink and drugs” they can turn to all sorts of positive actions that don’t require bailouts from greedy rich people, like self-education, locally-organized civic groups, neighborhood watch, etc.

This is a difficult book to review. Its arguments are complex, broad in scope and application, and ironically reductive. On the face of it, it is a meditation on a line from Emerson–“Language is fossil poetry” (from “The Poet”)–that is taken so far to the extreme that it breaks.

Most of what I have to say is criticism of Barfield which might give the impression that I hated the book. In fact, I quite liked it. The ideas have great appeal. The real shame is that he overreaches so far that I can no longer agree with him. In a way it is like empathizing with a grieving father who advocates revenge killing the accused murderer of his child. I understand the emotions, but he’s just taken things too far.

Well, let me take a step back. Do you remember the theme song to The Facts of Life? Sing it with me:

You take the good, you take the bad,
You take ‘em both and there you have,
The Facts of Life.
[…]
When the world never seems
To be living up to your dreams
And suddenly you’re finding out
The Facts of Life are all about you.

I feel this song sums up Poetic Diction pretty well, but perhaps this statement requires some explanation…

Barfield’s big idea is that if “language is fossil poetry,” then working our way back into linguistic time, language should get intrinsically more and more poetic until finally we hit the bedrock of language where all human linguistic experience is ultimate poetry. What’s more, this _ur-_poetry is supposedly a “truer” state of understanding of the universe than the cult of modern empiricism offers.

The Facts of Life

The first problem is that these are two distinct claims. Claim #1: older language is more intrinsically poetic. Claim #2: the more poetic language is a more accurate representation of the universe than the modern prosaic language. Barfield gives some evidence of #1 and thinks he’s proved #2. This is little more than a textbook example of the kind of chronological snobbery that Barfield accused scientism of. The only way to infer the truth of #2 from #1 is to assume a priori that older is better.

The second problem is Barfield’s oblique re-statement of William Paley’s watchmaker argument from Natural Theology. Anyone who is familiar with the teleological argument against evolution by natural selection can see that Barfield’s arguments here are a close cousin in the linguistic domain. Compare Barfield’s descriptions of how poetic language degenerates over time to creationists assertions of genetic degeneration.

Applying Barfield’s logic to the actual fossil record (rather than the linguistic fossil record), we would expect the essence of life (to keep the “essence” tangible, let’s call it DNA shall we…) to get more and more potent as you move back in time until we arrive at the earliest organisms that are the quintessence of life. In fact, we know that the truth is entirely the opposite. DNA began simple and evolved non-random adaptations from random mutations over obscene timescales.

Whenever Barfield bumps up against such things he falls back on the claim that changes in consciousness drive changes in the perception of evidence. This is an incredibly lazy dismissal of empiricism. He really can’t decide if he is a subjectivist or Platonic objectivist. He asserts either whenever it gives him the strongest argument against science.

He takes the good, and leaves the bad

The bulk of Barfield’s evidence comes from two sources: internal reflection and historical linguistics. He rightly discusses poetry in terms of “a felt change in consciousness” that is accessible to us only through internal reflection. However, he does not allow for changes of consciousness that work both ways. If moving from prosaic to metaphoric thinking causes such a change that has value, is not the change caused by moving from metaphoric to prosaic also valuable? Would this not also qualify as poetic in Barfield’s own system?

He also plays fast and loose with linguistics. His evidence of linguistic change is almost entirely predicated on the evolution of the Indo-European languages which is largely the story of transition from synthetic to isolating languages. But as I understand it, that is by no means the only direction of language change and is by no means a one-way street. He cites Chinese as being further along this path of degeneration from the poetic ideal, but yet this entirely contradicts his thesis. If his view of the interaction of language and consciousness were true, then the Chinese culture should be the epitome of scientism and it is not. His conception of poetry presupposes a strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which is now out of favor.

At best, the linguistic evidence is inconclusive–especially considering that anatomically modern humans have existed for ~200,000 years but our linguistic evidence is only about ~6,000 years old. The oldest languages we can point to are unlikely to be truly early languages at all. It occurs to me now that the Biblical creationist chronology begins around 6,000 years ago too. Coincidence?

When the world never seems to be living up to your dreams

…assert the Facts of Life are all about your internal experience of poetry.

You have to know a bit about Charles Fort and his work before reading this biography (otherwise there’s little reason to bother doing so), but it is a very well done account of his life and writings. For starters, Steinmeyer is generally skeptical of Fort’s claims, but not an ass about it. As he put it in this interview:

I tend to be skeptical, but I don’t consider myself a “debunker,” and maybe that’s why I appreciated Fort’s work, even if I didn’t always accept the phenomena.

The book is about Fort not Fortean phenomena–although Fort’s biography goes a long way toward explaining how Fort developed his particular approach.

Steinmeyer has dug up a lot of detail about Fort’s life and work (published and unpublished) from his short story days to early attempts at book-length “crank” theories, through to the four primary works that are still in print today (which Steinmeyer also edited–The Collected Works of Charles Fort.)

You will also learn a fair amount about the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort’s patron and advocate, in the process. H.L. Mencken and Benjamin De Casseres also make regular cameos. These three figures typify the ways one might interpret and appreciate (or not) Fort’s work: through the eyes of a credulous enthusiast (Dreiser), a scornful skeptic (Mencken), or as willfully agnostic satire (De Casseres). I myself straddle the Mencken/De Casseres borderline.

Fort’s work fits into a broader pseudo-scientific, Spiritualist movement of the time where the occult, theosophy, seances, and circus freak shows were popular and names like P.T. Barnum, Robert Ripley, and Harry Houdini became well-known. Steinmeyer touches on this cultural phenomenon a little bit, but I am keen to find a broader study of this from the same point of view Steinmeyer takes with Fort. Nevertheless, this book is a fascinating piece of the historical puzzle that outlines the development of the modern paranormal community and its skeptical antithesis.

Having gone to college as a grown-up, I have something to say in response to this well-meaning article.

“The source of these problems is baked into the current organization of residential higher education.”

…which has been propped up by government subsidy for decades.

“If we were starting from zero, we probably wouldn’t design colleges as age-segregated playgrounds in which teenagers and very young adults are given free rein to spend their time more or less as they choose.”

The problem is that the proverbial We shouldn’t be designing anything. College is expensive and age-segregated because bad policy has made the higher education market unresponsive to the price mechanism and caused obscene amounts of money to be wasted.

“While innovators continue to imagine more flexible forms of college, traditionalists might champion two proven models: community colleges […] and the G.I. Bill”

These traditionalists are deluded fools. Tuition prices will come down when we stop dumping money on colleges by the truckload. If community colleges are the answer then they will beat out other options in the marketplace, no heavy-handed “championing” needed…

The vast majority of college undergrad learning can be done for pennies. This is not a new internet phenomenon. $50 and a trip to the used book store or a walk down to the public library gets you access to all the textbooks and materials you need to learn just about anything you can learn at a liberal arts college. Not self-motivated? Start a study group. If the only way you can motivate yourself to learn is by borrowing tons of money to pay someone to “force” you to do it, then you probably shouldn’t be going to college in the first place. Go get that retail or secretarial job now that you will inevitably end up in later anyway. That’s keeping it real.

Most people leave college and end up in a job that has nothing to do with their degree. Put another way, many jobs shouldn’t require a degree or could use skill-based competency exams instead. If we didn’t throw tuition money at ambivalent kids, many could enter the labor market directly instead. There’s no shame in this route, or wouldn’t be if we hadn’t engineered the educational system to be a marker of class.

On the flip side, I’ve seen kids with a Computer Science degree who can’t program themselves out of a paper bag. What on earth were they doing for 4 years?! Give me the competent kid with no degree any day–except employers can’t find those people because they are drowned out by the noise of thousands of pretenders waving a useless piece of paper that we bought for them.

The “intangibles” of the college experience can be had for the cost of your own free time and a library card. The job-training aspect (and high-level academic training, which is simply another form of job-training), will be vastly cheaper when colleges have the incentives to make it so and consumers aren’t paid to demand a product they don’t actually want.