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Here's a thought:
Cross-training is well-established in athletics. To be a really great baseball player, say, you're going to spend at least some of your training time doing things that aren't directly baseball-related. But it's a broader principle than that: it's a rare juggler who just juggles the type of prop he performs with. Paul Graham writes about how his painting improved his hacking. And so on.
So why don't academics do it? Mostly, we seem to pick a specialism and then largely ignore anything outside it, at least professionally. There are counterexamples: one of the lecturers in my department is half-way through a degree in Russian. And a lot of the really great intellects - Wittgenstein, Feynmann - seem to have been able to turn their hands to anything.
I guess this is something like the US idea of a minor at college. Someone (possibly Donald Knuth) reckons that in the near future, every academic will have a major and a minor specialism, but he's thinking of this as a way of coping with the complexity and scope of modern science - we won't find the fertile connections between field A and field B if the only people who know about field A know nothing about field B and vice versa - whereas I'm thinking of it as a way of improving our minds.
So, what do you all think? Good idea? Or should I go and have some more coffee until I've calmed down a bit? Are there any other good ideas that academia could take from sports? From somewhere else?
Cross-training is well-established in athletics. To be a really great baseball player, say, you're going to spend at least some of your training time doing things that aren't directly baseball-related. But it's a broader principle than that: it's a rare juggler who just juggles the type of prop he performs with. Paul Graham writes about how his painting improved his hacking. And so on.
So why don't academics do it? Mostly, we seem to pick a specialism and then largely ignore anything outside it, at least professionally. There are counterexamples: one of the lecturers in my department is half-way through a degree in Russian. And a lot of the really great intellects - Wittgenstein, Feynmann - seem to have been able to turn their hands to anything.
I guess this is something like the US idea of a minor at college. Someone (possibly Donald Knuth) reckons that in the near future, every academic will have a major and a minor specialism, but he's thinking of this as a way of coping with the complexity and scope of modern science - we won't find the fertile connections between field A and field B if the only people who know about field A know nothing about field B and vice versa - whereas I'm thinking of it as a way of improving our minds.
So, what do you all think? Good idea? Or should I go and have some more coffee until I've calmed down a bit? Are there any other good ideas that academia could take from sports? From somewhere else?
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But yes academics really should in many ways get a wider view. But then again I'm not sure there isn't a place for an over specialised person either. It's all about multiple view points. I think the PhD students are meant to have the broad outlook.
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In sports most cross-training foscusses separately on specific skills and then brings those together in the chosen discipline. I like to rock climb, trad lead mostly. I regard the act of lead climbing as breaking down into 3 skills: climbing, leading, fitness. And I can focus on those separately. I can climb without leading (that's bouldering or top-roping at a climbing wall). I can't lead without climbing, but I can lead without pushing my climbing abilities by leading easier, or just more, climbs (this focusses on the rope-work, the protection, the pacing). And I can focus on fitness by swimming, running, cycling, or just doing lots of continuous easy climbing. Then when I lead climb something hard I bring all three of these skills together at once.
I only juggle a very small amount but an analogy might be that the way to get to juggle 5 clubs (I fantasize) is to practise juggling 5 balls, and practise juggling 4 clubs, then pracise juggling 5 clubs.
The other thing that's going on is the broadening aspect. Like picking up paintaing. I started a humanities degree a while ago with the OU; it improved my writing immensely (which, as a computer scientist, I think is a good thing).
Translating the first sort of cross-training into something like computer programming would be to break programming down into smaller skills and focus on each one separately. To some extent I think this is why learning different languages is a good idea, especially when the languages embodies a paradigm. We should all learn Haskell for its lazy functionalness, Lisp for its S-expressions (and its object system?), C for its explosive hackerishness, perl for its hmm.. well perhaps nots perl, Smalltalk for its "objects all the way down" approach. (I like to think of these languages as being on the extremes of the language space polytope). And when we're learning such languages we should attempt to be as idiomatic as possible, embracing the Haskell way to do Haskelly things and the Lisp way to do Lispy things. Then, having learnt to be an ace Haskell programming, that will make us better programmers in whatever language we choose when we want to actually get something done.
I'm beginning to wonder if golfing (perl golfing / C bumming / shell one-liners) has a place here too. No doubt about it if you want to produce witty terse code in any language you're gonna have to know your stuff. Maybe that's an example of honing a particular skill.
I have a funny feeling that I really ought to have listened more to the people that told me to read C.P.Snow.
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Programming languages - that's pretty much my approach too. My "languages to learn" list is roughly "More Haskell, for pure functional stuff; Lisp, for metaprogramming; Erlang, for concurrency; Smalltalk, for OO; J, for arrays; then Ruby, because it generally looks fun and would allow me to put many of the new ideas to work". But if you're going to learn all those different paradigms, maybe you also need to learn a really eclectic language like Perl so you know how to fit them all together :-)
[Pet peeve: [Pp]erl is case-sensitive. Perl is the language, perl is the interpreter.]
As for golfing, quite a lot of what I know about Perl/C/Haskell/shell comes from examining golfed or otherwise obfuscated code in those languages. As you say, to produce witty terse code you really have to know your stuff.
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Everyone should learn a language abuse too. Like writing an accounting package in TeX, or a full-screen editor in dc.
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[The "only perl can parse Perl" thing is no longer true (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/09/ppi.html), btw.]
As for multiple independent implementations, we all know how much fun it is trying to make code portable across multiple buggy implementations of an ambiguous spec :-) Seriously, specs have their good points, but so do implementation-defined languages (provided the implementation is widely-ported enough): for one thing, many questions about the language can be answered by simply trying it out, rather than by days of angels-on-pinheads sophistry with the language spec. These days, I reckon, Haskell is effectively defined by its implementation in GHC, but Haskell types are mostly of the "good => spec-defined" mindset, so make efforts to hide this fact.
Language abuse: absolutely. A full-screen editor in dc, eh? Hmmmm....
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From what little I know of the Haskell approach to specification, I found it a bit cheeky. One the hand they say "here's the specification of the language", on the other hand, it turns out that most of the specification is an implementation, in Haskell! You have to be very very careful when doing things like that to avoid accidentally specifying something that turns out to be: 1) unintended; 2) very inconvenient for the next person to implement; and, 3) accidentally relied on by all existing code.
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Interestingly, he also felt more like a dwarf pirate, where I like the idea of being a ninja elf...
So, when we talked about it, he objected to being given pointless things to do. Think General Studies and Compulsory RE. He had stories of certain US universities which apparently have special "Anthropology" courses, which are designed to be as easy as possible, so that physicists can get a minor on paper, while still spending most of their time doing physics.
I think I agree that half-hearted, forced things like that are pretty pointless. But I would really like to do an anthropology course... I'd probably want it to be a "proper" one though - not one designed to tick a box on a piece of paper. My housemate could understand that, when I talked about it that way - but he didn't want to join me :)
So, I reckon maybe there are people who work well that way, and people who don't... The generalists might be good at finding interdisciplinary things to study, while the specialists might be good at mining those things.
I do feel that the academic system is probably geared up to support specialism rather than generalism. There are places that seem to be providing an alternative... They do seem to feel quite lonely though.
So yeah - I like the idea. But I wouldn't like it to be a forced thing - just more easily available for those of us that like to work that way.
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That being said, I wouldn't have minded taking a "minor" in psychology, as a related degree, or architecture, or maybe linguistics. But I don't really see myself looking outside my field (Computer Science and Informatics) too far. though this could be because there's so much one can say about information that relates to computer science that maybe I see the world in that way.
I don't follow the "common" view that a humanities degree is "useless", but I don't see it as my particular cup of tea. So, yes, there's only *so* far that you can stray from your field before you lose interest completely.
That being said, I'm starting to learn Arabic now, though that's due to the country I'm in. I've already got my inner linguistics geek going.
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Hmm
Maybe I should seriously think about going to some lectures in other depts next year.
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Does it help? Oh course it does. Each subject trains your mind to think in a slightly different way, and if you can take one way of thinking and apply it to another area, you can be surprised at how differently you think about it. The one bit of contract law that now makes sense is the bit which talks about European conceptions, whereas before that was the one part I didn't understand.
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Dabblers and Blowhards
(Personally, I'm not much of a painter, so I can't really comment on how much painting and programming have in common.)
More generally, I certainly think that extra knowledge can come in handy. For instance, I remember watching a program about astronomy when I was a kid, and they showed someone who'd taken photos of the night sky on two different days. He then put those photos into a machine that would swap them back and forth at high speed, so he could tell if there were any significant changes (movement) because the relevant stars would flicker. Years later, I came to apply this technique to source code, since I could flick back and forth between two versions of the same file to see what had changed. (This was before I used a source control system.)
I also deliberately chose my A level subjects to be a mixture of art and science (Maths, Latin, English Lit), because I wanted to get a balance.
The problem is time, or the lack thereof. I have stacks of unread books/magazines in my flat, so any time that I devote to a new hobby (e.g. learning Japanese) is time that I can't spend learning about computers (e.g. VOIP).
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Yes. We should drink lots of water and cut out the alcohol. Performance-enhancing drugs should be banned, especially from exams and PhD vivas. We should wear shorts or track suits. Lecturers should use whistles that they wear round their necks to keep control in class. We should take lots and lots of vitamin supplements, and we and our journals should make lots of money from advertising them. Countries should compete for the right to host the ICM, and then design a hideous seizure-inducing logo when they are successful. And we should all retire at 35!
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Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner!
(This comment brought to you by Erdo-Vite Cerebellar Stimulants. Nine out of ten Fields medallists ask for them by name!)
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Juggling and theatre isn't a minor but it adds to a well rounded brain.
I think people who are in acedemia tend to take CLASSES and focus their academic work on their speicalty. However I have only very rarely (if ever) come across Academics who truly had no other intellectual pursuits outside their focus.
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I love that quotation - it's one of my favourite email signatures (http://samur41.org.uk/lad/sigfortune). I think I know how to do nine of those things...
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