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Viliam comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I've noticed a lot of disciplines, particularly ones that sometimes have to justify their value, often make a similar claim:
"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"
This raises some interesting questions:
I can believe, for example, that Art History instils in its students some useful habits of thought, but I suspect they're less general than those from a discipline with an explicit problem-solving focus. What kind of scheme could one construct to score the meta-cognitive skills learned from a particular subject?
Are there any subjects which are particularly unlikely to make this claim? Are any subjects just composed of procedural knowledge without any overarching theory, cross-domain applicability, or necessary transferable skills?
Are there particularly potent combinations of skills, or particularly useless ones? It seems that a Physics degree and a Maths degree would have similar "coverage" in terms of thinking habits they instil, but a Physics degree and a Law degree would have much broader coverage. "I have technical skills, but I also have people-skills" is a fairly standard contemporary idea. Do Physics and Law have strikingly different coverages because Physics Lawyers don't really need to exist?
I would interpret that claim as: "we may be practically useless, but we are still fucking high-status!" :D
The claim isn't just made with arguably useless disciplines, though. Many people argue (quite rightly, IMO) that programming doesn't just teach you to command machines to do your bidding, but also instils powerful thinking tools. So even if kids don't grow up to be software developers, it's still valuable for them to learn programming. Similar arguments could be made for law or finance.
Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would "feel" like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization.
There's no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.
Could you make that argument for finance? I see that learning finance is very useful for personal financial decisions but how does it provide use beyond that?
Obviously "finance" is a very wide area that covers a lot of different ideas, but my observation of "finance people" is that they have a powerful mental vocabulary for thinking about what kind of a value something is and what can be done with it over time. For example: the difference between stock values and flow values, expected return of a portfolio of assets, the leveraging of credit, the mitigation of risk.
More generally, they seem to be able to look at some number assigned to a thing, and observe that it's morphologically similar to some other number assigned to some different thing, and understand what sort of things can happen to both those numbers, and what sort of process is required to turn one sort of number into another sort of number.
Finance is about marshalling resources and using them to efficiently create a lot more wealth. Since wealth is at minimum the thing that keeps us from working 24/7 on getting enough food to eat, and generally gives us the kind of free time we need to invent AIs, post on message boards, have hobbies, and try to get the hot chicks, it can be quite useful even for a non-wall-street worker. Think of finance as the thing that keeps you from carrying a balance on your credit card or buying lottery tickets as investments.
That's not an argument for the claim that finance skills instill thinking tools that are useful in other domains. It's just an argument that finance skills are useful.