Eigenmumbles

I listened to a fair amount of Weird Al Yankovic when I was young. It has been a while, but some things stick with me – most relevant for this post, the song “I lost on Jeopardy”, which features Weird Al playing Jeopardy (badly) against “a plumber, and an architect, both with a Ph.D.” It seems like an appropriate response to a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education in a vein that I tend to think of as the “Oh, the humanities!” genre. The premise of “Big Brains, Small Minds” is that the humanities uniquely provide students with patience, wisdom, and an interest in meaningful questions, while “STEM culture” is ruthlessly pragmatic and unreflective, leading to “a search for the ‘right’ answer” and a “disordered mind.”

I think our students should read Plato and other philosophers (I’m more fond of Marcus Aurelius). I also think they should learn enough about mathematics, science, and engineering to appreciate how we ask questions. Mathematicians do not spend their days adding columns of numbers, nor do most scientists and engineers spend their days carefully heating test tubes or building concrete walls. The accusation that we “knew all the answers, but we couldn’t get the questions right” is as ignorant as it is condescending.

What lessons should one take away from such writings? Perhaps the main thing is that we ought to teach the methods of questioning early in the curriculum in any area. What do we assume? Why should we believe our models? What are the limitations of what we know now, and how does that affect the questions we ask? What are the limitations of what we can know, whether in practice or in theory, and how do those limits affect the questions we ask? When is the whole simpler than the sum of the parts, and when is it more complex?

And, from my seat in a computer science department, this essay has helped me put a finger on one of the things that has always bothered me about “computational thinking.” Is computational thinking about “solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science?” Of course it is. But computational thinking is also about the types of questions we ask, how we think about the difficulty of those questions, and so much more. When we look at faculty candidates, we judge their taste based on the questions they pursue. When we mentor students, we emphasize that the right question makes the difference between an exciting result and a boring one – good technique is usually necessary to make for interesting research, but is not sufficient. Beauty matters. Simplicity matters. Ethics matter. I enjoy problem-solving, but why should I cede the joy of question framing to the humanities? Questioning should be a joy for all fields. By starting from the answer, we sell ourselves short.