Can one really think straight if one hasn't undergone rigorous training ....

[nomadd]

I'm not necessarily suggesting that a university course in a hard subject is the only way to learn to think logically, but it certainly helps.

Point taken. But I'm not so sure...

I remember one girl on my course who got the best grades in the written exams every year. The grades were everything to her, as her father and mother were both teachers and therefore expected the 'best' from their daughter at Uni. Truth be told, she was a thick as two planks when it came to the lab work on the course - where you were set a challenge and had to think for yourself and deliver a working solution. Clearly the course wasn't helping her to learn any thinking skills; in fact, she got a first, so the actual lack of thinking seemed paradoxically to help her enormously.

So I don't believe anyone learns to think at Uni. - in fact I'd actually argue quite the opposite. Maybe at PHD level this changes, but undergraduates are rarely called upon to think.

A second example would be the "offshore experts" I spent last week with in a major Investment Bank. It proved next to impossible to explain to them why a "global sequence number" in a distributed, highly parallelised system was a very bad idea (severely limits scalabilty - that was the problem I was fixing for them; and is meaningless as a "point in time" recovery mechanism - which was why they'd added it in the first place.) Now, these were are "bright chaps" with "good degrees", but their ability to think was clearly deficient. Their respective educations hadn't taught them to think; a few more years in the industry will hopefully reverse that (but in my experience, it probably won't.)

[OwlHoot]

Al least Vince Cable has one great idea, IMO: the need for a coherent industrial policy.

Vince Cable is wonderfully good at looking and sounding like a wise old bird, whose opinions and pronouncements are so eminently sensible they are practically beyond question, and he fools a lot of gullible people (including you it seems).

But in fact any insider will tell you he's as stupid as an ox, and about as knowledgeable as one in economics.

Whenever a peacetime Government has tried to formulate and finance an "industrial policy", it is a disastrous waste of time and money and talent which ends up doing more harm than good. Like everything he says, it sounds fine in principle but is actually complete and utter bollox.

[sasguru]

Point taken. But I'm not so sure...

I remember one girl on my course who got the best grades in the written exams every year. The grades were everything to her, as her father and mother were both teachers and therefore expected the 'best' from their daughter at Uni. Truth be told, she was a thick as two planks when it came to the lab work on the course - where you were set a challenge and had to think for yourself and deliver a working solution. Clearly the course wasn't helping her to learn any thinking skills; in fact, she got a first, so the actual lack of thinking seemed paradoxically to help her enormously.

So I don't believe anyone learns to think at Uni. - in fact I'd actually argue quite the opposite. Maybe at PHD level this changes, but undergraduates are rarely called upon to think.

A second example would be the "offshore experts" I spent last week with in a major Investment Bank. It proved next to impossible to explain to them why a "global sequence number" in a distributed, highly parallelised system was a very bad idea (severely limits scalabilty - that was the problem I was fixing for them; and is meaningless as a "point in time" recovery mechanism - which was why they'd added it in the first place.) Now, these were are "bright chaps" with "good degrees", but their ability to think was clearly deficient. Their respective educations hadn't taught them to think; a few more years in the industry will hopefully reverse that (but in my experience, it probably won't.)

I think the point you're making here is that rote learning (as practised by your anecdotal friend and most certainly in the educational systems on the sub-continent) produces people with paper qualifications.
There'll always be those people without a sense of enquiry or interest in the subject who cram for exams and it is indeed possible to pass some exams in this way (although I would argue from my experience that my first degree (Engineering) wouldn't allow you to get a 1st by paper learning only, since so many marks came from projects).
So I would argue that it is not a rigorous degree, one that allows you to do well by rote learning alone.

[sasguru]

Whenever a peacetime Government has tried to formulate and finance an "industrial policy", it is a disastrous waste of time and money and talent which ends up doing more harm than good. Like everything he says, it sounds fine in principle but is actually complete and utter bollox.

Well I was looking at this and it doesn't seem to be true.
Look at the Rolls Trent engine for example.
Or the Olympics success which was to get a group of talented people and through organisation make them world-beaters?
Could it be that we simply haven't tried hard enough or well enough?

It's certainly not true in competitor countries and as I have pointed out before most life changiing advances have been created by the public sector: penicillin, the atomic bomb, the internet and the WWW etc.

Edit: Interesting too that you mention peacetime. Wartime governments seem very efficient probably because it concentrates the mind. So it seems to be a question of will.

[shaunbhoy]

Never mind the "thinking straight" aspect. Did you have to be trained to be an antisocial twunt or is it simply some genetic trait?

[sasguru]

Never mind the "thinking straight" aspect. Did you have to be trained to be an antisocial twunt or is it simply some genetic trait?

It's probably genetic, bit like your low IQ.

[TestMangler]

I'm a tester; I'm not supposed to think straight. I find the crap in a system by thinking and acting in ways that you wouldn't want a user to do.


At least, that's my excuse.

And I'm a test manager, so I watch you

[doomage]

It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.


I got that from a book I read.

[cojak]

I thought that Philosophy gave you a grounding in critical thinking (the Socratic Method an' all that...)

[nomadd]

So I would argue that it is not a rigorous degree, one that allows you to do well by rote learning alone.

Well, as someone who spent five years at College doing an HNC in Automotive Engineering before going to Uni. for three years to do a Comp. Sci. degree, I guess I've covered both the profiles you raise. I honestly still don't believe any undergraduate course really aims to teach 'rigorous training in thinking', which is the question your thread title raises.

In fact, I'm not really sure you actually can rigorously train people to think, and keep thinking for life. I think (no pun intended) that you are either born with an inquisitive mindset or you are not (controversial, I agree.) Most of the people I've met in my life - even in I.T., which attracts brighter minds than most industries - are simply not thinkers. And no amount of rigorous training will ever change that, IMHO.

The best that any of us can hope is that by thinking through a problem we can convince the non-thinkers of the validity of our solutions. And then invoice them for it.