Engineering colleges and limits on human power

From my living room, I have a good view of a hill on which stands a college campus. The college is focused on architecture, engineering, and the sciences, although, this being the US, it also offers degrees in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

My undergraduate degrees were conferred by a similar institution, although one where the humanities and social sciences were, for the most part, relegated to a service department. It lies on the side of a mountain - my legs were much stronger when I was forced to climb up and down from classes back then.

Isn't that a bit curious, however? Why is that one college on a hill, why is the other on the side of a mountain? Surely it would be more convenient for the students and faculty if the college were at the same level as the city's downtown, where some of the dorms are, and surely my alma mater would have been much more accessible if it were on a flat surface. These are engineering-dominated colleges - surely if any body would have the knowledge and ability to turn that hill, that slope, into a conveniently flat surface, it would be these.

And yet, there are limits. Despite the fact that humanity is almost defined by its ability to redesign its environment, in practice, often we work with what's in front of us. We will build a road around or over a hill instead of tunneling through, we will accept a given coastline to build along, instead of filling it in or digging it out. When we don't, sometimes we regret it - climate change with its hotter, more acidic, higher sea levels will likely destabilize neighborhoods built on reclaimed land.

We currently live in a world that is full of environments that are close enough to what we can live with that we are able to engineer them to our comfort, or at least, to our survival. When we leave the Earth and try to live in outer space, or in other planets, the whole situation is different. A system's failure doesn't just require us to accept slightly harsher conditions, and maybe retreat to a safer environment - it will likely mean death. We don't even have to go to space - going too far into the ocean is dangerous enough in that sense.

I think we should respect the limits, to understand that we have them. Our imagination may be free, but we should constrain it so that it leads us into improvements of what can be done, not paths forward that might eliminate all of our margins of error.

Podcasts do not replace higher education

When I was in undergrad, there were a bunch of classes I was required to take. Some of them, like Discrete Math or Introduction to Programming, I took to immediately. Others, like Calculus/Analysis, I struggled with. It took me all of Calculus1 and a bit of Calculus 2 to finally understand the power of epsilon-delta proofs. That shift in thinking has served me to this day, even though I am doing very practical things.

That was a more obvious exposure to very different ways of thinking, but I also had very different professors, with very different ideas of how to teach and learn, and how to think.

These days there is a plethora of podcasts about academic and technical topics, in all fields of the humanities, sciences, engineering, and so forth. Each podcast has a whole community around it, with people forming relations and developing intellectually under the podcasters` purview. Some people might think that this is a substitute for a college degree, and with the cost of higher education being as it is these days, it's understandable that they might prefer to spend a fraction of the cost to financially support their favorite teachers.

But every field, I think, has a variety of subfields and approaches. And no single academic, not even a small group thereof, is going to give a beginner the exposure to all of these that an actual degree from a university program would. Even when these people are fully open about their own biases, they are not going to be able to present other views like someone who actually held them.

I would like to think of myself as mature enough, seeing as I have been exposed to different views in academia and outside of it, to take a contrary stance to existing podcasts. I know that I usually will listen to them, maybe immerse myself in their community, but then tire of the repetition and the limitations, and either leave or at least make sure to expose myself to other attitudes. But I worry about those who seem to fit in too well.

Science sometimes involves a lot of serious arguments about methodology, theoretical frameworks, occasionally facts. Cultural criticism can come from many directions, some of them incompatible with each other, and their interaction with cultural practice can be a bit difficult. Technology advances, changes, and occasionally old, washed-out ideas become new again, while other times the cutting edge leads absolutely nowhere.

While you will end up with your own biases and specializations, you shouldn't let yours be completely dictated by a specific choice of community that came when you were the most impressionable, and most able to understand things differently, if you were given the opportunity, or forced to.