Math matters both more and less than you think…
Yes, you can ignore math and be a highly paid professional programmer. Programming is a wide enough field that you can choose which areas you want to focus on – some of which do not require math – and still be successful. On the other hand:
Mathematics is the tool used to solve specialized problems, and
Programming is doing mathematics. more >>>
Following are excerpts of a conversation between Bari Weiss, Op-Ed staff editor and writer at The New York Times and the New York Tines best selling author Yuval Noah Harasi,
From 47:23 to 1:02:36
BW: "A young person comes to you, about to enter university, What do you tell them to study and how do you tell them to spend their time?"
YNH: "I would first of all say that nobody has any idea how the job market would look like in 2050. Anybody who tells you that they know how the job market will be and what kind of skills will be needed. They are probably either deluded or mistaken whatever, so just start with the understanding that it is unknown most probably you will have to inventing yourself repeatedly throughout your career, not just the idea of job for life, but the idea of professional for life, this is outdated. If you want to stay in the game, you will have to reinvent yourself repeatedly and you don't know what kind of skills you actually need. So the best investment is to invest in emotional intelligence, and mental resilience, or mental balance, because may be the most difficult problems will actually be psychological."
BW: "Anxiety and Stress".
YNH: "It's so difficult to reinvent yourself, to learn new skills. It's difficult when you are 20. It's much much more difficult when you are 40, and to think that you have to do it again, learn everything when you are 50, and again when you are 60, because you have a longer life span and longer careers. Emotional intelligence and mental stability and n=mental balance, I think will be the most important assets. The problem is, it's the most difficult thing to teach or to study. You can't read a book about emotional intelligence and say ok, now I know and most teachers they themselves are the product of the old system which emphasized particular skills and not this ability to constantly learn and reinvent yorurself, and keep your mental balance. So we don't have a lot of teachers who are able to teach these things.
BW: "But do you think that humanities and the classics have a role to play in that they are concerned with the big questions about the meaning of life and how to live a good life or are those now irrelevant?"
YNH: "As I said in the beginning they are more relevant than ever before, in many practical ways, because a lot of questions are going to migrate from department of philosophy to department of engineering and department of economics and questions like what do you really want to do with your life, are going to be far more practical than ever before, given the emmense powers that tehnology is giving us and the ability to change yoru body, to change your brain, is going to put enormous philosophical challenges in front of everage person. You need to make the kind of decisions, that for most of the history or the stuff of the thought experiments by the philosophers. What would you do if you could be this and if you could be that. For most of us, you couldn't. It's impossible. Why do you care about it? But in 20 years, 50 years, maybe you can. So in this sense, philosophy and humanity in general are, maybe more important than ever before. "
Question from the audience: "You talked about the importance of needing to reinvent yourself on multiple occasions in the future, that much of what will be learnt in school and college will now largely be irrelevant. Given the rise of nano degrees and coding camps and school oppotunities that are short in targeting at specific jobs, people still seem to require a four year degree in this country and when politicians talk about the education, system, they are talking about making that free or not free, but I am wondering if you see any signs that the four year college degree is changing or are we stuck with that in anything that's going to be layering on top of that. It seems to be a lot of money, a lot of time, to invest in something that will not really last you as long as it used to last.
YNH: "I think the entire education system is facing a huge crisis and it's really the first system that faces this growing crisis, because it needs to comfort the future, when you think about what to teach today in school or college, you have to think in terms of 2040 and we don't have the answers so if you talk to experts in educational fields, almost all of them will tell you that the system is becoming almost irrelevant but what can replace it, we just don't know. There are many experiments being done, they work, some of them quite well in small scale, but it's very difficult to scale it up. from the level of the experimental school to the elvel of an entire system with millions of teachers and tens of millions of students, I definitely don't have the answer. I don't think anybody at present have the answer. One of the problems is that we already have a system we don't start from scratch the inertia of the system is immense. You have all these buildings, you have all these teachers, you have all these bureaucrats. It's an immense system. I think this is the tip of the iceberg. Here we are encountering for the first tie this shock of the future world. It's too early to expect to have the answers. We hardly began the debate. in my impression is that the educational system to be relevant will have to switch from focusing on information and skills, and move to the direction on things like emotional intelligence or mental balance or learning how to learn and not learning a particular skill.
