What bothers me about a liberal education that allegedly teaches critical thinking is they teach things that simply aren't true. For example, how can one have critical thinking skills yet firmly believe that Marxism works? There are no successful examples of Marxism - history is replete with its failure.
"Liberal" as a political term is wholly unrelated to the original meaning of liberal arts though it's unsurprising that the two things are being conflated, even by people teaching at the college level.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
Try to not throw the baby out with the bath water while sorting this out for your personal edification.
> while sorting this out for your personal edification.
I wasn't rude to you, and rudeness won't bolster your case.
> Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
The difference is that, with a STEM degree, if you design an airplane and it doesn't fly then you're wrong. There's no way to delude oneself into thinking one's design works.
There's no such corrective force with liberal arts.
There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena. It's just not easy.
It's not easy with science either. Plane crashes killed people like some Cthulhu horror tearing planes out of the sky before they realized square windows create stress points when flying at jet speeds which eventually destroy the plane.
People died because of that design flaw and it wasn't immediately obvious why.
I quoted the line you used. Show it to your friends and ask them if they think it is rude or not, without saying you wrote it.
> There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena ... it's not easy with science either
Liberal arts majors are particularly bad at it. I doubt they are even aware of what the scientific method is, or how to implement it. We all know that a survey can get wildly varying results depending on exactly how the questions are worded. I also see plenty of liberal arts surveys that use too few samples to get statistical validity, along with clearly wrong interpretations of the statistics. The lack of statistics being a required course for a liberal arts degree is just another glaring problem with liberal arts programs.
As for the DeHaviland Comet crashes, allow me to clarify. The problem with finding the cause was the airplane would disintegrate at high altitude with no warning, and all there was was a rain of debris. Once they gathered up all the pieces, and reconstructed the airplane from the debris, it was immediately obvious that the fault originated in the window corners, and any structural engineer knew why. They then conducted experiments to confirm it.
The problem was not "jet speeds". It was the pressurization/depressurization cycles from flying up to 30,000 feet and then down, resulting in fatigue damage. Square corners are "stress risers" meaning the stress in a square corner is 3x the stress in the rest of the material. The problem did not occur with propeller airliners because they flew at lower altitudes either unpressurized or with little pressurization.
A fix was devised - make the corners round, and a forged doubler was riveted over it. Then this was also tested, and proved sound. And it works because sound methods of design, analysis, and testing was done.
There is simply no comparison with how these things are done in aviation engineering vs liberal arts.
P.S. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aeronautical/Aerospace, and I did design work on the 757, and have a particular interest in crashes and their causes.
