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Universities should be more than toll gates

(www.waliddib.com)
140 points wdib | 3 comments | 21 Sep 25 07:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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artemonster ◴[21 Sep 25 10:02 UTC] No.45321420[source]▶
I get my blood pressure to dangerous levels each time I stumble upon some high quality video lectures on youtube that explain some topics that were totally fucked in university, like PID control. 30 Minute video made by some amateur with cool animations explains basically 95% of everything you need to know vs old lifeless dork professor at "elite" university mumbling some nonsense and throwing walls of formulas with zero context, explanation or examples to help you understand. And in the end, your uni knowledge is at most 5% applicable in your work, you are still totally unprepared to enter the workforce and your first employer carries the burden to teach you.
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general1465 ◴[21 Sep 25 10:17 UTC] No.45321472[source]▶
> throwing walls of formulas with zero context, explanation or examples

This rings so true for me. Lot of teachers has this ass backwards style of teaching where they will come up with final formula like deus-ex machina. Why? To buy his text book where it is explained the way he wants it.

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1. Almondsetat ◴[21 Sep 25 10:58 UTC] No.45321674[source]▶
Many formulas you use are the apex of months of research from the best minds of the last centuries. Every explanation is a deus-ex machina ordeal
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2. general1465 ◴[21 Sep 25 11:08 UTC] No.45321733[source]▶
You can summarize years or even centuries of research into a some digestible steps with length of less than a average lesson. Months of research does not mean that I need to read your whole research journal from start to finish to understand what research was about and what it reached.

But that often expects that the person explaining a thing knows what they are talking about. I.e. people on high school does not like logarithms because they don't understand what it is for. I would bet that's because teachers themselves have absolutely 0 clue what in essence is a logarithm and why did it came to be. It was centuries of research, which you can summarize with one sentence - to make multiplication as simple as addition with lookup tables, because at 15th century they did not have calculators so multiplication was a hard laborious process. 135+265 is simple. 135*265 is difficult.

3. imtringued ◴[21 Sep 25 12:44 UTC] No.45322221[source]▶
Many people have hard won ideas, that doesn't make them valuable though.

Given a flood of results, you look at the most promising results and then figure out how they work, not the other way around.

Almost all successes are built on having knowledge of a desirable outcome first and foremost, rather than the means to obtain them.