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“You should’ve gone to the screening at CERN.”
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“If I have seen a pattern, among my students and my parental peers alike, it’s that parents who try to be someone that they’re not, pursuing a parenting style that doesn’t come from their own life experience, are the ones who will create the most psychic havoc for their children and for themselves. That’s the really pernicious thing about figures like Chua, or indeed most folks who try to sell a complete parenting philosophy to an anxious middle-class public, whatever the recipe they’re peddling. Parents who are trying too hard to do what bourgeois consensus views as the right thing, who are too sensitive to the glances and petty remarks around the edges of a PTO meeting, who peer surreptitiously around the living room of neighbors to spy out their domestic rituals[…]: those are the people whose kids are much more likely to massively disavow what they’ve been pushed or required to do, or to angrily lament the lack of earlier pushing or prodding by their permissive parents.”
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“[M]any of those who are proudest of the liberal arts make a point of contrasting liberal arts with those grubby, dirty “practical” fields like engineering and medicine and business. However, I would note that when people from math and science look for scholars to collaborate with, they are more likely to head over to the College of Engineering or College of Medicine than the Humanities and Social Science Building. Yes, there are exceptions, there are people studying ethical issues in science, there are biologists who collaborate with psychologists (a discipline that is on the border anyway), there are mathematicians who collaborate with economists, neuroscientists who have discussions with philosophers, and so forth. All of these are important. But, at the end of the day, we know which sorts of cross-cutting discussions are more frequent. So, those of us in the natural sciences certainly seem to have a lot in common with the heathens in those grubby, practical, unworthy fields.”