Article URL: https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131034 Points: 22 # Comments: 16

In college, I took a religious studies class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons: I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it. The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And… We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors! At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use? I loved that course, but thought it had no particular relevance to my career as a software developer…until I started encountering text like this (from a presentation by Lenore Zuck): Section 2.7.6: Security (~ page 10) “If the system sends a signal hot then send a message to the operator.” Section 9.3.4: Temperatures (~ page 150) “If the system sends a signal hot and T>600, then send a message to the operator.”