You’ve made me feel much better about my messy desk. 
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I recall a professor once observing that there seemed to be a negative correlation between how much people tried to put on their crib sheets and the mark they got.
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I read it that he doesn’t personally see value in those areas and doesn’t need to appreciate them in order to be fulfilled in life or show humanity, i.e. a refutation of a possible suggestion that there are ‘human’ and ‘scientific’ areas of existence that are mutually exclusive:
I don’t agree if the point was that humanities are no value to anyone, but I do think that specialisation is good at times and that general cultural knowledge (or knowledge of electronics, for example) is not necessarily vital to everyone.
I agree, in fact I’d say crib sheets are often an important way to teach you more lasting skills outside of school. As others have pointed out, basic information is not difficult to come by nowadays - you can easily carry the important facts with you in your job or find them if you don’t have them, but the skill comes in learning how to use them (for example, recognising where you can use an equation and correctly using it, putting dates and names in context in order to explain events, possibly using a summary of a text written by someone else in order to gain tools to better understand a different text, etc.). The idea that the subject is about the Cliff’s Notes summary or the crib sheet is missing the point.
It probably depends on how you do it - some forms of cheating subvert the idea of a school being a place where teachers dispense knowledge to their students. Sometimes the creativity used may not benefit that particular subject, but it’s a good sign that you can use lateral thinking to get results. Sometimes innovation is a form of finding ways around the established rules, and ‘doing things properly’ may be a waste of time if you can make a program that can do it in a fraction of the time or find ways of achieving success with less effort. I suppose it depends on what your objective is with humanities, as their value is often difficult to quantify. A lot of students don’t have a lot of time for the literature or history that they’re taught in school, so ‘cheating’ by checking friends’ work or finding ways of smuggling information into the class is better than rewording Cliff’s Notes and probably teaches you more.
You do get a lot of people who say “I never used the knowledge of [subject] in my life, it’s useless” (and often they’re talking about maths or science). I have gained value from most subjects I studied in school (although a lot of that value came from studying the topic in my own time rather than sitting in classes - thank you Khan Academy, evening courses at college and the various language learning websites!). I wonder how much value people are missing in their lives because they/we don’t even see where it could apply.
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The advanced math I was forced to study in order to qualify for my degree has been utterly useless to me, and I long ago forgot everything I so painfully learned in Calculus IV. I never used it when I was a rocket scientist, I never used it when I was a process engineer, I never used it when I was at the Academy, and I don’t ever use it now.
However, the stuff I learned in history class has been a constant source of insight into modern day events and personalities. I remember Dr. Thomas’s witty and entertaining lectures quite fondly.
I think uselessness is relative. Any math past algebra is useless to me, but knowing the Xian bible has been a great advantage. That’s just how my life has happened to work out, and others will have different lives.
Back on topic, I took copious notes and never read them, and made crib sheets and didn’t bother to take them to the test. The act of writing and condensing helped cement the facts in my mind so I didn’t need the notes or crib sheets afterwards.
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On the contrary, the “hard” sciences are the same for everybody. Despite the outward richness, the underlying background is the same for everybody. Physics works the same across space and time. The same alloy with the same composition and thermal treatment and mechanical history will have the same behavior everywhere (and if not, we hit something interesting and/or missed a variable). Literature, on the contrary, is subject of the whims of interpretations, to local cultural and historical biases - you can get several different interpretations from the same text. (This was how I was getting out of lit interpretation assignments - guessing or asking a classmate what I was supposed to say, then making a logically bulletproof construction that was something entirely different.)
A physics or math book has one interpretation. You then have the exercises that you can go through and test if you got it right. No such way with literature, which is way too arbitrary and subjective, with too much “wiggle space”.
Literature is a rather convoluted way to get there. I learned more about human behavior from Konrad Lorenz’s animal etology books than from all the low and high lit I managed to read.
In comparison with behavioral studies, both on animals and humans, and with harder approaches like game theory, literature feels to me like going a curvy, tortuous maze without a map instead of going directly to the targets.
But it may work for some. (But if it was on me, I’d let people get familiar with the “harder” ways of seeing the world, and only then go with the more interpretation-sensitive ones.)
Not that harsh. I just don’t believe it is an effective enough way.
It depends. I never cheated in the subjects where I felt the need to learn and understand. I tried in the others too, but then I realized that F with effort is easily beaten with D with cheating, and the effort can be spent on the other subjects. Sacrificing one for improving the other further.
And it paid off. For the sample of last 20 years, Knowing local poets was of no use beyond at-the-toilet crosswords, while knowing some beyond-the-curriculum details of drafting, namely how to draw a semicomplex parts assembly of a vertical turbine with ball bearings, made a fairly big difference just a few years ago. Only one specific example of many.
Of course knowing both would be better, but the former just refused to stick in my memory with any reasonable amount of effort. I could get the names, the works, the dates, but never the pairings between them - the logic that would glue them together wasn’t there. And I intended my career path to be in a lab or in a workshop, so I prioritized accordingly because the amount of time was limited. Hence cheating as the right way to accomplish the goal.
That can be achieved in more condensed form with less noise, by resorting to at least the summaries and conclusions of various studies. But in comparison with understanding the working of the world/universe itself on the low level, it is a lower-priority icing on a cake anyway. At the end, all the progress boils down to engineering anyway - whether agricultural or building or materials or any other flavor. The state of engineering (together with other non-negotiable factors, e.g. geography and geology) determines the key resources available, which determine the hard limits of any system. Everything else must happen within these limits.
It describes the path. In many cases in a rather incomplete way, and often the key points are determined by something totally random (okay, chaotic).
How? (Also, isn’t empathy needed more for the present? The past generations are mostly sniffing the flowers’ bottoms and can’t care less.)
Beware of false understandings. Correlation that pokes out like a sore thumb may still not be causation.
It’s being said that a physicist can find a couch to crash on for a night in any bigger city in the world, due to various acquittances from conferences/congresses. Also a form of community, I’d say.
This is true about roughly any field.
We are also physical creatures. Misjudging a bearing capacity of a chair leg (and then getting one’s face rearranged by the floor or wall), or scalding one’s mouth by biting into the lava-hot center of a just-microwaved jelly donut is a failure of basic physics comprehension (in the first case a common Newtonian mechanics together with basic material behavior, in the second case of microwave absorption and heat conduction) leaves actual physical damage that lack of historical knowledge cannot provide. The possible argument that people can vote in a warmongering goon if they do not know history fails on people’s susceptibility to PR/propaganda/advertising (in way too many cases you can play the crowds like a violin) and the Wilson’s election on the basis of his antiwar promises and subsequent birth of modern PR (Bernays, I am looking at YOU!) and the US people support for WW1 is a nice example. (Now, humanities, how would you suggest to counteract these effects? How to get people thinking? Questioning? Making and killing hypotheses? …and we’re back at the cold logic even if I did not want to when starting this part.)
The STEM fields are the concrete platform on which everything else has to be built if it should not sink into a quagmire of subjectivity.
I even do some art. But I don’t consider it important beyond feels-good is-fun playing with different materials; my molten-glass works stemmed from an attempt to fuse glass and copper for the purposes of vacuum-tight passthroughs.
Oh? Howso? Why? 
I would classify it as mostly correct. I actually see some value in the non-STEM fields, I just prioritize them rather low. (Aka it’s not so important but if you like it, do it, as long as I am not forced to do it too.)
And as long as the world is adhering to causality, which it mostly seems to be doing and the rest seems to be an observation error, the engineering approach will be giving decent results.
True that. Basic physics (not the equations but the elementary “feel” for the non-negotiable rules the physical world plays by) and basic engineering (in case of electronics knowing the concept of wired and wireless signal transport, having rough idea there is something like radiofrequency bands, and how such things mesh together) is vital for at least rough navigation of the tech-based world. And details like devices having the tendency to work better when they are plugged in and switched on. With such very basics, the very concepts, the details can be taken in rather quickly. A physics/engineering equivalent of basic literacy.
And a deeply ingrained habit of looking stuff up. When I was a kid it meant a trip across the room and climbing a chair to get to the three-volume encyclopedia. Now we have terminals everywhere and there is no reason to not check things up. This is again a very generic skill/habit.
Above that level, it is not so important who goes along what path. And familiarity with cause-effect relations, ingrained from the tech fields, together with e.g. ability to differentiate between observation and interpretation, and integrating knowledge by relations to already known (and demanding to be told the relations where not obvious) instead of the so-favored-by-students blind remembering-forgetting cycles I so despised, will be helpful in all of them.
Shouldn’t teachers ideally just guide students along so they get the knowledge on their own? (Another generic skill…?)
I sucked in calculus hard. 
Should revisit it. At least to check if the sight of the dancing snakes would still make me sleep. And matrices, these seem to be rather useful.
(Rocket scientist. Wow! What subsystems? Process engineer, what kinds of plants? [nosy])
In some subjects, no amount of writing/reading helped me. The things just weren’t sticking together. In others, single reading was enough to remember and integrate. Weird.
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If you get really good at just one thing, all of a sudden no one cares how you little you know about anything else. If not one of the various researchers who independently discovered carbon nanotubes never realized that Lewis Caroll had written two versions of a young girl in a magical land, it most likely doesn’t mean anything. If a professional writer has utter contempt for all technology and social media more advanced than an Underwood No 5 typewriter, all we care about is when his next book is coming out. And if your particular talent is putting a ball through an apparatus, someone will hand you a diploma.
Learning as much as you can about the world around you is certainly preferable and – though far from guaranteed – will make you a more rounded person, It just can’t be expected of everyone. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn the same thing in another way. Joe Back wrote a book called “Horses, Hitches, and Rocky Trails”, a work on the proper way to secure your cargo to pack horses. He didn’t seem like the type who had read Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance”, but he had presented the same lesson about confident people who were totally helpless once outside their element. Where you learn the lesson isn’t nearly as important as whether you actually did learn the lesson.
I was once with a group of people when one of them said, “I’ll tell you, you’ll never have as unique a group of friends as you’ll have in college.” Everyone was in agreement, but that’s true no matter where you spend the same amount of time, whether it’s academia or with carney folk. I knew an immigrant from Guatemala who had never been in trouble with the law until he got to America. His stories about his life and journey were more interesting to listen to than what I’ve heard from so-called educated people who could quote Hemingway.
When the engineers at GE Aerospace call my brother for advice, all they care about is his reputation and their working history with him. They don’t care that he had never been to college, so he didn’t have to suffer through those classes only to forget them in the first place, and skating on a few subjective literature tests wouldn’t have made any difference. I read more than anyone else in my family and I’ve been published a couple of times, but I’m not the one who measured across the canyon behind our house by doing the trigonometry in my head. I make fun of his creative spelling and he reminds that his calculator is bigger than mine.
One’s character has little to do with where one gets a degree in animal husbandry.
And, yeah, I pictured you taller. 
Twas a joke, the video gives no idea of your height, as I recall, you’re seated throughout.
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Agreed! But that doesn’t mean educated people can’t be cool, too. Again, this isn’t about “academia/humanities” are “better”, but that it matters…
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