The recent thread "Haskell is not category theory" on Y Combinator includes thoughtful comments by "epgui" beginning with:
| The number of times I’ve heard someone say that some academic topic was not helpful and they were right is close to zero. It’s a pretty good heuristic to not adopt that attitude. |
after some pushback, epgui expands that:
Indeed you’re free to ignore my perspective, which is just what my comment offered… But this is something I’ve seen play out over and over and over again.
It probably started all the way back in high school with people in the back of the class asking how all this high school maths would help them in real life. Then you get to university and people ask the same in just about every class. Then you get to industry and all the people who had that attitude growing up are calling you for help (and the people who still have that attitude seem to stop learning, or learn at much lower velocity).
It’s always more obvious in hindsight, and particularly with maths: stuff always seems kinda useless before you deeply understand it. That’s unfortunate, because it severely hampers the motivation to learn the stuff in the first place… But it is what it is, I guess.
Even pure mathematicians, who have every incentive to see their own work as immensely useful, are notorious for frequently having no idea just how useful and applicable their work will be in the future (albeit usually over longer time horizons).
My experience is that this is even more true for cross-disciplinary applications, as either discipline naturally is unaware of the perspective of the other discipline. It’s true that it’s important/necessary to specialize deeply and narrowly, but the value of cross-disciplinary skills (especially regarding maths) is probably under-appreciated, IMO.
(cf Applied Category Theory (2019-04-24), More Meta (2019-08-31), Mantra - Be More Meta (2020-01-02), Systems Thinking in a Nutshell (2022-11-05), ...) - ^z - 2023-02-06