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Quoting machine

gracias a David por este link http://www.scottaaronson.com/teaching.pdf

del cual quotearia el pdf entero, pero par ser mas preciso:


Whenever students are taking our courses not out of intellectual curiosity but to fulfill the requirements for a degree, we will always
be fighting an uphill battle. Not even the clearest, best-organized lecturer on earth can get around a fundamental fact: that the typical student headed for a career at Microsoft (i) will never need to know
the Master Theorem, (ii) knows she’ll never need to know the Master Theorem, (iii) doesn’t want to know the Master Theorem, and (iv) will immediately forget the Master Theorem if forced to learn it.
Faced with this reality, I believe the best service we can provide for non-theory students is to teach them theoretical computer science essentially as a liberal-arts course. Aspiring computer scientists
should know that they will not be glorified toaster repairmen, but part of a grand intellectual tradition stretching back to Euclid, Leibniz, and Gauss. They should know that, in Dijkstra’s words, “computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” —that the quarry we’re after is not a slightly-faster C compiler but a deeper understanding of life, mind, mathematics, and the physical
world. They should know what the P versus NP question is asking and why it’s so difficult. They should be regaled with stories of Turing’s codebreaking in World War II, and of Gödel writing a letter to the dying von Neumann about “a mathematical problem of which your opinion would very much interest me.” They should be challenged as to whether they would have had the insights of Edmonds, Cook, Karp, and Valiant, had they lived a few decades earlier. And they should be prepared to appreciate future breakthroughs in theoretical computer science on the scale of Shor’s algorithm or Primes in P. From the discussions at websites such as Slashdot, it’s clear that the “general nerd public” has enormous curiosity about these breakthroughs, and it’s also clear that the level of curiosity greatly exceeds the level of understanding.

por favor el hecho de que diga microsoft por ahí no tiene nada que ver con mi interés por el párrafo.

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