Here is the money quote, I think:

t’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for “don’t give up on your dreams.” Stay upwind.

Without meaning to wreck the great intentions at this thread, there seems to be a good share of cabbies and hotel and restaurant personnel, with impressive liberal arts academic credentials (at least this seems true in NYC and some other major cities).

On the other hand, there’re some not so great paper credential folks who strike gold in liberal arts related work.

There’s no definite pattern. Much of the success is luck of the draw and/or being of the preferred slant.

If pressed, formally educated liberal arts folks can find decent paying work outside their main love, in a way that allows them to continue their passion.

I am glad you made these points:

1. That if you hate a subject you probably won’t do well in it. I would expand that to say that, even if you do well in it, why would you want a job based on that subject? You’ll just wind up hating your work. IMHO, better to make less money and enjoy what you do.

2. Having only an undergraduate degree in a hard science doesn’t give you much of an advantage.

You don’t see peak oil leading to immediate collapse of civilisation. That’s interesting coming from a poster to tod, where big names such as Gail and Nate are very much moving to that direction (eg latest thing about the two denialist articles http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5811). I’d be interested to know what you say in response to http://energyark.blogspot.com/2009/07/will-there-be-abrupt-collapse.html

Re-CS and peak oil. First, I don’t see peak oil leading to the immediate collapse of civilization – the period of greatest risk is after peak useful energy (“emergy”) and critical buildup of pollution levels.

But even if I’m wrong and we’re already on a steep downslope, then believe it or not math is every bit as useless as CS. Just who’s going to feed you for your knowledge of groups, number theory or the Black-Scholes model?

“Spencer has criticized academics at his Web site writing that he opted not to enter any PhD program because he “could see [in 1986] that Middle East Studies and other departments were becoming highly politicized and retreating from genuine academic work”.[1][39]“
[please delete the copy in wrong place below]

“Spencer has criticized academics at his Web site writing that he opted not to enter any PhD program because he “could see [in 1986] that Middle East Studies and other departments were becoming highly politicized and retreating from genuine academic work”.[1][39]“

“computer science and engineering are far more useful nowadays.”
I wonder if here your peak energy awareness is a bit shallow (or of course we all struggle to live up to the paradigm shift inplications)–maths came before corporatisation/oilisation and will long outlive it, unlike comp sci.

US not an authoritarian society? So you have got a sense of humo(u)r after all!

“somewhat greater freedom to approach non-scientific subjects from outside the established dogmas”
A somewhat big word at the beginning of that quote (albeit makes a nice change from the excellent fabulous etc norm of what usually comes from between Altantic and Pacific).

I’m reminded of the last email I got from Noam Chomsky in which he referred to the myth of political correctness. At which it was clear he was either a liar or an utter incompetent. Let’s just guess how many professors of Islamic studies there are who are critical of Islam, ooh, like say “Professor Robert Spencer”, now which college is he based at….

My reckoning is that the main difference between west and east is that the former are much better at believing their own propaganda, due to the capitalist natural selection process having strongly selected for successful (profitable) deceits and discarding the duds into bankruptcy. Meanwhile a small handful of us fall between the cracks in the machine and get our CVs mangled…

Re-math, even from a “philistine” perspective computer science and engineering are far more useful nowadays. (And in the case of the former, far more enjoyable than math IMO).

Which I suppose goes to show that you don’t need one for success.