In high school, I predicted to my parents what I would be doing in the future, the kind of environment I would be working in, and even the demographics of the people I would be working with. But instead of helping me, my parents did everything they could to hinder me and prevent me from achieving my goals.
My predictions were quite reasonable, or so I thought. First, there would be a close collaboration between computer scientists and physicists to study some issues which are at the core of both fields; as a result, there would be a niche for people fluent in both fields who could facilitate communication between the two communities. Naturally, I thought that I should fill that role. Second, I would be working in close proximity specifically to astrophysicists; I will explain how I arrived at this conclusion in a later post. Third, the engineers and experimentalists in this combined community would include a disproportionately large number of Iranians; this was actually just one minor aspect of what I thought at the time about what the demographics of my future colleagues would be like, but it would turn out to be important later. I had classmates who wanted to become professional athletes, movie stars, or members of pop music bands, and their parents indulged them despite the unlikelihood of attaining their goals.
Before I discuss why I thought what I did in high school about the future of computer science research, I want to point out that the general public actually has a completely wrong idea of what computer science even is. I think Edsger W. Dijkstra summed up this misunderstanding best when he opined, “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” (Incidentally, while Dijkstra is famous as a computer scientist, he was trained as a theoretical physicist.) My experience has been that when most people who are not computer scientists hear the words “computer science”, they think of either computer applications or computer programming. This was especially true in the early to mid-1990s, when I was in high school, and a few years before the dot-com bubble burst. Whenever anyone heard that I was studying computer science, they would inevitably say things to me such as, “Oh, you must be really good at programming”, or — and this happened often enough to be quite irritating — “There’s something wrong with my Windows, can you fix it for me?”
Now, it happened that I was really good at programming, and I did fix their broken Windows — and I made good money doing both. But the point is that applied and theoretical computer science are really two separate (though related) fields, and lumping them together under one name is, I think, quite damaging to potential future graduate students in computer science. I have already mentioned this in a previous post. I was actively discouraged by my parents from studying topics during high school that I would later need for graduate school in computer science, on the grounds that they had “nothing to do with computer science”! Of course, when I did inevitably encounter the very same topics later, it made me very depressed and I couldn’t focus on my studies. (And to further rub salt into the wound, my parents would then accuse me of being “distracted”.)
I think that there are, generally, two kinds of high school students who end up entering graduate studies in computer science and related fields. The first enjoy reading popular books on science and mathematics, such as works by Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Raymond Smullyan, and Martin Gardner, to name but a few authors, and solving puzzles. The second spend a lot of time studying their textbooks and doing their schoolwork. I fell naturally into the first category — and besides, my teachers encouraged me to read by suggesting books and authors to me — but my parents kept pressuring me into the second. Every time they caught me reading something that didn’t look like a school textbook, they would tell me to stop “wasting my time” on “nonsense”.
When you’re trying to understand a difficult subject, you don’t want to be interrupted. You especially don’t want to have to be defending yourself against accusations that what you’re studying is “worthless” or a “waste of time”. I have already written much about how traditional Chinese culture is incompatible with science, and I think it bears re-iterating. No culture in which it is considered a sin to defy authority can ever sustain scientific development. Once my father had declared that certain topics had “nothing to do with computer science”, then they didn’t, and that was that — regardless of the facts.
My parents simply ignored everything I told them about how important certain topics were to my future career in computer science. After all, my father worked with computers, and he had never heard of any of the things I told them about, so they must be “worthless”. My mother’s attitude was that my father was always right and I should listen to him; I simply had to be wrong for no reason other than because “your father knows what he is talking about”. Eventually, I began to ignore them instead of defending myself whenever they ordered me to stop studying. When giving me an order once wasn’t enough, they began to interrupt me every several minutes in order to disrupt my concentration, so that I wouldn’t be able to study. And when that didn’t work, my father would scream at me, and eventually that escalated to hitting me. But that only happened a few times, because by then I had learned to hide my studies pretty well from them.
I think that there are certain ideas that a person has to be exposed to early on, if he or she is to understand them deeply, because they have to be ingrained into his or her very thought processes. One example of this is the idea that problems can be categorised into classes such that they are somehow “equivalent” within each class, and solving certain problems allows you to solve any of the problems in that class. The basic gist of the idea can, I think, be understood by a bright child even in elementary school, and most certainly by the time he or she is in high school. But once you have it, every time you see a problem you ask yourself, “What other problems is this one like?” or “Can a solution to this problem be used to solve any other problem?” It becomes a habit and affects the way you think. Anyone whose first exposure to this idea is in university is, I think, being exposed to it far too late.
The difference between the two kinds of high school students can be seen by the time they enter graduate school. Those who stuck to their textbooks typically study applied computer science or computer engineering. Theorists, on the other hand, tend to have read a lot of interesting books. This is all based on my admittedly unscientific observations, conversations with various graduate students, and an examination of the titles on their bookshelves. But I think it partially explains the abundance of students of Chinese cultural background in the applied areas and their paucity in the theoretical ones — because their parents prevented them from being exposed to ideas not found in high school textbooks.
– davinci
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