Tam mentioned that she and her boyfriend were talking about their perceptions of various college majors. (She also said she might blog on this, but she hasn't yet, so I am anticipating her by talking about my experience first.)
People tend to have incorrect assumptions about both of my college majors:
"Economics...that's about money."
"Psychology...why people are depressed or crazy or whatever."
In both cases, WRONG. Not that there aren't people who do study those particular topics, but they are not the central, or even most important, aspects of the fields. Both subjects would exist without money or insanity. All you need is scarcity and want for economics; psychology just requires people (or arguably, just some kind of animal that does things).
I have almost zero interest in money (mine, yours, the federal government's, anybody's; I'm a totally lazy investor who gets by through a combination of mooching, cheapness, and various good habits) and only a passing interest in craziness per se (though I did enjoy my job in psychiatric research, that was mostly about the research - I got to look at construct validity of DSM categories and evaluate programs and that sort of thing). Yet I enjoyed majoring in psychology and economics. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that I did not take a single class on money or abnormal psychology in the process.
What do people assume the field(s) you studied was about? Were they right? Were you right or did you find out later that the subject was something other than what you expected?
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Psychology was one of the examples I was going to use, but I didn't think of economics.
In my life, I have majored in, though not in all cases received a degree in, Mechanical Engineering, Economics, and Statistics. I have seen many an eye glaze over, but I don't think most of them had a particularly wrong view of what engineering entailed. Economics, is another issue, in that most people do think it is mostly about making money, and most people think they know more about it than they do. (No one seriously expects to be able to build a bridge. Diagnose the ills of the macroeconomy, sure.) As to stat, it is both understood and trusted about as much as the peasants understood the court magicians - most people don't so much think it is obvious as that it is hokum.
Yeah, I figure if the combined brain power of Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, et al., don't really understand the macroeconomy, it's sort of hopeless for the rest of us.
I am also looking forward to:
"Marketing...so you're in sales."
Umm....
And yes, I agree there is quite a bit of "lies, damned lies, and statistics" thinking. Now, these same people will believe that the random anecdote passed on by someone at work is hugely meaningful and a good place from which to draw inferences, but insights based on hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of data points are obviously suspect. One of the big problems with our built-for-narrative brains.
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