Master of Science
I attended professor Lee’s office hour this afternoon to discuss a question in midterm, and to consult him something about the graduate school in Berkeley as well.
Although I said it’s okay to keep the original score, professor Lee insisted on changing the grade, and of course, I felt happy to get 3 more points on this midterm.
Afterwards, I consulted him something about the graduate school in Berkeley. When I was preparing for this conversation, I learned that M.S. stands for “Master of Science” and Ph.D. stands for “Doctor of philosophy” for the first time in my life. I was amazed that philosophy plays such an important role in western world. And this reminded me of his new book which I am reading - Plato and the Nerd, in which talks a lot about philosophy of science and engineering. It is really a rare opportunity to talk about a book directly with the author of that book, which I have never done before. And the feeling of doing so is amazing.
I asked him how long did it take him to write this book just out curiosity of the phrase “stubborn and lazy” in his book(he used this to describe himself as man having these two characteristics), and the answer is:
9 months. I almost dropped everything else to write this book.
I have no idea what it means to write a 266-page English book in 9 month because I haven’t written any book myself. No wonder we always tend to have difficulties understanding things we are not familiar with.
We talked about what machines can do, why they can do far more than human beings, which explains the question that I came up with before.
Why that the goal of artificial intelligence to reproduce human cognitive functions in computers is misguided, is unlikely to succeed, and vastly underestimates the potential of computers is the case?
As for the graduate school part, professor Lee gave me the following advice:
Think about what you really want carefully. Berkeley has a “Master of Engineering” program designed for those who know that they don’t want to pursue a Ph.D. degree.
Berkeley is really a research-oriented university, unlike Stanford, it doesn’t have too much room for M.S. students.
Anyway, it was a really pleasant conversation, from which I learned a lot.