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Lessons of an MIT Education

math.tamu.edu

171–180 of 263 posts

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#171
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny Here is Orwell on the matter: >"When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however,…

Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got. Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

Yea, and even if it were possible, it would still only be the realm of theory until it could be experimentally proven

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#172
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny Here is Orwell on the matter: >"When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however,…

Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got. Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

I have an unpopular view, that physics is probably the easiest science. Chemistry is harder, biology is even harder. Heading up the chain into social sciences is just unbelievably hard to get good answers.

With physics, you can build a machine an test to your hearts content to determine what the underlying rules are. That's real tough to do when you're studying, say, an economy.

So, i don't mean this as a slight to physicists. It would never occur to me to use oil drops to measure the mass of an electron. It was a brilliant insight. But, with modern tools, I kinda think i could replicate that experiment in my apartment. Evolution? I mean, golly, that's a really subtle insight. I might be able to do something with petri dishes and poisons, but that seems like a pretty tough thing to detect. I'd like to compare Darwin to Newton, but Darwin is probably closer to Aristotle. We haven't begun to get to the really good stuff yet.

I'm skeptical of phycology, there are issues with replication all the time. But clearly they're on to something. The whole advertising industry is built on psychological insights.

I've dealt with crazy race conditions that make me want to pull my hair out. They're not consistently reproducible. Eventually i work out the logic and things fall into place. But i have access to the source :) I can't imagine how hard it is to get anything out of random interactions of black boxes. Social sciences just aren't for me.

Anyway, yeah, i believe it's possible to model human interactions. We do it all the time. As with all things, some models are just more useful than others.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#173
post #27
post #6

The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…

The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…

From time to time “history” has shown us history in textbook can be deliberatly false because the regime/authors/publishers do not approve the “accurate” version.

In the end, I think education is also the veichel and a platform for students to have the intellect to question and to challenge established facts.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#174

An insightful list, but one part bugs me: the approval of working so hard you can't stay awake. This is bad for learning, and apparently there are even experiments showing that it's bad -- which casts an ironic light on the part of this list about demonstrably knowing things vs. bullshitting. Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.

[deleted]

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#175
post #172
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got. Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

I have an unpopular view, that physics is probably the easiest science. Chemistry is harder, biology is even harder. Heading up the chain into social sciences is just unbelievably hard to get good answers. With physics, you can build a machine an test to your hearts content to determine what the underlying rules are. That's real tough to do when you're studying, say, an economy. So, i don't mean this as a slight to p…

I think your unpopular view is very true. Worse, it's the key to finance and politics.

I used to know someone who had nothing but contempt for developers and the IT team, because while he was busy playing the corporate ambition game, they just wanted to do a good job.

As far as he was concerned, this made them easy prey.

Guess which kind of person runs the world?

Engineering and science won't teach you this. You can finish your PhD with a completely unrealistic view about how politics works, and how political outcomes are generated.

Neither science nor engineering are immune to this. Popular beliefs and high-status areas of research are decided politically, not dispassionately.

It's tempting to say that things would be better if we had dispassionate objective AIs deciding policy, instead of individual and tribal ambition - but of course one of the challenges of AI is that instead of simply automating math, AI has the potential to automate and amplify influence and persuasion.

When you don't really understand influence and persuasion - but others do, in practice if not in theory - that's not necessarily a good place to be.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#176
post #46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…

I think you're mischaracterizing humanities as not falsifiable as if it should be like mathematics. The content is not wrong in the same way a math question is, but many humanities classes are explicitly about taking arguments presented in essays, books, journals, by the government, by public interest groups, by private industry, and testing them against "objective reality and truth that exists around them." No human…

> Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny.

The reason we have a "left" and "right" in politics is it is impossible to prove one true and the other false. No matter how intense the scrutiny or clever the arguments.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#177
post #165
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand about this comparison is that there's actually an awful lot of "knowing what" involved in math and science too. You won't get far in solving math problems if you try to derive everything from first principles. You could make fun of historians for learning lists of dates, but you could also make fun of mathematicians for learning lists of trigonometric identities.

It is true that you need to remember a lot of things to do math effectively, but a big difference between knowing dates and knowing theorems is that you can re-derive the theorems by yourself given enough time. A not-insignificant reason I got into mathematics was that I have difficulty remembering specifics, so I could lean on reinvention. I frequently forget the trig identities, but I know the basic definitions of…

You can also re-discover the dates by doing your own historical research, if you want to. And of course, historians don't really spend much time literally learning lists of dates. More realistically, there are lots of causal and logical connections between historical events that enable a historian who knows the details of a particular period to infer certain facts that they've forgotten from facts they remember.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meatsack.WhoIs:[your_owner] Meatsack.PurchaseRequest:[internal_organs]

If the purchase-price being offered exceeds the sum I think I'll be able to give my heirs as inheritance, then I should actually accept that transaction.

In that case I have A Modest Proposal.

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#179
post #41

> Lesson Six: You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can imagine a propective student or parent asking, "Why should I (or my child) take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn't the material practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a great deal?" Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. "My institution is b…

> Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?

My experience at an okay school was that all upper level classes were graded and taught to scale with the student's intelligence. I and many other students passed through the curve. Many of us would not have passed comparable (by name and subject matter) courses at the top schools with a different curve and more in depth material.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not 18.03 (which is differential equation). Check the syllabus. http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Guidi-Not... Seems that after Gian-Carlo Rota died, the class is defunct. The closet one can get is 18.175, but it still presents material from purely theoretical standpoint (e.g. no application to physics to CS).

Hmm my mistake. The blog post said Differential Equation and a classroom of 300 some students. Not many non-core classes have 300 students in them. I remember my diff eq class (18.03) being rather large (similar to 8.01, 18.01, etc etc). While 18.03 is not core, it is a requirement for most engineering disciplines at MIT.

The confusion is that the article refers to two different courses:

"18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students" [ths might be the course that is now 18.03]

"18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory"

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