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Lessons of an MIT Education

math.tamu.edu

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Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#191

Post by emars »

kelukelugames wrote: post #152
pjscott wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious to see if he'd actually said that or if you were misrepresenting a more reasonable claim. I'm not familiar with Jordan Peterson but managed to find this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q ... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but…

No, that would be at least be a somewhat defensible claim. Peterson literally says some men have crazy high motivation and women don't. It's not from this video. I saw it when one of my co workers started sending my Peterson vids. God, I wish I never heard of this guy. Okay, I made the mistake of watching the linked video. At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms. I mean...where did the te…

Lame that you'd say this without posting the source.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#192

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Spooky23 wrote: post #157
dougmwne wrote: 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…

He’s an engineer or scientist. The world needs engineers and scientists, and it makes them feel good to assert their superiority. At the end of the day, these guys always work for somebody, who is usually some sort liberal arts or business major. It’s something to keep in perspective when somebody asserts that math and science run the world.

>At the end of the day, these guys always work for somebody, who is usually some sort liberal arts or business major.

Usually that someone is a liberal-arts major because they had a trust fund, not because the liberal arts turn you into an insightful, far-seeing, compassionate leader.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#193

Post by eli_gottlieb »

oblio wrote: post #170
mmirate wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> treat people as machines We are machines. Squishy, carbon-based machines with certain unique computational capabilities, I'll grant - but still, machines.

Armed with this insight, does it actually help us interact with humans? I'd argue that it does not...

Bayesian brain theories are very helpful for interacting with other humans, actually.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#194

Post by mmirate »

dougmwne wrote: post #178
mmirate wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, is the total lifetime earning potential of an 18th-century Irishman greater than the value of the meat on an infant? If not, then his proposal would have had merit outside of satire...

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#195

Post by mcguire »

kelukelugames wrote: post #152
pjscott wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious to see if he'd actually said that or if you were misrepresenting a more reasonable claim. I'm not familiar with Jordan Peterson but managed to find this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q ... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but…

No, that would be at least be a somewhat defensible claim. Peterson literally says some men have crazy high motivation and women don't. It's not from this video. I saw it when one of my co workers started sending my Peterson vids. God, I wish I never heard of this guy. Okay, I made the mistake of watching the linked video. At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms. I mean...where did the te…

"At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms."

Well, sure, you see, those hyper-competitive men who happen to like that sort of environment would never, ever, do anything dishonorable or unethical to reduce their competition. It's purely "market determined right to the core"[1].

[1] Yes, I went back to get the quote.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#196

Post by pkrumins »

ooronning wrote: post #167
pkrumins wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come work for me. I only hire people without college degrees. I consider college degrees a red flag.

Why's that, might I ask? I've seen statistics that I haven't verified that indicate that while somewhere between 25 and 40% of CS undergrads aren't able to find work as programmers, around 40% of professional programmers don't have a CS degree. And I'm really not sure what to make of this.

Because they wasted years of time learning useless garbage that universities teach that is of no use.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#197

Post by chrisseaton »

chrisseaton wrote: post #184
_delirium wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, diffi…

> PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable You mean PL design, don't you? Performance work is very empirical. If my new type of inline cache is better then I need to prove that and it's falsifiable (using benchmarks, which I admit aren't ideal).

In fact! I can falsify your claim that PL research isn't falsifiable by using some PL research!

http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/producing-wrong-data.pdf

> Of the 133 papers published in the surveyed conference pro- ceedings, 88 had at least one section dedicated to experimental methodology and evaluation

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#198

Post by eli_gottlieb »

abecedarius wrote: post #141

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.

Indeed. I thought Lesson 8 was simply a statement of institutional-scale masochism.

>MIT students often complain of being overworked, and they are right. When I look at the schedules of courses my advisees propose at the beginning of each term, I wonder how they can contemplate that much work. My workload was nothing like that when I was an undergraduate.

Ok. How is that at all healthy, not just medically but academically? There are limits, and when you push too far past them, you reduce long-term performance. The human machine operates within engineering tolerances like anything else.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#199

Post by mcguire »

jack_pp wrote: post #30
dougmwne wrote: 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…

For anyone interested in learning more about people (and yourselves) I highly recommend Jordan Petersons' lectures on youtube. I believe he has started working on an online university for the humanities with all the money he's bringing in from patreon (he wisely hid it recently but it was close to 60k per month last time it wasn't)

From an article (https://thevarsity.ca/2017/09/18/professor-jordan-peterson-w...) about the announcement[1]:

"Peterson has emphasized his desire to provide students with better and more affordable education. “There is absolutely no reason why high quality education can’t be made available to masses of people at low cost,” said Peterson in a recent interview on CTV’s Your Morning. “I think it’s a scam pretty much from top to bottom and it’s a very expensive scam.”

"He has not clearly stated when he will form the online university, though he said on Your Morning that he will soon start a website that will distinguish between postmodern and classical content and “cut off the supply to the people who are running the indoctrination cults.”

"Peterson also expressed that his online university would be an alternative to traditional universities, which he believes “have abandoned the humanities.”

"“About 80 percent of the humanities papers are never cited once and the humanities have been dominated by a kind of postmodern neo-Marxist, cult ideology,” said Peterson. “[The humanities have] abandoned their mission to students. Their mission should be to teach students to speak, to think, and to read, and to become familiar with the best of the world fundamentally.”"

[1] I think they're talking about this video (http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1169448), but CTV doesn't seem to do transcripts and I live in the wrong "region".

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#200

Post by dredmorbius »

oblio wrote: post #166
wallace_f wrote: post #119

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?

Look up Peter Turchin.

http://peterturchin.com

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