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Lessons of an MIT Education

math.tamu.edu

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Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#241

Post by foldr »

kmill wrote: post #223
foldr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't worry, I'm not completely ignorant about the work historians do. > You can also re-discover the dates by doing your own historical research My point was that you can put a mathematician in a closed room with only pencil and paper, and they could redevelop an entire theory if needed. A historian in the same position would be unable to do any work -- they need primary sources. I went with your "learning lists of…

That's just to say that history is an empirical discipline whereas math, to a large extent, isn't. There are also limits to the amount of useful work that, say, an astronomer or biologist can do with just a pen and paper.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#242

Post by bjourne »

neltnerb wrote: post #57
bjourne wrote: 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…

As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest. I've met super impressive people from everywhere from community colleges to Rhodes scholars and do not subscribe to the idea that MIT alums are uniquely good. But having taken some physics and math courses at multiple universities MITs went much deeper in a shorter period of time. This isn't necessarily reflected in the sylla…

> As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest.

There are many schools around the world with much harder and more technology intensive curriculum than MIT. If you disagree with that statement, then you do see "value in competing over whose classes were the hardest." If you do not disagree with that statement, then you must agree that the "MIT experience" you describe can be gotten in many schools other than MIT. F.e, I also worked 10+ h/day 7 days/week year round at university and also felt that getting A grades were impossible.

I think the professor is making a great point by comparing math to sports. Yes, you can go to a sports university but you don't have to. The way to get good at it is by busting your ass of (and having good genetics). It's your own effort that counts, not the name of the institution, imho.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#243

Post by chrisseaton »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #218
chrisseaton wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That puts it on par with psychology or sociology which has a poor reputation in the falsifiability department

I think most of the other papers have non-experimental proofs, so it's not that they do nothing rigorous.

And anyway the claim was 'very rarely', when it's actually a majority of cases.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#244

Post by internetman55 »

rhizome wrote: post #146
rayiner wrote: 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…

Ironically, the very concept of "objective reality" is not falsifiable.

Quite a few folks these days seem to make very non-trivial philosophical claims, then claim that philosophy is not worthy of attention in the same breath. It's very odd to see.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#245

Post by internetman55 »

I thought that the point of a liberal arts education was 'knowing how' to live a good life, and then possibly knowing how to communicate effectively through speech and the written word.

One of the most cutting arguments I've heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#246

Post by Spooky23 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #192
Spooky23 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Liberal arts help you to analyze information in front of you and express the outcome of such analysis in prose or speech.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#247

Post by csa »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #232
csa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for MIT, but I can speak for a couple of Ivies. The content covered in the curriculum and the speed at which it is covered is one potentially challenging aspect of one school over another. The more important aspect, imho, is your peers. Speaking for myself and what I have heard others experience, peers can push your thinking to more sophisticated levels -- this can be in terms of something like elegance…

> It took him a few minutes just to realize that the test covered the same topics, while I thought the test was merely "hard" pedestrian content. Once I talked him through the problem, he realized how cool it was, and then he realized one of the key differences between our schools -- the boundaries of my thinking on topics were challenged and stretched much, much more aggressively. Well as long as you were able to de…

Neither I, my friend, nor any of our peers doubted who was better at STEM subjects -- he was and is.

The whole thing was a pitch to get him to transfer (I think he would have easily gotten in), but he didn't want to leave our home state.

My point was merely that the school I went to pushed the boundaries of my thinking, while his (at least in that class) did not.

Did that make my school better? For my personal goals, it did. For his personal goals, it did not.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#248

Post by neltnerb »

bjourne wrote: post #242
neltnerb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest. I've met super impressive people from everywhere from community colleges to Rhodes scholars and do not subscribe to the idea that MIT alums are uniquely good. But having taken some physics and math courses at multiple universities MITs went much deeper in a shorter period of time. This isn't necessarily reflected in the sylla…

> As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest. There are many schools around the world with much harder and more technology intensive curriculum than MIT. If you disagree with that statement, then you do see "value in competing over whose classes were the hardest." If you do not disagree with that statement, then you must agree that the "MIT experience" you describe can…

I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to say. I am explicitly saying that lots of other schools are fantastic, and also that schools which aren't pitched as the "best" produce fantastic alumni. So, as you say, I agree.

Yes, I think that there are schools around the world with harder curricula than MIT, with the caveat that every university has different strengths. I could go into my accomplishments in undergrad, but it's truly besides the point.

At some point it's truly ridiculous to compare as if it's a linear ranking. It's counterproductive to worry about rankings, and causes completely unnecessary friction between institutions. Pride and insecurity get in the way of solving problems, and all of us are ultimately struggling against a much more interesting challenge than each other.

I think the professor here is really not making a compelling argument, to be honest. None of the listed things are unique to MIT for sure, though strictly speaking he doesn't claim that they are -- he says that they are lessons of an MIT education, rather than unique aspects of an MIT education. He's a mathematician so this may be intentionally precise.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#249

Post by mmirate »

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...

Yes, it does. Provide input, expect output, send to maintenance dept. when errors occur.

Re: Lessons of an MIT Education

#250

Post by sn9 »

indubitably wrote: post #150
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…

It's also releveant that the author feels perfectly justified in making recourse to a hypothesis about history which far from easy to test: “The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education.” Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.

That's a rather unreasonable criticism. I'm sure if you could ask the author (before he died a few years ago), he could provide you with more detail.

Requiring an author to expand on every question a piece brings to the readers' mind is just an unreasonably high bar.

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