81–90 of 263 posts
MIT is a very good school, but shouldn't be fetishised. After several years of hiring people in the Boston area, I've seen just as many mediocre MIT grads as mediocre BU grads. In fact, the only person at my company to be fired for incompetence was an MIT graduate
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> It's also weird to suggest that no historical claims are falsifiable. That seems to put real history on a par with nutty conspiracy theories. In my humble opinion the scarceness of falsifiability in history is the reason why it is so easy to create nutty conspiracy theories about history vs, say, mathematics or physics.
But then why do you judge the conspiracy theories to be nutty, if they are on just as firm an epistemological footing as actual history?
> But then why do you judge the conspiracy theories to be nutty, if they are on just as firm an epistemological footing as actual history?
But to elaborate on your argument: Because of the dubious epistemological footing indeed "actual history" has not the highest reputation to me. The reason I disregard lots of "nutty conspiracy theories" rather lies in the fact that many "conspiracists" have a tendency to find conspiracies in other topics, too, where falsification is much better possible. Thus I tend to judge by looking at the track record of the respective person.
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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…
This would be true if the only listeners you’d encounter were computers. But we live in the world of people, and demonstrating proficiency in only one insistent cultural mode because it is the most dedicated to rationalism is an impoverished worldview.
The question is, to what extent the current shape of humanities is aligned to those principles?!
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These days I think that the creative element of programming is why software is eating the world at the pace it is. Undergrads can look at each other's code and say Wow! while one titration is fungible with every other. Seeing past this level of understanding is an attrition gate in any subject. What I mean is, the students who got past freshman chemistry to become good chemists are the ones who saw the creative eleme…
The 'good' chemists I know eventually wound up at places like Coca-Cola making sugar water after a post-doc or teaching titration...after a post doc.
Advertising and GUI design are the sugar water of computer science.
The "coding interview" tells me that at least some aspect of programming is akin to titration.
MIT is a very good school, but shouldn't be fetishised. After several years of hiring people in the Boston area, I've seen just as many mediocre MIT grads as mediocre BU grads. In fact, the only person at my company to be fired for incompetence was an MIT graduate
Dirty little secret -- no more than 30% of elite school grads are really "smart" (here meaning they can grasp, apply, and extend complex new ideas quickly). The others are usually bringing in some sort of social capital (athlete, highly skilled and aggressive hoop jumper, etc.).
One thing I try to tell people about elite school grads is to set the expectations early and clearly. The really smart graduates get bored really quickly, and if you have routine work for them, it likely will not work out well. That said, the hoop jumper grads may be exactly what you need as long as you have a long series of hoops. The athletes have their strengths and weaknesses, too (n.b. the elite school varsity athlete totally-not-a-club club is a thing, and that thing has value in the right contexts).
> 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…
It matters very much whether you got your CS Masters from a place like Cambridge or ETH Zürich versus some small university in a small member state. In my experience (having studied and taught in multiple European universities, both before and after the standardization) Lesson 6 very much applies to the EU.
The main achievement of the EU standardization is that a Bachelor degree from any accredited university from any member state will technically qualify you to the Masters programs in all member states -- before the Bologna Process some countries didn't even have separate Bachelor and Masters degrees.
The Masters programs themselves are standardized at the level of nominal effort, but vary wildly in topics offered, actual effort required, and quality of the teaching. No standardization can change the fact that the top people will seek out the top universities, which then heavily skews the skill distribution between the universities.
The structure of the programs is standardized in the EU, not the quality of the programs.
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…
"Begin"? The prior century is replete with horrific examples of societies, spanning - perhaps defining - the modern ideological spectrum, which behaved in precisely such fashion. I agree that the study of history is the best method yet found for recognizing the errors which produced those enormities, in order to avoid repeating them. But I'm not sure how effective undergrad history courses, or even history specializa…
Why? Do we have any evidence for that it helps at all?
Here's what I find weird: when one is talking about learning history, usually the "pro" side cites the importance of the subject, and the "no" side, the methodological "flaws". It seems that this discussion is a bit pathological: Everyone agrees that if a certain avenue of study can reduce the probability of genocide, it should be undertaken. The question is that maybe (probably) these avenues of study do nothing of the sort.
Of course, we can disagree about that. But how would we settle/improve our knowledge of the question?
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It is 18.03. He may have just inadvertently flipped the 0 and 3. It is 18.03 now, and was in 2002 :D.
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).
While 18.03 is not core, it is a requirement for most engineering disciplines at MIT.
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This would be true if the only listeners you’d encounter were computers. But we live in the world of people, and demonstrating proficiency in only one insistent cultural mode because it is the most dedicated to rationalism is an impoverished worldview.
And "the world of people" needs to be driven by a coherent set of principles. So far the western world subscribed to rational thought and the socratic method. The question is, to what extent the current shape of humanities is aligned to those principles?!