8 ms·

Lessons of an MIT Education

355 points by funkylexoo 9y ago

senthil_rajasek 9y ago
This was written in 1997. "From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT April 1997"
- dogruck 9y ago
  Yeah, that should be noted. It’s more interesting once you notice the note at the bottom, saying it’s 20 years old.
- melling 9y ago
  He died 2 years later at the age of 66. Much too young. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gian-Carlo_Rota https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gian-Carlo_Rota
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  That explains what he might have meant when he was talking about the "hidden curriculum" in comp. sci. Nowadays, the complaint more often heard is that the curricula have become too applications-focused, with the kids having huge gap in their understanding of theory.
icc97 9y ago
> The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value. I've been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers. In a similar way I'd recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala. Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I'm not quite sure how true that is.
- ahussain 9y ago
  This is true, but after studying physics you find that you have a lot of catching up to in comparison to the computer scientists. Maybe you will have more insight in understanding some complex linear algebra concept, but it's not of great use if you can't debug a docker issue or get a database working.
  - jhbadger 9y ago
    True -- but those are hardly computer science issues. Some of the best computer scientists I've met were really applied mathematicians who were great at figuring out whether a problem was NP-hard but couldn't really program or handle sysadmin problems.
- wenc 9y ago
  > learning Category Theory There is a level of abstraction which for most people is the wrong end of the stick to start from. Category theory is one of them. (and I'm a big fan of category theory and Haskell). Category theory may occasionally lead to elegant, orthogonal and consistent solutions, especially if you are building new abstract tooling (LINQ in C# is a good example). It gives you tools to reason about structure. However in most situations, it doesn't give you anything you can directly use. Most of them time it serves to clarify and enlighten rather than generate. Categorical thinking [0] may be more useful than the actual theory. If you seek to apply category theory without first getting your hands dirty with conventional "inefficient" programming, you will end up with abstruse solutions that are potentially overly complicated and unmaintainable. Applying theory without the requisite real-world experience (to temper the tendency toward heavy abstraction) is a problem of youth. The world is not full of highly-intelligent people who can work with highly abstract code. One needs to learn to work with the inelegance in the real world and with other people in the system. A larger coherent system, though weak in parts, may produce a better result than a few bright people. [0] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category-theory/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category-theory/
  - tome 9y ago
    Yes! Absolutely. Unless you already have quite some proficiency with mathematics and/or generic programming then learning category theory is pretty pointless. In fact I don't even know what it would mean to "learn" it if you don't have a suitable background to build it on.
baxtr 9y ago
> Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences. > When an undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around." You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to "go back". Flexibility comes at a price.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- david-gpu 9y ago
  > "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around." I hear people say that about mathematicians, physicists and even philosophers, yet I've never come across any of them in my career. I suspect it's wishful thinking.
  - foldr 9y ago
    Indeed, what is it even supposed to mean? You can become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever just like that because you have a degree in math?
    - sdenton4 9y ago
      It's pretty common for math majors to go kick ass in the LSAT and become lawyers. Switching to medicine is a bit less common, I think.
      - foldr 9y ago
        It's common for people from lots of fields to go to law school, AFAIK. I don't see why a math degree specifically would be helpful in making that switch.
dougmwne 9y ago
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 suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.
- throwanem 9y ago
  "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 specializations, are likely to be in equipping their students with the tools for such study. Granted I've never taken such a course myself and so cannot speak with authority on even one example of the type - but I have found it not at all unusual for people who do have such education to be surprised in even so elementary and recent a matter as the American origin of the eugenic idea. Quite aside from being in my opinion a necessary antidote to the idea that the United States are somehow blessed with a permanent immunity to such enormities as we here discuss, such ignorance, on the part of so many supposedly educated in history and - if you're to be taken at your word - historical analysis, does not inspire enormous confidence in the value of such education.
  - dougmwne 9y ago
    I'll offer a specific example of historical context. The University of Virginia offers an undergraduate level Coursera course on modern history.[1] That course's treatment of the causes and importance of the industrial revolution suggests that access to cheap energy is the key difference between an agrarian and high technology civilization. That idea and that particular history professor's connections to Washington (he was executive director of the 9/11 commission) helps to explain a forever war in the Middle East and climate change denial. [1]https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world
melling 9y ago
Has the course number changed? It’s not on the Open Courseware list. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/
- phereford 9y ago
  It is 18.03. He may have just inadvertently flipped the 0 and 3. It is 18.03 now, and was in 2002 :D.
  - ll931110 9y ago
    No, it's not 18.03 (which is differential equation). Check the syllabus. http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Guidi-Notes-Rota-Probability-Vol-1-2.pdf 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).
    - phereford 9y ago
      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.
      - jamessb 9y ago
        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"
bjourne 9y ago
> 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 better than yours." Anecdotes like "All MIT graduates I've met were dumb" or "All MIT graduates I've met were smart" does not count. 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? The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work." It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.
- dagw 9y ago
  I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. Just looking at the curriculum doesn't really tell you anything useful. How well the material is taught and to what depth matters much more. Something simple like "learn matrix multiplication and determinants" could either be covered in 45 minutes or take up several lectures going deeper and deeper into the subtleties of what those things actually mean on a fundamental mathematical level. Then there is of course the personal additions a lecturer can add to each course beyond the curriculum, which in many cases can be more interesting and educational than anything on the curriculum itself. Basically you can have a dozen lecturers covering the same curriculum using the same textbook and get a dozen very different educational experiences. You can probably, to a lesser extent, even have the same lecturer lecture to a dozen different groups of students and get a dozen different outcomes. That being said I have no idea if MIT is actually better in this regard
- mathattack 9y ago
  Within the US there is tremendous variance in academic quality both between schools and within schools.
jancsika 9y ago
> It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep. There isn't a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a "self-generating" genius who never made mistakes. Also, the Beethoven pieces that today's composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators. Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don't actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.
- Klauster 9y ago
  Yes, scholars. Maybe it's a generational thing. Young people have too many people they have to compare to. You have to be great at everything! I'm hearing that high schoolers don't have confidence anymore.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    > Yes, scholars. As well as anyone who has played a piece by Beethoven or read a children's book about him. The Beethoven stereotype is the impassioned if erratic genius who literally ripped through the paper correcting his own errors in a quest for perfection, persisting in his struggle to write masterworks even after going deaf. The author is almost certainly confusing Beethoven's myth with the Mozart myth-- the child musical prodigy through whom Christ's perfection sounded. This matters because the author is attempting to make a causal relationship between Romantic-era genius myth-making and higher education in the U.S. at present. If he can't even match the myth with the right composer I think I'm right to be skeptical of his theory.
ploggingdev 9y ago
(Off topic) > Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work. Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists' lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it's pretty good so far. Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have <domain>/~username urls (such as the linked post's url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school's linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can't remember)and other users could access it by going to <internal school ip>/~myname, but it wasn't exposed to the internet.
- hoke_t 9y ago
  Try "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman?"
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    While entertaining, I think biographies are better than autobiographies.
  - HiroshiSan 9y ago
    Surely you're joking Mr Feynman is an autobiography and definitely does not reflect Feynmans life unbiasedly. Its a great book but if you want a more unbiased account of his life check out Genius by James Gleick. Walter Isaacson also just came out with a biography on da Vinci and he has one on Benjamin Franklin, though I never finished it, it was written to the same standard as Einstein.
    - sn9 9y ago
      Surely You're Joking is a great read but Genius is what you read for genuine insight into the man, and it's probably the best biography I've yet read.
- throw-away-8 9y ago
  Heilbroner. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers.
asciimo 9y ago
> Those who do not become computer scientists to the second degree risk turning into programmers who will only implement the ideas of others. The horror! Maybe this was truly a terrible fate in 1997.
- jotm 9y ago
  Engineers will always work for someone with social/people skills or someone who can sell. At least for the next century I guess.
- TheGrassyKnoll 9y ago
  There's probably a few poor souls at Google pulling $150k+ that are doomed to this...
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
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
- sabujp 9y ago
  was the person incompetent or did he/she not get along
  - SiempreViernes 9y ago
    > fired for incompetence Surely that was clear enough?
    - trendia 9y ago
      In defense of the person you're replying to, a lot of large corporations have "employee improvement plans" that are designed specifically to create documentation that can justify a firing, especially when that firing is for some other reason (e.g. "not getting along"). The improvement plans have nothing to do with getting the employee back on track, but rather to either 1) show that the employee is unable to keep up with artificially high work demands, or 2) get the employee frustrated enough to quit. That means that when a person is fired, the stated reason for that firing is not always the same as the real reason.
  - xkcd-sucks 9y ago
    Surprisingly they were hired because they got along. It took a while for people to get their heads around the fact that such a nice guy simply was not capable of learning new things
- csa 9y ago
  Indeed. 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).
patientplatypus 9y ago
I quickly scanned for "You will be hired at places that others are not even considered for because you are largely paying out the nose for a brand name." Didn't find it. Lame.
mcguire 9y ago
On the other hand... http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit-higher-than-national-average/1aGWr7lRjiEyhoD1WIT78I/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit...
- sanderjd 9y ago
  I can't seem to get to the article. What does it say?
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Sorry about that. Wr,dr: Suicide is a bit of a problem at MIT. "Over the past decade, the university’s student suicide rate has been 10.2 per 100,000 students, according to a Globe review of public records as well as university and media reports. More recently MIT’s suicide rate has been even higher; over the past five years the campus has reported 12.5 suicides per 100,000 students. "The increasing rate has been driven by the school’s undergraduate population, whose suicide rate in the past decade has outpaced that of the school’s graduate students — 12.6 to 8.5. "The national average for college campuses is roughly between 6.5 and 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students, according to three major studies that looked at undergraduate and graduate student suicides from 1980 to 2009." On the other hand, over across the street at that other school, "At least one other local school, Harvard University, has an above average rate for its undergraduate population. The rate of suicide at Harvard was 11.8 per 100,000 undergraduates over the past decade. When accounting for both undergraduates and graduates, the rate at Harvard was 5.4 per 100,000." So maybe it's Boston. But wait, "...the university’s undergraduate rate has declined, particularly since the early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2005, the undergraduate suicide rate at MIT was 18.7 per 100,000." Holy poop.e Edit: And I just noticed the "Ten Lessons" were written in 1997.
deleted 9y ago
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trisimix 9y ago
Man I think I hate Ivy leagues.
- Buldak 9y ago
  You're in luck, MIT is not one of them.
  - akhilcacharya 9y ago
    They are in HYPSM though.
deleted 9y ago
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pkrumins 9y ago
Lesson zero: You don't need an education.
- ooronning 9y ago
  found the self-taught programmer :) No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.
  - pkrumins 9y ago
    Come work for me. I only hire people without college degrees. I consider college degrees a red flag.
    - ooronning 9y ago
      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.
      - pkrumins 9y ago
        Because they wasted years of time learning useless garbage that universities teach that is of no use.
        theossuary 9y ago
        I wanted a college degree because I see it as hedging my bets. I may not want to work at the boring companies of the world, but if I ever needed that stability I can have it with a college degree. Four years while I can work part-time in my field and the offer of my parents to fund my education made it a no-brainer. All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.
ta_1509903111 9y ago
I liked the part about the hidden curriculums. Any idea how one would balance it with the actual one when you have plans to go to grad school? For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I'd work under the supervision of Ph.D.'s in the field. That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I've found, given it's still academic and aligned with the actual degree I'm applying to? I'd be applying as an international student.
abecedarius 9y ago
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 9y ago
  [deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  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.
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    Maybe it works better at sorting people by ability (in some more visible sense of ability) than at helping them develop. I think that goal explains more about precollege education (as one of many goals for it, all fighting it out) -- at the college level the biggest sorting happens in admissions. I'm just guessing about all this, though.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
MilnerRoute 9y ago
I just realized that was written in 1997. It's interesting to wonder if, 20 years later, the author would change some of what he originally wrote.
jpmattia 9y ago
If you find these lesson interesting, there were another 10 lessons from the Rotafest: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le... [Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]
internetman55 9y ago
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.

355 points by funkylexoo 9y ago

senthil_rajasek 9y ago

This was written in 1997. "From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT April 1997"

dogruck 9y ago
Yeah, that should be noted. It’s more interesting once you notice the note at the bottom, saying it’s 20 years old.
melling 9y ago
He died 2 years later at the age of 66. Much too young. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gian-Carlo_Rota https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gian-Carlo_Rota
lr4444lr 9y ago
That explains what he might have meant when he was talking about the "hidden curriculum" in comp. sci. Nowadays, the complaint more often heard is that the curricula have become too applications-focused, with the kids having huge gap in their understanding of theory.

icc97 9y ago

> The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value. I've been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers. In a similar way I'd recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala. Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I'm not quite sure how true that is.

ahussain 9y ago
This is true, but after studying physics you find that you have a lot of catching up to in comparison to the computer scientists. Maybe you will have more insight in understanding some complex linear algebra concept, but it's not of great use if you can't debug a docker issue or get a database working.
- jhbadger 9y ago
  True -- but those are hardly computer science issues. Some of the best computer scientists I've met were really applied mathematicians who were great at figuring out whether a problem was NP-hard but couldn't really program or handle sysadmin problems.
wenc 9y ago
> learning Category Theory There is a level of abstraction which for most people is the wrong end of the stick to start from. Category theory is one of them. (and I'm a big fan of category theory and Haskell). Category theory may occasionally lead to elegant, orthogonal and consistent solutions, especially if you are building new abstract tooling (LINQ in C# is a good example). It gives you tools to reason about structure. However in most situations, it doesn't give you anything you can directly use. Most of them time it serves to clarify and enlighten rather than generate. Categorical thinking [0] may be more useful than the actual theory. If you seek to apply category theory without first getting your hands dirty with conventional "inefficient" programming, you will end up with abstruse solutions that are potentially overly complicated and unmaintainable. Applying theory without the requisite real-world experience (to temper the tendency toward heavy abstraction) is a problem of youth. The world is not full of highly-intelligent people who can work with highly abstract code. One needs to learn to work with the inelegance in the real world and with other people in the system. A larger coherent system, though weak in parts, may produce a better result than a few bright people. [0] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category-theory/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category-theory/
- tome 9y ago
  Yes! Absolutely. Unless you already have quite some proficiency with mathematics and/or generic programming then learning category theory is pretty pointless. In fact I don't even know what it would mean to "learn" it if you don't have a suitable background to build it on.

baxtr 9y ago

> Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences. > When an undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around." You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to "go back". Flexibility comes at a price.

ValentineC 9y ago
Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
david-gpu 9y ago
> "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around." I hear people say that about mathematicians, physicists and even philosophers, yet I've never come across any of them in my career. I suspect it's wishful thinking.
- foldr 9y ago
  Indeed, what is it even supposed to mean? You can become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever just like that because you have a degree in math?
  - sdenton4 9y ago
    It's pretty common for math majors to go kick ass in the LSAT and become lawyers. Switching to medicine is a bit less common, I think.
    - foldr 9y ago
      It's common for people from lots of fields to go to law school, AFAIK. I don't see why a math degree specifically would be helpful in making that switch.

dougmwne 9y ago

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 suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.

throwanem 9y ago
"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 specializations, are likely to be in equipping their students with the tools for such study. Granted I've never taken such a course myself and so cannot speak with authority on even one example of the type - but I have found it not at all unusual for people who do have such education to be surprised in even so elementary and recent a matter as the American origin of the eugenic idea. Quite aside from being in my opinion a necessary antidote to the idea that the United States are somehow blessed with a permanent immunity to such enormities as we here discuss, such ignorance, on the part of so many supposedly educated in history and - if you're to be taken at your word - historical analysis, does not inspire enormous confidence in the value of such education.
- dougmwne 9y ago
  I'll offer a specific example of historical context. The University of Virginia offers an undergraduate level Coursera course on modern history.[1] That course's treatment of the causes and importance of the industrial revolution suggests that access to cheap energy is the key difference between an agrarian and high technology civilization. That idea and that particular history professor's connections to Washington (he was executive director of the 9/11 commission) helps to explain a forever war in the Middle East and climate change denial. [1]https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world

melling 9y ago

Has the course number changed? It’s not on the Open Courseware list. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

phereford 9y ago
It is 18.03. He may have just inadvertently flipped the 0 and 3. It is 18.03 now, and was in 2002 :D.
- ll931110 9y ago
  No, it's not 18.03 (which is differential equation). Check the syllabus. http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Guidi-Notes-Rota-Probability-Vol-1-2.pdf 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).
  - phereford 9y ago
    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.
    - jamessb 9y ago
      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"

bjourne 9y ago

> 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 better than yours." Anecdotes like "All MIT graduates I've met were dumb" or "All MIT graduates I've met were smart" does not count. 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? The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work." It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.

dagw 9y ago
I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. Just looking at the curriculum doesn't really tell you anything useful. How well the material is taught and to what depth matters much more. Something simple like "learn matrix multiplication and determinants" could either be covered in 45 minutes or take up several lectures going deeper and deeper into the subtleties of what those things actually mean on a fundamental mathematical level. Then there is of course the personal additions a lecturer can add to each course beyond the curriculum, which in many cases can be more interesting and educational than anything on the curriculum itself. Basically you can have a dozen lecturers covering the same curriculum using the same textbook and get a dozen very different educational experiences. You can probably, to a lesser extent, even have the same lecturer lecture to a dozen different groups of students and get a dozen different outcomes. That being said I have no idea if MIT is actually better in this regard
mathattack 9y ago
Within the US there is tremendous variance in academic quality both between schools and within schools.

jancsika 9y ago

> It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep. There isn't a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a "self-generating" genius who never made mistakes. Also, the Beethoven pieces that today's composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators. Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don't actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.

Klauster 9y ago
Yes, scholars. Maybe it's a generational thing. Young people have too many people they have to compare to. You have to be great at everything! I'm hearing that high schoolers don't have confidence anymore.
- jancsika 9y ago
  > Yes, scholars. As well as anyone who has played a piece by Beethoven or read a children's book about him. The Beethoven stereotype is the impassioned if erratic genius who literally ripped through the paper correcting his own errors in a quest for perfection, persisting in his struggle to write masterworks even after going deaf. The author is almost certainly confusing Beethoven's myth with the Mozart myth-- the child musical prodigy through whom Christ's perfection sounded. This matters because the author is attempting to make a causal relationship between Romantic-era genius myth-making and higher education in the U.S. at present. If he can't even match the myth with the right composer I think I'm right to be skeptical of his theory.

ploggingdev 9y ago

(Off topic) > Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work. Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists' lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it's pretty good so far. Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have <domain>/~username urls (such as the linked post's url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school's linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can't remember)and other users could access it by going to <internal school ip>/~myname, but it wasn't exposed to the internet.

hoke_t 9y ago
Try "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman?"
- BeetleB 9y ago
  While entertaining, I think biographies are better than autobiographies.
- HiroshiSan 9y ago
  Surely you're joking Mr Feynman is an autobiography and definitely does not reflect Feynmans life unbiasedly. Its a great book but if you want a more unbiased account of his life check out Genius by James Gleick. Walter Isaacson also just came out with a biography on da Vinci and he has one on Benjamin Franklin, though I never finished it, it was written to the same standard as Einstein.
  - sn9 9y ago
    Surely You're Joking is a great read but Genius is what you read for genuine insight into the man, and it's probably the best biography I've yet read.
throw-away-8 9y ago
Heilbroner. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers.

asciimo 9y ago

> Those who do not become computer scientists to the second degree risk turning into programmers who will only implement the ideas of others. The horror! Maybe this was truly a terrible fate in 1997.

jotm 9y ago
Engineers will always work for someone with social/people skills or someone who can sell. At least for the next century I guess.
TheGrassyKnoll 9y ago
There's probably a few poor souls at Google pulling $150k+ that are doomed to this...

xkcd-sucks 9y ago

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

sabujp 9y ago
was the person incompetent or did he/she not get along
- SiempreViernes 9y ago
  > fired for incompetence Surely that was clear enough?
  - trendia 9y ago
    In defense of the person you're replying to, a lot of large corporations have "employee improvement plans" that are designed specifically to create documentation that can justify a firing, especially when that firing is for some other reason (e.g. "not getting along"). The improvement plans have nothing to do with getting the employee back on track, but rather to either 1) show that the employee is unable to keep up with artificially high work demands, or 2) get the employee frustrated enough to quit. That means that when a person is fired, the stated reason for that firing is not always the same as the real reason.
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  Surprisingly they were hired because they got along. It took a while for people to get their heads around the fact that such a nice guy simply was not capable of learning new things
csa 9y ago
Indeed. 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).

patientplatypus 9y ago

I quickly scanned for "You will be hired at places that others are not even considered for because you are largely paying out the nose for a brand name." Didn't find it. Lame.

mcguire 9y ago

On the other hand... http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit-higher-than-national-average/1aGWr7lRjiEyhoD1WIT78I/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit...

sanderjd 9y ago
I can't seem to get to the article. What does it say?
- mcguire 9y ago
  Sorry about that. Wr,dr: Suicide is a bit of a problem at MIT. "Over the past decade, the university’s student suicide rate has been 10.2 per 100,000 students, according to a Globe review of public records as well as university and media reports. More recently MIT’s suicide rate has been even higher; over the past five years the campus has reported 12.5 suicides per 100,000 students. "The increasing rate has been driven by the school’s undergraduate population, whose suicide rate in the past decade has outpaced that of the school’s graduate students — 12.6 to 8.5. "The national average for college campuses is roughly between 6.5 and 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students, according to three major studies that looked at undergraduate and graduate student suicides from 1980 to 2009." On the other hand, over across the street at that other school, "At least one other local school, Harvard University, has an above average rate for its undergraduate population. The rate of suicide at Harvard was 11.8 per 100,000 undergraduates over the past decade. When accounting for both undergraduates and graduates, the rate at Harvard was 5.4 per 100,000." So maybe it's Boston. But wait, "...the university’s undergraduate rate has declined, particularly since the early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2005, the undergraduate suicide rate at MIT was 18.7 per 100,000." Holy poop.e Edit: And I just noticed the "Ten Lessons" were written in 1997.

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trisimix 9y ago

Man I think I hate Ivy leagues.

Buldak 9y ago
You're in luck, MIT is not one of them.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  They are in HYPSM though.

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pkrumins 9y ago

Lesson zero: You don't need an education.

ooronning 9y ago
found the self-taught programmer :) No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.
- pkrumins 9y ago
  Come work for me. I only hire people without college degrees. I consider college degrees a red flag.
  - ooronning 9y ago
    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.
    - pkrumins 9y ago
      Because they wasted years of time learning useless garbage that universities teach that is of no use.
      - theossuary 9y ago
        I wanted a college degree because I see it as hedging my bets. I may not want to work at the boring companies of the world, but if I ever needed that stability I can have it with a college degree. Four years while I can work part-time in my field and the offer of my parents to fund my education made it a no-brainer. All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.

ta_1509903111 9y ago

I liked the part about the hidden curriculums. Any idea how one would balance it with the actual one when you have plans to go to grad school? For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I'd work under the supervision of Ph.D.'s in the field. That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I've found, given it's still academic and aligned with the actual degree I'm applying to? I'd be applying as an international student.

abecedarius 9y ago

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.

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eli_gottlieb 9y ago
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.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Maybe it works better at sorting people by ability (in some more visible sense of ability) than at helping them develop. I think that goal explains more about precollege education (as one of many goals for it, all fighting it out) -- at the college level the biggest sorting happens in admissions. I'm just guessing about all this, though.
- deleted 9y ago
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MilnerRoute 9y ago

I just realized that was written in 1997. It's interesting to wonder if, 20 years later, the author would change some of what he originally wrote.

jpmattia 9y ago

If you find these lesson interesting, there were another 10 lessons from the Rotafest: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le... [Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]

internetman55 9y ago

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.