The conclusion that your reasoning leads us to here is clearly germane because it is absurd. Consequently, I can't accept your argument as presented.
See, my MIT education was useful for something. I knows fancy logic things.
To elaborate a bit more on why I think that equating income with educational value is a non-starter, using a direct argument rather than a reductio ad absurdum argument: my MIT education instilled me with values, passions, and interests that could very well be in opposition to maximising my income. I.e., if I'd gone to a lesser school, I might very well make more money because my values, passions, and interests would be different. I.e., not necessarily for the better, but perhaps oriented more towards increased income. E.g., without certain passions and interests that MIT instilled me with, there would have been a lot more jobs–some of them high-paying–that would have been appealing to me. But with the passions and interests I ended up with, these jobs were not appealing to me. E.g., I could have gotten a very high paying job right out of college programming in Cobol. But that certainly was not for me after groking the beauty of Scheme.
Consequently, a study showing that I would have statistically made as much money if I had received my education at a less prestigious school, is utterly irrelevent to how I value my MIT education.
Wow. Nice misapplication of a logical fallacy. My claim was that forging connections between legacy students and merit students was not particularly beneficial to merit students. You then claimed that this would lead to the supposedly absurd conclusion that your MIT education is valueless.
You cannot apply reductio ad absurdum here, because you cannot conclude 'an MIT education is valueless' from my claim that 'merit students do not need to be friends with legacy students to succeed'. Since MIT does not have legacy admissions, my claim does not apply to it. You cannot conclude anything about MIT from my claim. Nowhere have I claimed anything about college friends / connections in general, only those between legacy and merit students, which, again, do not exist at MIT.
Moreover, you have committed the fallacy of petitio principii (popularly known as 'begging the question' -- you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic). You have already concluded that your MIT education is worthwhile (and perhaps it is, I don't know; you certain have not proven it), and have used that to mistakenly conclude that you could apply reductio ad absurdum to my claim which -- again -- does not apply to MIT in any way whatsoever.
So, we see that you've (1) misapplied a logical fallacy, (2) attempted to argue against a strawmanned version of my claim, and (3) used petitio principii in an attempt to persuade everyone of the value of an MIT education.
I did not downvote you, but I am unsurprised that you were downvoted.
This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
> you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic
You don't need to go to MIT to understand a joke either. Especially when it is followed up with, "I knows fancy logic things."
No that is not at all what my argument is. My argument is (quoting from a previous comment)
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
I used a study asserting
> that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend
You are attempting to attack the study over my usage of the term 'top school', which you believe applies to MIT. That is far. However, if you read the study (which you clearly did not), it is actually talking solely about Ivy League schools not any 'elite college'. Actually, if you didn't read the study at all, but had only clicked the link and read the title (as most HNers are apt to do), then you still would have known it's about the Ivy League, because it's titled The Ivy League Earnings Myth. All the ivy league schools have legacy admissions. The use of the word 'top school' was my invention. However, using that word versus just using what the study used (Ivy League) does not change the core of my argument which again is
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
You are attempting to attack the study by giving your own anecdote about your experience at MIT. Attempting to extrapolate global truth from your anecdote argument is yet another instance of logical fallacy. However, even admitting your use of fallacy as an actual argument, the argument itself would fail to actually refute the study, because again -- as a non-Ivy League school -- the 'success multiplier' of an MIT education has nothing to do with that of an Ivy League one.
I suggest you go back to my first comment and replace the word top school with 'Ivy League schools', and see that the arguments still follow. I apologize if my use of the term 'top school' to mean 'Ivy League' was confusing.
> This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but is actually orthogonal to the one you are continuing to make about 'elite schools'.
> Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
Well... no. An argument based on false premise is false. In mathematics, unsoundness is a property of a logical system, not particular statements in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness
> No that is not at all what my argument is. My argument is (quoting from a previous comment)
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
In support of the above statement, you made this statement:
> Studies show that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend. In other words, the admissions itself serves as an indication that this person is top-notch and capable of great things.
Everything else you assert would seem to follow from this assertion of yours which is immediately above. You have provided no evidence for this claim, however, other than as measured in financial terms.
> However, if you read the study (which you clearly did not), it is actually talking solely about Ivy League schools not any 'elite college'.
OMG. You are too much!
This is the actual study:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322
It has absolutely nothing to do with Ivy League schools. From the paper itself, it is about "elite" schools (in the paper's own words), and eliteness was measured largely using "selectivity (as measured by the school's average SAT score) and net tuition".
> Actually, if you didn't read the study at all, but had only clicked the link and read the title (as most HNers are apt to do), then you still would have known it's about the Ivy League
:facepalm:
Even in the summary article you linked to it says, "or other super elite college".
> You are attempting to attack the study
I am not attacking the study. I am stating that "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things" (your terms) and financial earnings cannot be equated.
It's a tautology that they cannot be equated, but it would be a long and expensive philosophical, psychological, and sociological/anthroplogical slog to attempt to prove that they are not very strongly correlated. But the burden of proof is not on me; it is on you. It is you who are claiming that a study that only looks at income somehow can be extended to a larger context of "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things".
> by giving your own anecdote about your experience at MIT. Attempting to extrapolate global truth from your anecdote > argument is yet another instance of logical fallacy.
I provided an example of benefiting that is divorced from financial gain. Only a single instance of such in the entire world is enough to refute the claim that financial gain and benefit can be equated.
> However, even admitting your use of fallacy as an actual argument, the argument itself would fail to actually refute the study, because again -- as a non-Ivy League school -- the 'success multiplier' of an MIT education has nothing to do with that of an Ivy League one.
This is a strange hole you want to dig yourself into. What is so different about Ivy League schools from other elite colleges and universities? Nothing except that Ivy League schools are all in the same football league. Schools (both elite and non-elite) are all different from each other. Which is one of the reasons that we have lots of them. So that students can attend a school that matches their abilities, interests, and disposition.
Not to mention that if you had actually followed your own advice and actually read the study, you'd know that it says nothing about Ivy League schools in particular.
> I suggest you go back to my first comment and replace the word top school with 'Ivy League schools'
I suggest that you follow your own advice and read studies that you cite as evidence for your arguments.
>> This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
> That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but is actually orthogonal to the one you are continuing to make about 'elite schools'.
How so? My position is that elite schools can provide significant benefits that cannot be measured financially. This assertion is certainly true. As to whether such benefits frequently exceed such benefits from less elite schools: I clearly am in no position to perform the kind of study that "proving" this would require. I can speak about my personal experience, however, which informs my beliefs on the matter.
>> Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
>Well... no.
Well, YES!
> An argument based on false premise is false.
That is just wrong. There is no such thing as a "false" argument. You can make no conclusion about the truth of the conclusions of an argument that is based on a false premise. An argument is "valid" if its conclusions follow from its premises and "invalid" if its conclusions do not follow from its premises. An argument is "sound" if it is valid and its premises are true, and unsound if it is either invalid or if it has a false premise.
A sound argument necessarily has true conclusions.
> In mathematics, unsoundness is a property of a logical system, not particular statements in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness
That's a different usage of the term "soundness". Words can mean different things in different contexts. I should think that you would know this.
These links will help inform you about how the term "sound" is typically used by philosophers and logicians in the context of logically deductive arguments:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sound_argument
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/281208/what-is-the-...
> That is just wrong.
It is completely backwards, in fact. An argument of the form of P -> C (if premise, then conclusion) is (vacuously) true if P is false, regardless of the conclusion.
Yes, that's exactly right! If you write out an argument in the form of a single logical proposition and any of the premises are false, then the proposition itself is true.
That's one of the things they beat into your head a lot in Logic 101 since it's rather counterintuitive that a material conditional with a false antecedent is always true. GIGO.
My only nit would be that terminologically one wouldn't normally use the terms "true" or "false" to describe an argument, since if you did, then you'd have to say that all arguments with a false premise are true, and that's just too confusing. So usually one speaks of arguments in terms of validity and soundness instead.
P.S. Another thing that's confusing to Logic 101 students on day 1, is that an argument can be valid and yet the conclusions can still be false.
In math, this usually doesn't come up, since you wouldn't typically have valid proofs in math that started with a false premise.