Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

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The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

Interesting... I found the opposite. I went to Oxford University (as elite as it gets), with a head big as a balloon, and clearly thinking myself better than everyone. Four years in the presence of people whose intellect crushed me like an insignificant cockroach taught me humility. Since I still needed to believe that I wasn't... you know... just plainly inferior, that forced me to re-rationalise what it means to be "better", and to come to the conclusion that intellectual prowess has nothing to do with being a better person.

It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

I also disagree with this, to an extent. My time in Oxford made me a more rounded person, intellectually, inter-personally, and emotionally. And I think that was the right result - that's certainly what my parents hoped when I went in. I think the purpose of education is to make people - not just minds or careers. A person is a combination of many different things, including mind, network of connections, desires, abilities, and a myriad other things.

Mind you, Oxford might just be different from Yale... perhaps Yale should take a leaf ;-)

Oxford taught me that I'm a better computer scientist than I am a mathematician (or at least, that I'm better at algorithms than at algebraic number theory), but it didn't teach me humility.

I realized that intelligence has nothing to do with being a better person when I came up against the apparent contradiction that all of the fascinating people I enjoyed talking to were far less intelligent than myself. :-)

This wouldn't seem like a contradiction if we had better definition of intelligence. For example, it wouldn't seem like a contradiction to say you enjoy talking with fascinating people who were all worse than you at math and logic.

How do far less intelligent people fascinate you? Is it because they know something that you don't, and/or are able to see things in ways that are new to you? Or perhaps they are less concerned about evaluating the level (in anything) of the other party?

If I was sitting next to Tiger Woods I would probably talk very little about golf, knowing that we share little in common in that area and would make for a very one-way conversation. Perhaps, then, it would appear that I have interesting things to say, although the whole time I am a golf idiot (or sports idiot, or math idiot, whatever).

Or is it something different?

If I was sitting next to Tiger Woods I would probably talk very little about golf...

If I sat next to Tiger Woods I would talk about the weather and the menu for a minute or two, but then I'd certainly introduce the topic of golf and see what happened. It could be that Tiger loves nothing more than to talk about golf. He is freakishly obsessed with golf, after all.

The result might turn out to be a "one-way conversation". So what? People really like to talk about the things they love. If you listen intently and ask questions that indicate you're following along, they'll love you for it, even if the questions are basic.

The secret is to be alert for signs that your conversation partner is trying to change the subject. If I ask Tiger about golf and he responds with a few quick sentences and then asks about the music that's playing on the radio it's probably time to talk about something else.

Touche.

I was drawing an analogy though, to pick on cperciva's post. It isn't so hard to see that the contradiction he writes about isn't so much of a contradiction, which is surprising to read from someone who is obviously very intelligent.

Different paths, same destination :-)

a couple of years ago i saw an academic ranking of british universities.sheffield was the best with oxford and cambridge around 20th place. so maybe you're right that oxford is different from yale

I've seen a lot of university rankings, and I've never seen one that looked like that. If you had a link it would be useful, but pretty much every ranking I've seen has had Oxford and Cambridge as the two top British universities.

Example: http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm with Cambridge 4th, Oxford tenth and Sheffield in place 72, just ahead of the University of Arizona.

It's funny. I hadn't started University, and I was accepted at Sheffield to study AI. Now, I arranged to meet a hypertext legend to help him with a recent project, and I ended up having Christmas dinner with this guy, and some of the faculty and the head of computer science at Sheffield.

Something tells me it would have been better going to Sheffield than going to this local University just for this reason, but we all make mistakes.

As it happens, I became friendly with the head of computer science at my local University choice, for doing well in a computer trivia quiz.

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