MIT professor's hack to recruit students | Hacker News Reader

MIT professor's hack to recruit students

librarylab.law.harvard.edu

246 pointsiamwil41 comments

Ah, so Jerry Lettvin died.

I took a couple of courses from him as an undergrad. He was quite a character. Here's a Jerry quote for you: "The brain is not a computer. The brain is a gland." I don't even know if he believed that, but he loved to stir controversy -- and announcing this at the MIT AI Lab c. 1982 certainly accomplished that!

I would say "RIP", but he probably already has his lab set up and is hard at work, wherever he is :-)

I think he deserves to come back as an ant, so that would figure. Bad Karma should carry him a few steps down the food chain at least.

The world is divided between those who see this kind of behaviour as lovable eccentricity and others who regard it as sabotage and a special kind of nastiness. I am of the latter, and see this "character" as a bad person because of his book-trick.

Did you know him? I don't, and I would be hesitant to condemn his character based on a couple of brief anecdotes.

He is dead, and quite likely was an atheist.

"Now I will have to say that the great Prof. Lettvin could hardly get himself bent out of shape just because some puny undergrad had come forward with a puny work product, but I was to learn that day what he might heap upon a bullshitter."

Your heart is in the right place, but do not foul the memory of such a beautiful, insightful, and honourable individual with bullshit---metaphorical or otherwise.

I thought a hater or two might come out of the woodwork when I said that.

You people are as arrogant and humorless as the worst fundamentalists.

Jerry was neither arrogant nor humorless. You cannot persuade me that he would have the slightest objection to my innocent image of him in an afterlife.

Also, read the first poem on this page:

http://jerrylettvin.blogspot.com/search/label/Jerry%27s%20Wr...

I'm ok with your colorful counterfactual about his current disposition, the same way I'm fine reading a Sutra talking about reincarnation, or a Nasrudin story invoking Allah. I don't think belief should have anything to do with cultural acceptability; and I think the people objecting to your comment are rude--but I also think "you people" is a rude way to address them.

You have a point. I spoke in anger.

I think it is too bold a statement to suggest that the idea of an afterlife is rubbish. Who are we to definitively say that there is nothing after this life?

While man's body likely evolved from an ancestor common to all other life on earth, I believe it would be wise to take a humble and open-minded approach when contemplating the origin of man's uniqueness.

As smart as this group may be, when it dismisses everything that can't be empirically proven it misses out on so much of human experience. Being open to those experiences and even beliefs that are beyond the reach of the scientific method will lead to a deeper and more meaningful life.

Also, true religion and true science will never contradict each other. At the heart of both true religion and true science is the same driving force: a search for truth. Though the means of searching are very different, the ends are the same as long as truth was the result.

Anyway, just my 2 cents after spending many years searching for truth in both spiritual and scientific places.

It's not impossible to be an atheist and still be socially graceful.

I'm not a 'hater' (per below), but I would suggest to you that 'probably' is most definitely the wrong modifier here.

Can you really not deal with encountering someone with different beliefs than your own? As someone with minority beliefs -- a small minority -- I deal with it every day. It's just a matter of respect.

Argh, this reminds me of my frustration with the university library. Students were 'hoarding' books that I wanted in other sections of the library so that they could effectively bypass 1 hour or 3 day lending limits (short/long term borrowing). While a nice hack to get what you want, it's depriving others from using the resources in the meantime. There was even up to three very helpful librarians try to even find one book over three days. I'm even paranoid that it was stupidity that someone decided to mix Economics among Medicine books.

At least it's known who has the book in this case.

I worked at the library at a university library for a while. I hadn't heard about the issues you mentioned, but the issue of this article was very common.

It stemmed from our lending policy. Undergrads could get a book for two weeks, but had a two-week grace period on renewals (sorta weird). Grad students and professors could check out books for the entire academic year, they were supposed to physically bring in their books for renewal once a year, but many times they could convince staff to just renew all books on their accounts. Some professors had over 100 books checked out and many didn't know how many they had checked out. The common response to inquiries was to tell the student to go talk to the professor. We were allowed to give out professors names.

At my university, there was 3 day lending policy. With renewals within the day of return. Due to a limited selection, it was possible for others to put a 'hold' on it. This means library staff would keep it behind counter for up to a week before releasing it to the next hold request or put it back on shelf.

Since some undergrad books were in heavy demand (especially due to assignments/exams) when it's common to see holds. Some students have learnt to put the book somewhere else in the library so they could have exclusive privilege of reading it.

Conversely, I haven't heard of the professors or anyone hoarding lent books. All holds I have placed eventually turned up available in <3 days. Your two weeks policy is very generous and something I would have liked over 3 days which seems quick.

I bet many people's first reaction to this story is something along the lines of "Look what we're losing if print dies!" or "This is why print will never die!"

But, think about Kindle's bookmarks. You can see highlights and notes from everyone who has ever read the book. That's insane! That's Lettvin's hack, scaled to the max. The problem is obviously filtering all that data, but look how much larger the pool gets: now the professor doesn't just have the pool from MIT to choose from, he might have the whole world to choose from.

What an awesome time we live in.

It's Lettvin's hack scaled to the point of meaninglessness. The whole point was to get them physically in his office and talking to him, and I'm pretty sure he was only interested in students to begin with. If he wanted to talk to everyone who had ever read the book, he may as well just put an ad somewhere.

Maybe I wasn't very clear: the post made it sound like the point of the "hack" was to identify and recruit talent (i.e. if you were interested in the book you were probably talented). Dealing with physical books, on campus, obviously limits the pool of potential talent. Something like Kindle's notes (or its next, more refined, version) could not only identify who might be talented (i.e. who had read the book), but the notes/bookmarks/highlights could also provide insight into just how talented someone was, whether that person was on MIT's campus or was some kid living in a village in India.

Fair enough. Lettvin's hack backed up and scaled in a different direction...

I don't think Lettvin really cared about the books themselves - he just wanted to meet the type of people who reads them.

I checked out some esoteric books and every now and then would look through the previous due dates and wonder how much in common I may have with some of these locals I'll never know about. It's easy to meet likeminded folks on the web and yet with locals who've checked out physical books, there is that identity disconnect--in some cases for good reasons(I don't want everyone to know about every book I've been checking out).

Have you considered leaving something in books you check out? "Hi! I live nearby and also am interested in X! You should email me at ..."

Not sure how well your library checks things that you return (I know someone at Stanford who got an email from the library because she forgot to remove a couple sticky notes from a book), but it might be worth a try.

My wife found a piece of bacon in a library book recently, so I'm inclined to think that in general they don't check books often. Just stick a note in there.

A friend of mine put a $20 bill in his university library's copy of his thesis. AFAIK it's still there.

I am writing my masters thesis now. I know only my 3 readers and my dad will ever read it. A strange tradition

I suppose the majority of thesis' are completed for the creator's benefit, not the world's.

I've found a few interesting things inside library and second-hand books.

Probably the most interesting was inside a library copy of the 2003 edition of the Clocksin and Mellish book Programming in Prolog. Inside the book was a print-out (dot-matrix, by the look of it) of an email sent in 1988 from one of the authors of the book to the other, regarding how to revise it for a future edition.

Edit: Also on the piece of paper, handwritten, is the name `Geoff Goodhill'.

What were some of the esoteric books? (It may be an unfair question. I doubt I remember enough to answer it myself.)

I've just come across a QuickTime video of Jerry's famous debate with Timothy Leary about LSD. I found it quite fascinating to hear both Leary's argument and Jerry's rebuttal. As I understand, Jerry accepted the debate invitation on very short notice and so had little time to prepare his remarks, and that shows; he rambles a little. But he makes his point.

Here's the link: http://neuron.duke.edu/Lettvin/Lettvin_Leary_Deb.mov

If you find Leary's mysticism tedious and you just want to see Jerry's rebuttal, skip to about the 60% point. (Don't miss Leary's brief reply at the end, though.)

Oh, and in an interesting bit of synchronicity, Jerry mentions the Charles Whitman case, which figures prominently in another article on HN at the moment ("The Brain On Trial").

Some more Jerry stories: http://jerrylettvin.blogspot.com/search/label/Memories

Lettvin really missed out by refusing to try LSD. I bet he would have sung a different tune if he had.

well - to play devil's advocate, it's clever but if a student hoarded books, he'd have the book thrown at him/her and academic standards should apply to all equally.

Well students are expected to come to the university, study in obscurity, then leave after paying monies.

The context is different for professors, especially tenured ones.

Why do you think this is an "academic standard"? And even if it is one, why should they apply equally (e.g. its an academic standard that students cannot use one paper for multiple classes, however professors can use one paper for multiple conferences/journals/etc.)

Actually, usually one paper can't be submitted to multiple places.

It varies a lot by discipline. Law reviews universally accept papers that have been submitted elsewhere; CS conferences universally don't (unless they were rejected already, of course). Lots of places, in many disciplines, will publish material in technical reports or dissertations that's already been published elsewhere.

To answer your last question, because the purposes are different.

Professors assign homework (including papers) to force students to learn something new. But professors speak at conferences because other professors want to hear about their work.

In theory, why can't some student who wants to work in that professor's lab just request the books that the professor checked out (or are likely to check out)?

Seems like hacking the hack.

You probably can't figure out which books he has on his shelf, especially if he realizes this approach and consciously conceals them and suppresses the information.

Seems like it would've been easier to just swing by his office and tell him you wanted to work in his lab. That'd probably get you farther than the book thing anyway.

seems like physical version of delicious to me :)

if you are doing this shit at 11 you don't need a "life lesson", you are already ahead of the pack no matter the outcome.

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