nessus42

I just looked up what a 2100 equates to in terms of current scores. It equates to 1470, which is not shockingly low for MIT. Admittedly, it's not near the top of MIT scores, but it's well within the accepted range.

MIT looks at all sorts for things when it admits students. You don't know what other qualifications this student had. He could have had straight A's, max scores on all his Advanced Placement exams, stellar recommendations from teachers, award-winning science fair presentations, etc.

It's never too late!

> but I wonder why I haven't stumbled on any philosophical literature about it before ?

Well, you'd usually only be exposed to it via a Philosophy of Mind class or in journals for professional philosophers.

Behaviorists were operating under the misconception that something can't be both subjective and objective at the same time. It took Cognitive Psychology to rescue us from this sorry state of affairs. But for years, those who wanted to do Cognitive Psychology academically were blocked from publishing and getting tenure, etc., by the entrenched Behaviorist establishment.

These days we know that via using FMRI, for instance, psychologists and neuroscientists can often determine objectively more about some of your own thoughts than you yourself might know. Or they can sometimes know what you will come to decide before you believe yourself to have decided. Etc.

But certain mental states (i.e., phenomenal ones) seem to have an inherently subjective component that cannot be studied objectively at all. Or at least that's what someone who believes in the "hard problem of consciousness" will say. Others will say, "Pshaw!"

My position on this is that there are natural phenomena which cannot be fully described mathematically. There's nothing supernatural about such things. They are just physical things, like all other physical things, but which defy mathematical analysis.

If you don't believe what I just said, then it seems that you are forced to believe Max Tegmark's theory that there is nothing to physical existence other than mathematical existence. Is that really a theory that you buy into.

It's certainly an interesting theory, but I'd be willing to wager that most scientists would not be willing to sign on.

The famous cosmologist Max Tegmark has written an entire book (and published several papers) arguing that there is no difference between mathematical existence and physical existence and therefore all worlds that can be described mathematically and consistently are just as "real" as our world. Consequently, physical existence of a world is due to nothing more than that such a world can be described mathematically.

According to Tegmark, our world is just pure math with no extra secret sauce to make it "real" and physical. And so, of course, according to Tegmark, there are an infinite number of other worlds described by math that also exist physically. And they exist physically for no other reason than that they exist mathematically.

Do you agree with Tegmark?

And if you don't, why isn't it the case that you are postulating invisible pink unicorns to explain the difference between mathematical existence and physical existence?

(Note: I'm not aware of this approach to arguing for the hard problem to be present in the literature. This argument is my own.)

Philosophers generally take solipsism seriously. They just do something called "bracketing" regarding solipsism. "Bracketing" is a philosopher's way of saying, "Yes, this is a serious issue, but we can't make any progress unless we ignore the problem, so that's what we're going to do. But we'll be sure to keep it in the back of our heads as a possibility, lest it come back and bite us."

I.e., virtually every philosophical argument starts with an implicit, "For the sake of argument let's assume that solipsism isn't true." There are also probably dozens of other such worries that are typically bracketed.

Mathematicians often do something similar. There are certain mathematical conjectures (usually involving infinities in my experience) which we can prove can neither be proved nor disproved. So mathematicians will just assume some such conjectures for the sake of making progress. One example of this would be the axiom of choice.

I skimmed the article very quickly. It doesn't even mention the Bohm interpretation. It has long been considered that the Bohm interpretation and MWI are experimentally indistinguishable. Since the article doesn't specifically mention this issue, I'm not sure that it's worth the slog (if all you care about is the philosophical worry that we can never distinguish whether we're in an MWI world vs a Bohm world.)

As for MWI/Bohm being distinguishable from other interpretations, it is certainly the case that this is true. Though actually doing so in practice would be extremely difficult. My guess is that this article is really on how me might approach trying to narrow the field down to MWI/Bohm, or exclude them, as the evidence may ultimately show.

Uh, oh! You're doomed now. You're going to have to waste thousands of hours of your life studying Philosophy!

If I were writing a formal proof, you would know it. I have expressed my beliefs and explained as best I can the reasons for them with the extremely limited time that I had available to me.

As for "You are wrong", I softened that with the acknowledgement that you have plenty of company amongst philosophers, and that the subject has been a topic of vigorous debate for decades, and that reasonable people differ on this issue and that we weren't going to be able to resolve such a fraught issue in this limited forum.

You want more tip-toeing than that in a debate? Really? My Philosophy professors would just say directly to you in the middle of a class in front of everyone else, things like, "You are suffering from a profound misconception." This was just a challenge to you to either step up your argument or to ask them for more explication. They would not, however, mock you, or impute that you or half of all the Philosophers who study the topic are so ignorant that they are making an invisible unicorn argument.

As for attending classes for weeks to understand the issue: I have a Philosophy degree from MIT. I spent most of my actual work on Philosophy studying THIS particular issue. It took ME weeks in my first Philosophy of Mind class, when we got to this very topic to ultimately understand the issues involved. I wasn't slower than anyone else in the class either. In fact I'm a natural at Philosophy. I.e., I got an A on every single Philosophy paper I ever wrote. (And MIT does not have grade inflation.) As with most difficult philosophical issues, true understanding really only sets in when setting out to write a paper on the topic.

What's also somewhat unique about this particular philosophical divide is that no matter how much motivating either side does, many philosophers (e.g., even famous professional ones) cannot see the opposing viewpoint at all. No matter what is said, there is a certain contingent on both sides that basically just pounds their fists on the table in frustration that the other side won't even acknowledge that their side might have a valid point.

So what exactly am I supposed to tell you other than that I don't have the time to explain why I don't have the time to explain? (That's an inside joke from the video game Destiny, btw.)

If your point is that I wasted thousands of hours of my life studying this topic, point taken. As Wittgenstein claimed, studying Philosophy is more of a disease than anything else, since with most topics that it deals with, you can argue about the topic for hundreds of years without making much progress. But it's a disease that typically only afflicts people who are passionate and smart and who would like to understand something better, even if such understanding may be ultimately illusive.

> I am also dismissive because I don't see a succinct motivating example, paradox etc.

What makes you think that everything that's of interest can be motivated with a succinct example? Lisp is clearly the best programming language humans have ever devised and yet most programmers just dismiss it as having too many parentheses. If you can't convince people to use the best programming language no matter how much you explain the issues, why should you be able to convince a skeptic about a complex philosophical issue that is moot with respect to any practical concerns.

Though most people immediately do see why there might be a philosophical worry when you mention a robot duplicate of them, and how maybe it might feel different if you had a silicon brain rather than a meat brain. Or that it might not feel like anything at all. Most people just immediately get that there's a worry here. That's about as close as one can come to succinct motivating example. Also, most everyone who ever goes into Philosophy of Mind came up with the inverted spectrum hypothesis on their own when they were ten years old. If that doesn't describe you, then Philosophy of Mind will likely never be your cup of tea. (How can it be that they come up with this at a young age and then end up pounding the table later in life? Well, I'm not sure. I suppose that they've had an epiphany in the meantime, or they dismiss their ten-year-old philosophizing as childish musings.)

> Claiming that something is categorically unknowable and yet an important field of study is inconsistent.

You are suffering from a profound misconception. For instance, it is categorically unknowable in the general case what the morally right thing to do is. And yet ethics is still a field of the utmost importance. E.g., you can, after a whole lot of rumination and debate come up with, for instance, strategies that you might have good reason to believe will increase your likelihood of doing the morally right thing. Fingers crossed.

Also, if QM turns out to be consistent with the Many Worlds interpretation, it is categorically unknowable whether or not it is really the Bohm interpretation that is correct. On the other hand, you may come up with philosophical reasons to believe that one interpretation is more likely to be true than the other. And which is more likely might help you with other important philosophical issues.

Ultimately, this forum is just not the right place to have the sort of discussion that you seem to want to have because discussing the various arguments can be very involved and intricate. This forum is not the right place for such discussions and I don't have the free time right now anyway.

If you actually are interested, rather than just wanting to throw stones, we could move the discussion to Reddit or another forum, and I could provide better motivation for my beliefs on this issue when I have the time and inclination to do so properly.

I actually have my own novel argument on this topic. But it first relies on having some knowledge of Max Tegmark's argument that there's no difference between mathematical existence and physical existence and therefore all worlds that can be described mathematically and consistently are just as real as our world. I.e., our world is just pure math with no extra secret sauce to make it real. (Max Tegmark is a famous cosmologist, in case you don't already know.)

The only interpretations that really make sense to me are objective collapse theories and the Many Worlds interpretation. For neither of these interpretations does human consciousness cause wave function collapse.

If you want to know more about the various interpretations of QM, there's a Wikipedia page on them here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...

If you'd like to know even more, here's a good book on the topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Al...

(2) As I mentioned previously, we are not going to settle this debate here anyway. There's a huge amount of literature on the issue. And even just "getting" what the issues are often requires attending a Philosophy of Mind class for weeks or months and doing lots of reading and discussing and philosophizing with an open mind.

(3) If your mind is less closed than it seems, and you don't have access to a good Philosophy of Mind class, you might read this book by David Chalmers:

https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mi...

I'm guessing it'll be kind of a slog, though. And I don't agree with much of what he says, but it's a start at least. He's also the most famous proponent of "the hard problem" (or at least he was when I was actively studying Philosophy of Mind). He's also the person who coined the term "hard problem of consciousness".

Or you could start with the Wikipedia page, but I doubt that anyone would be convinced by it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Well, if you want to dive right in, you could read this book by David Chalmers, who is (or at least was when I actively studied such things) the most famous philosopher who has grappled with the "hard problem" of consciousness:

https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mi...

There are a bunch of books and published papers on the topic, of course. But most of them, including the book listed above, would be a slog if you're not taking a philosophy class on the subject. Even then, they'd likely be a slog. Philosophy arguments on this topic can quickly become extremely intricate, and laden with jargon.

I've written a number of papers on the topic myself for classes, but don't recall if any of them are accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the debate. There might be a decent one that I wrote for Douglas Hofstadter when he was a visiting professor at MIT. I can check and send you a copy if it seems like it might be approachable.

As for a correlation between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that's not really something I buy into. The famous physicist Roger Penrose, however, wrote a couple of books arguing that computers can never be intelligent because the human brain does special quantum mechanics stuff. If you ask me, his ideas about this are a bunch of claptrap. But in case you are interested, here is one of them:

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physic...

You might have a point if philosophers had been arguing for decades and written huge tomes on whether or not there is an invisible pink unicorn. But they haven't.

The academic philosophy community isn't made up of dimwits. You don't do anyone a service by implying that they are.

We are not going to settle this issue here. I suggest that we come back in a millennium and see if any progress has been made. I don't have high hopes.

When it comes to issues of consciousness, I'm loathe to make any strong claims, since I don't think that phenomenal consciousness is amenable to scientific inquiry due to its innately subjective nature. E.g., for all I know, it might feel like something to be a rock. Though I doubt it.

Likewise for plants, I would hypothesize that feeling things consciously requires complex information processing. E.g., such as is done in the brains of many animals.

Plants certainly process information to some degree, but the degree to which they do so would seem to pale compared to the amount of information processing performed by even the simplest animals that have brains.

It's impossible to objectively study what it feels like to be another being. One of the canonical examples from the philosophy literature is on what it feels like to be a bat.

We can't ever observe what it feels like to be a bat because the only way to know for sure what it feels like to be a bat is to actually BE a bat. But you can't be a bat. Consequently, you cannot know for sure what it feels like to be a bat.

Another example from the philosophy literature is the "inverted spectrum hypothesis". Let's say that we make a robot duplicate of you. The robot duplicate of you behaves exactly as you would in all situations. Now let's say that we show the robot a ripe tomato. When you look at this ripe tomato, you will experience a feeling of redness. But for all we know, the robot duplicate of you might feel blueness instead. I.e., it might feel what you feel when you look at the sky on a beautiful summer day.

There's no way for us to know the answer to this question.

There are also philosophers who argue that a robot duplicate of you would feel nothing at all. E.g., no redness, no blueness. If you want to know more about why someone would believe this, look up Searle's Chinese Room argument.

Philosophers who take this point of view believe that any robot will be a "zombie". I.e., it will have all the other sorts of consciousness that we might talk about, but it wouldn't have phenomenal consciousness.

This is also sometimes referred to as the "absent spectrum hypothesis".

Yes, that is exactly right. Science is all about that which can be studied objectively and the "hard problem of consciousness" is specifically about the component of consciousness that is purely subjective.

How can you study something that is purely subjective using objective methods?

A. You can't!

Here's another question that science can't answer:

The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics posit vastly different things about the nature of reality. Unfortunately, they are experimentally indistinguishable from each other.

So, if somehow we could narrow QM down to either MW or Bohm, at this point we are stuck. We can never know which interpretation is the right one, even though the answer to this question is up there in importance with the hard problem of consciousness!

You are talking about "phenomenal consciousness", which is sometimes also referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness". (Though not all philosophers would equate these two terms.) There are quite a few other useful definitions of consciousness, and consequently, all of the different notions of consciousness should not all be lumped together.

I actually have a Philosophy degree from MIT, and I spent almost all my philosophical time worrying about and studying this issue. It still keeps me up at night sometimes to this day.

I agree with you that the hard problem of consciousness is not amenable to scientific study, and consequently, I don't think that we can ever understand it, unfortunately.

I also agree that it is the deepest and most important question about the nature of reality that we could ever have, and it is quite frustrating that we will never know the answer.

Back to other notions of consciousness, though: Many of them are interesting, and I think amenable to scientific inquiry. So we shouldn't let the hard problem of consciousness deter us from studying easier problems of consciousness.

That's nonsense. I never said anything of the sort.

I've been engaged in another debate here concurrently, which you can easily track down. The originator of that debate posted about a study showing that where you go to school has little impact on your lifetime income. My response argued that income isn't the only benefit that one gets from an education. But I'd readily admit that income is certainly one of the most important benefits.

Unless you have a hankering to work on a small team developing, maintaining, and operating an X-ray space telescope, or to become a prestigious researcher, I'm sure that your education is just fine. That's what the data shows. Also, if you go to graduate school for a PhD, the graduate school you go to is way more important than the undergraduate school you go to. There are plenty of people I know who went to non-elite undergraduate schools but then went on to elite graduate schools.

Personally, I wanted to go to MIT for CS grad school, but I didn't get in. (Despite good grades and excellent GRE scores. How unfair!) I got into BU's PhD program, but BU wasn't doing the kind of research I wanted to do. So I bailed and just got a job at MIT. Though I learned incredible stuff as an undergrad at MIT, it was also difficult to distinguish myself, other than in a few classes for which I was particularly well-suited. Why? Because before I went to MIT, I was the best student out of a thousand. And my SAT scores were the best out of 5,000.

At MIT, though, I was just average. If I had gone to a school where I could have been a bigger fish, maybe I would have gotten into MIT's CS Phd program. Or maybe not. Life is too short to try to second-guess all the maybes. But I have a friend who went to UMD for both undergraduate and graduate school and now he's an Associate Professor at UPenn. Now that he's doing scientific research and applying for grants, etc., it certainly helps him to be a professor in a research lab that has some other very fine minds working with him.

> Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.

Society values research universities based on the quality of the research they do. This is determined largely by the volume and quality of their peer-reviewed publications. Also, I imagine by the publication of influential textbooks, like SICP. Etc.

When the P99 produce results that match that of the P50, then your dream will come true, and not before that. But that's unlikely to happen since universities that are more selective are more likely to attract higher quality researchers. Which will affect their ability to get research grants. Etc.

As for where one should get an education, this is clearly a personal choice. I've gotten to do some interesting things in life due to my education and by staying at or near MIT. But my brother, who went to BU, and never worked on anything of note (other than running Westchester's slam poetry team) is a lot happier than I am, no doubt. Why? Because he found a loving, supportive relationship with a great woman.

This has alluded me. At this point, I'd trade everything I've ever done in life for a job that pays me well enough and a lasting, harmonious relationship.

Did my brother going to BU and me going to MIT result in him ending up happier? Who knows? But ultimately, he's won. At least for what's most important in life.

Regarding my suggestion for where kids should go to school today, I'd probably recommend that if they have enough discipline, they should just get their education from Coursera and/or edX. For whatever reasons, a college education has just become too expensive these days, leaving many students with a terrible debt load that will harm their wellbeing for decades. Whatever benefit you'd get from MIT or Harvard or even University of Arizona might be offset by suffering from crushing debt.

I've taken a bunch of classes on Coursera and edX (including the original machine learning and database classes that were offered online by Stanford for free before there was a Coursera), and they were excellent experiences.

Though actually going to college has a lot of benefits that self-learning in your parents' basement doesn't have. E.g., making life-long friends, getting nookie and learning to navigate sexual/romantic relationships, developing relationships with professors and other researchers, etc. It would be interesting to see data on how the lives of people who take these two different approaches turn out comparatively.

MIT IS a fantastic school. I'm not sure what you mean by "irreplaceable". MIT is irreplaceable only in the same sense that Picasso's art is irreplaceable. There's nothing else quite like it, but there's plenty of other great art in the world: Dali, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Calder, etc. If there never was a Picasso, the world would have been fine. It just wouldn't have been as good as a world with Picasso's art in it.

You're also irreplaceable, as is everyone. Since everyone is different.

Re where I work, there are plenty of other labs that do similar things, but none of them seem to do it as well. It used to be part of MIT but eventually decided to be its own thing. Much of of the original sequencing of the human genome was done here when it was part of MIT. Would that have been done at UMass Boston? I think not. Might it eventually have been? Who knows? Would the human genome eventually have been sequenced anyway? I'm sure. How much longer would it have taken? Who knows, but I do know it would have taken longer.

If MIT hadn't existed this lab would not exist. Why do so many biologist want to work here? Because there are few other places like it, and if knowledge on how to cure various diseases comes to fruition, it's likely to happen here. If and when that day comes, how many lives will be saved and how much suffering will be prevented that might otherwise not have been? I don't have any crystal balls, but these things matter.

In addition to going to MIT as a student, I worked at MIT for quite a few years. I got to redesign the computing and network infrastructure for a world famous lab. I wrote software that was essential for the operation of an X-ray telescope. 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers were published using results from the telescope and my software.

I got to adapt brain imaging software to visualize radio astronomy data for star-forming regions of space. Now I work on software to design CRISPRs to help bring on the zombie apocalypse. Or at least I can dream, can't I?

Could I have done all this somewhere else? Who knows? My backup school was Johns Hopkins. They have a cool physics lab. Who knows what might have happened if I'd gone there instead? Would I have done such interesting things at Chapel Hill? Maybe, but I doubt it.

If I had gone to Johns Hopkins, my life would have been different. But it probably would have been just fine. I got into MIT, where I wanted to go. I consider myself lucky. If I'd gone to Johns Hopkins I would also have been fortunate. If Picasso paintings had never existed, I wouldn't have missed them. As I mentioned, there's plenty of other great art. But in that Picasso works do exist, isn't it just so unfair that I can't afford to buy one! I demand a fair and equal distribution of his art, or it's really not a good thing after all!

Your #1 doesn't parse to me. Who said anything about any person being better? MIT choses its student body to be beneficial to itself, the student body, and the world. Considering MIT's success, it seems to be doing a fine job at this. But you would rather fix something that isn't broken?

Re #2, again you want to fix something that isn't broken. How about MIT just admits students via a completely random lottery of everyone who applies? Do you think that would work out well?

Re fundamental superiority, once again I find you clear as mud. I'm certainly not claiming to be fundamentally superior to anyone. I was just lucky enough to be born smart enough to do very well in high school and then lucky enough to be admitted via MIT's secret sauce selection methodology.

If your question is whether or not MIT is fundamentally superior, I don't know about "fundamentally". It's long been considered the world's best engineering school. As it turns out Harvard has better astronomy due, in part, to its close ties to the Smithsonian. I originally went to MIT for astronomy, and if I had only known at the time, I suppose I would have preferred Harvard. Oh, well. And maybe Caltech has better astronomy too. It turns out I settled for third best.

On the other hand, I got to learn SICP before the book was even published, and that changed my life. That couldn't have happened anywhere else.

I can't even begin to express how nutty this idea is. MIT's existence is certainly in the national interest. MIT is the world's best university for training engineers and the world needs good engineers. The more, the better. The better they are, the better. MIT is also excellent in other fields as well. I.e., stuff that the world needs.

> Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.

More insanity!

Look, I work at a famous research institute that is affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Our goal is to do fundamental research aimed at treating and curing cancer and other genetically-based diseases. Many people want to work here because it is so prestigious. And it's a non-profit because it makes no money.

But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.

So now you'd want to take away our tax-free status? The consequence of doing this is that some terrible diseases that might otherwise be cured might not be. And the same thing is true if you were to take away MIT's and Harvard's tax-free status, because the research institute where I work has close research ties to both MIT and Harvard.

You seem to have lost sight of the purpose of research universities. They do research! Valuable research. And students get to come and be with the researchers and learn from them.

At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.

Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?

Let's get rid of the tennis courts and the swimming pool and the bowling alley while we're at it!

> Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior

Inherently superior? No, of course not. But MIT's difficulty level is "calibrated" to those in the top 1% of scholastic aptitude. If someone doesn't have an aptitude somewhere in this ballpark, MIT is probably not going to be a rewarding experience for them.

In the US, the last I checked, 50% of high school graduates went on to college. MIT's difficulty level is clearly calibrated to only a few percent of these college students.

Also, clearly, if we crunched the numbers, we'd quickly determine that there are lot more students in the country who are at an appropriate aptitude level for MIT than MIT can actually admit. Well, such is life. There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can.

Life isn't always fair, nor can it be. Just like not everyone can work at my research institute that might want to.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education. And there are plenty of other opportunities in the world for those who wish to do genomics-based disease research.

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.

You're talking about a single student admitted at a school that has an active sailing program and then making a huge extrapolation from it about MIT catering to the "elite at the expense of everyone else".

Also, the sailing program at MIT is tiny little sailboats. The kind that any middle-class person can rent for reasonable rates if they live near a big enough body of water. E.g., the Charles River. We're not talking about yachts for the rich here.

MIT doesn't exist to maximize fairness. It exists to perpetuate itself and to provide a beneficial experience to its students. (Which includes having a diverse student body.) Since it has a sailing program, having a good sailing program is good for MIT's students.

I don't know what school you went to, but MIT is actually quite challenging, and, unlike Harvard, has resisted grade inflation. MIT does do a lot to help students graduate, however. E.g., you can easily change majors if the one you originally chose is not suited to you. And you can come back 20 years later and finish, should you not graduate on time.

But I'll give you one example of how MIT compares to the typical school: I had a visiting Psycholinguistics professor from some big university in Arizona. (I don't remember which one.) It was the easiest class at MIT I ever took. I mean, really, really easy.

The professor was impressed by us MIT students, however, because, according to her, she could make the class much more difficult than she would usually teach it, and we could still keep up.

So, at least from this one data point, it seems that psychology and linguistics majors at a typical college would not be able to handle MIT.

> 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-...

https://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/

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."

As I mentioned, when I applied to MIT, MIT said that they didn't really weigh SAT scores all that heavily. MIT has graduate departments that don't even require GRE scores at all. (Or at least that was the case at times in the past if it isn't now.)

I once read an interview with the head of Harvard admissions where he said that it's a misconception that Harvard's ideal student is someone who is well-rounded. He said that Harvard would much prefer to admit someone who has done something truly remarkable, even if they are lacking in other respects.

I don't know about this MIT sailing guy. I attended MIT and I never met anyone who had been admitted due to athletics, but Googling reveals that MIT claims they consider athletics along with everything else. For all that's been said here, this sailing guy might have been truly remarkable at sailing, and an excellent student in other respects. MIT may have wanted a good student to help lead their sailing team, and what is wrong with that?

If this guy wasn't a good student, there's no way that he'd end up graduating. It's not as if you can major in basket weaving at MIT.

Do you think that you have a right to an MIT education based solely on merit or intelligence? That's not how prestigious universities have accepted students for like 100 years.

Prestigious universities typically want, in part, a diverse student body, represented by both sexes and multiple races and cultures.

Let's grant for the sake of argument that Asians are just smarter than everyone else. The consequence of this is that all the best universities would be 100% Asian if they accepted students based purely on aptitude.

But the goal of prestigious universities is not to be such a pure meritocracy that this would ever be the case. Not for Asians, nor any other race or culture.

I made it into MIT, but at the time I was at something of a disadvantage demographically. I was a White male in 1980 from an economically advantaged city and area of the country. If I'd been female, or non-White (and maybe non-Asian), or from an underrepresented part of the country, my chances of getting into MIT would have been much greater. I knew this when I applied and planned my backup applications accordingly.

As for SAT scores, at least when I applied, MIT claimed that SAT scores were way down on the list of what they considered to be most important for successful applicants. (Though I'm sure that SAT scores were not ignored.)

I had an SAT score of 1500, which at the time was very high. I.e., it's equivalent to an IQ of 155 or so. (According to the people who do such correlations.) I also had, litterally, straight A's in high school. Not a single B in four years. I had a perfect score on my Chemistry achievement test. And yet I was not accepted via "Early Action".

Just how high does your IQ have to be to get in via Early Action? Well, there is no answer to that question, because that's just one of many things that MIT is considering when they admit students.