nessus42

And how does this claim translate into "education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing"?

I currently work at a famous MIT and Harvard-affiliated research institute that aims to eventually cure cancer and other genetically-caused diseases. Or at least find better treatments for them. Is this not important research? Is trying to treat and/or cure terrible diseases merely "window dressing" to you?

Before working on this, I worked at an MIT research lab that developed an X-ray space telescope. Software that I wrote was essential for the publication of about 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers.

Is 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers "window dressing"?

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.

I don't know if there is or isn't official documentation everything you might typically want to know for Apple products. Clearly, they don't document the answer to every question that anyone might ever ask, but they do document many things that you might not think they do.

I know this because often when I Google for how to do something on a Mac, I often end up on some Apple page that tells me how to accomplish what I want. E.g., a page that documents a bunch of MacOS keyboard shortcuts, or what have you.

Of course, one problem is churn. I.e., the features in the software are changing frequently, and consequently, documentation can get quickly out of date. Also, Apple is likely to be cooperating with book authors. There is the "Missing Manual" series, which often seems to contain a lot of useful information (though, as I mentioned sometimes out-of-date), and I'm sure that David Pogue and friends don't figure all of this out via just trial and error. It seems like they must get some sort of assistance from Apple in the form of release notes or rough documentation, or something.

Even if the answer to that question is nothing, that does not justify the conclusion that "education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing".

Btw, are you oblivious to the fact that RMS invented the GPL and wrote the GNU C compiler and Emacs and formed the FSF (among other very useful things) while he was employed as a research scientist at MIT. And that, as far as I'm aware, for much of this time he had no other responsibilities than doing these things?

Also, are you aware that his undergraduate education is from Harvard, which certainly must have had some sort of effect on the interests that he chose later to pursue? (He's on record as stating that he enjoyed much of his education there.)

Stallman also maintained the MIT version of Lisp Machine Lisp and the MIT Lisp Machine OS for some of this time. It is working on this and seeing MIT's research "stolen" by Symbolics and other companies that in no small part led to his beliefs about free software.

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.

I suppose. But a chart with 23 different lines is quite difficult to read in my experience.

I.e., visually distinguishing that many lines from each other is not easy.

As to whether legacy students would have helped me rise higher on any ladders, I can't say, since I climbed whatever ladders I did via some combination of merit, having a good education, having a prestigious education, and "white male American privilege". I have no idea how things would have turned out if some rich kid had been my roommate.

I have gotten jobs due to connections, though, and more and better connections might have allowed me to get better jobs. Though I pretty much got the jobs that I wanted anyway, so it's not clear if better connections would have made much of a difference.

Personally, my guess would be that legacy admissions exist mostly for a university to increase its stream of loyal donations from the well-to-do.

You're basing this conclusion based on an earnings study? That's pretty questionable reasoning!

I received an incredible education from MIT (and I was admitted based on merit), but I took that education and went to work for non-profit research institutes, because making as much money as possible was not my primary objective.

Oh, puh-lease! This is just utter nonsense.

Not that MIT and Ivy League schools don't deserve serious criticism (like just about everything else in the world) but your characterization is either extremely biased or completely uninformed.

And what would you use as an alternative? It would take a LOT of bars to display this information during the 90s as a grouped bar chart.

Apple products have been like this for ages. I.e., they present a "simple" interface for the "typical" user, and then they provide "advanced" features for the "power user" that are only accessible via keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. (E.g., doing a screenshot on MacOS is via Command-$.)

Their success in achieving the right balance, however, has been quite mixed IMHO.

How do you find out about the "advanced" features? Via Google or Stack Exchange or reading a book or guide, I suppose.

I'd also be surprised if there haven't been dists that used the GNU commands, but with a BSD kernel.

Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein, who was a staunch defender of civil liberties at a time when most of his peers weren't, wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal.

I agree completely that being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.

I find this hard to believe. I can use a single Gillette Fusion 5 cartridge for a month or more.

One person's "problem" is another person's joie de vivre. I loved the original Zork and all the Infocom games back in the day.

I admit, though, that I don't know if I'd have the patience to play them today. E.g., they required making maps with pencil and paper and taking notes, etc. These days, I just want to kick back on the sofa and shoot aliens with space magic guns.

This is great for going to the dentist, but I suppose it's not so great for managing chronic pain, however.

Put the journal (opened to the right page) and pen right beside your bed where you can't miss it when you wake up. Write down anything that's in your head, even if it's just, "I don't remember anything." Eventually, you'll start remembering dreams vividly and be able to write them down.

Or at least this seems to work for most people. I have no idea why. Of course, it probably doesn't work for everyone. But then again, what does?

I don't particularly like to argue over semantics, but this is not a "logical fallacy". It may be some sort of fallacy, but it's not a logical one.

So with Instant Runoff elections, the majority gets their wish. The Green Candidate wins.

With Approval Voting, 60% of the people vote the Green Party Candidate, 40% of the people vote for the Republican Party Candidate, and 100% of the people vote for the Democratic Candidate. The Democratic candidate wins.

I don't see how this is a win for Approval Voting. The candidate that wins is a candidate that no one really wanted.

Well, clearly my example is rather contrived, but I suspect (perhaps out of ignorance) that any situation in which Instant Runoff would cause counter-intuitive results is also rather unlikely.

I'll definitely have to look at your reference, though. I do find such issues very interesting

But I can already tell you by the complexity of what that article is trying to show that most people won't understand it and won't care.

When I vote, it's in part to declare what I want and what I believe in. I generally don't like Democrats and I don't like Republicans. If I want to vote for the Green Party candidate, then I want to vote for the Green Party candidate and make it known that that's who I want to win. I don't want to be stating that I equally approve of both the Green Party candidate and the Democratic candidate since that doesn't accurately represent my opinion.

Given that the Green Party candidate is not going to win, I generally vastly prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate, even if I don't like the Democratic candidate one bit.

I don't want to vote in a way in which my statement is that I equally prefer the Democratic candidate to Green Party candidate. I want to vote in a way that states, "I want the Green Party candidate to win. And if I can't have that, I'll reluctantly settle for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate."

Voting in a way in which one's desires are clearly indicated is what most people would want, I imagine, even if it has some counterintuitive results at times.

Also, at least on a cursory reading, it seems that the author of the article has a bias towards "moderate" candidates winning. Who says that I want a moderate candidate to win? I want some serious progressive change!

Hence, in the Everett Interpretation, if you shoot yourself using such a quantum gun, every time you pull the trigger, there will end up being one "world" in which the gun didn't go off and one world in which you put a bullet in your head.

In the Bohm Interpretation, that coin could always come up heads too, but again with a vanishingly small probability.

So they seem equivalent experimentally to me. (And to the experts who have written entire books on the subject.)

Max Tegmark came up with a way to experimentally determine if the Everett Interpretation is correct. (I believe it was Tegmark who came up with this.) It has a high cost for the experimenter, though!

What you do, is rig a gun to a fair quantum coin, so when you pull the trigger, the gun fires 50% of the time. Now shoot yourself in the head with it many, many times. If you end up surviving many rounds of this, you can be pretty darn certain that the Everett Interpretation is correct.

Never mind the billions of other versions of yourself that you murdered to discover the truth!

There are various interpretations that attempt to define "measurement" in various ways, but those are not the Copenhagen Intepretation.

As for whether you can give a scientific account of how data is processed by a brain in a superposition of states, you most certainly can. (Ever heard of "quantum computing"?) It's just complicated.

At some point this debate becomes a bit too confusing for me. All I can report is that the experts fretted over this.

I don't understand why this would be difficult to understand.

The "Many Worlds Interpretation" is actually something of a misnomer. This is why many people prefer to call it the Everett Interpretation.

It doesn't actually posit many worlds. It posits one very big complex world with very complex superpositions of state. But since your brain ends up in a superposition of states, different facets of this superposition of your brain state perceive this one big complex world, as smaller, simpler "worlds".

And the term for why different pieces of this superposition of states stop having an effect on each other is called "decoherence".

As for how the math works out in terms of probabilities, that is beyond me.

When I studied this, the discussion was usually simplified down to a quantum coin that when flipped would come up heads 1/3 of the time and tails 2/3 of the time.

This only results in two "worlds" though. A heads world and a tails world. So there was an issue that people debated at the time: Why do we perceive the .3333/.66667 probability for these two "worlds", rather than a .5/.5 probability?

I must admit that I am ignorant about the current state of this debate.

Yes, back when I studied this topic seriously, this was an issue. E.g., if you toss a quantum coin that has a 1/3 chance of coming up heads and 2/3 chance of coming up tails, this seems to result in only two "worlds". And if there are two worlds, why are the observed probabilities then not .5/.5 rather than .3333/.6667?

I didn't mention this in my OP because (1) that would have been something of a deep-dive for a summary post, and (2) there were ideas being floated about to solve this problem back when I was studying this, but I don't know how these ideas ultimately panned out.

I'm surely curious as to what the current best ideas are about this issue.