No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.
Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.
In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.
Wow, I didn't realize I was advocating for excess deaths. Thanks for clarifying that for the folks at home.
Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.
It's a trade-off. I'd rather live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime. Even authoritarians are correct at least twice a day.
> live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime.
that's a straw man false dichotomy. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because trump and his administration handled it poorly, doesn't mean it can't be handled well under a democracy. Look at new zealand and australia - they handled it fairly well.
Both democracies and authoritarian regimes can be found among governments that have had laissez-faire policies and both can be found among those that have had strict lockdowns. You can probably find the world's full range of policy responses to COVID-19 within the United States.
Well, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc relaxed on the vaccination distribution and got hammered.
Also, authoritarians sometimes get the actions right even if they don't understand the science or the math.
And do you remember the great "fogging disinfectant trucks" in China. Completely ineffective show that may have fooled the masses but would have failed to destroy any viral agents.
We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit.
Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?
Maybe it's just that my search skills are subpar, but I can't seem to find any relevant works on Google Scholar. Would you mind taking the time to share some of these sources?
Thanks for the link, I actually haven't seen that. Here's an interesting preprint tackling this issue as well: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/rw4es
I'm also curious as to why you thought that this was "very well known," however. Could you elaborate on how you determine which set of facts can be selected to be well known, and which set cannot?
Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.
In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.