It looks like a really fucking stupid class and a really stupid idea and the kind of thing that stupid fucking Harvard would do. People spending up to 60 hours a week doing problem sets, “covering” several classes worth of material in a year. I’m sure people come out of that class with such a shallow understanding of the material that it’s a complete waste of time and just something for the kids and the University to brag about.
Like, I don’t know what your background is, but if it’s not math, then of course looking at one of those problem sets is going to be like looking at a foreign language.
And again, obviously he’s smart, but if you saw a list in some magazine of the 50 smartest people on the whole planet, he’d probably be on that list and that would be totally unjustified.
I would take ChrisV vs him in a programming test and AllTheCheese vs him in a math test and give good odds.
Yea they obviously made it hard on purpose to weed out those that don’t want to deal with 4 years of math in 2 semesters. But if you can pass the class, you are obviously intelligent.
I do agree that it’s a stupid class because there’s almost no retention when absorbing that much material in a short time.
Oh god calling mac a nix skin rankles me in ways I cannot even put into words. Mac os is an abomination and has no place in comparison next to a true unix machine.
It has almost nothing to do with retention. Think of it more like rounding up your top prospects to see who can hit AAA pitching. Undergrads who can crush this have the potential to be promising academic mathematicians. They’re probably also using it to cherry pick people for the Putnam exam (a prop bet I proposed to Sklansky that he ignored).
Also:
In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou gave an upper bound of (5 n +5)/3. This was improved, thirty years later, to 18/11 n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough.
Dunno to what lengths you will go to do deify these things, but also, smart, but doesn’t prove you’re a crazy genius. I’ve known at least a dozen people who have aced the SAT math.
Edit: you almost have to have a perfect math SAT to get into Harvard or several other schools in STEM. And lol if you think every person in that set is a genius.
You guys really need to scale back the absolute hate or absolute love of any particular candidate. Real life just isn’t that black and white. Bloomberg has done more to advance the cause of gun restrictions in the past 10 years than nearly any other single person. He’s not a bad person and has done a lot of good.
They’re at the same stage I was at in the early/mid 80s, with a new and horrible regime that I thought should only be countered by an idealistic opposition.
Micro going to the mat on Gates not being extremely smart is quite the interesting hill to die on.
I also like the subtle goal post shift from not “extremely smart” to not one of the “50 smartest people on the whole planet”. Or maybe that’s a strawman. Or maybe both. In any case, good effort, I guess.
I think I get this, but can you elaborate a little.
I’m not for burning it all down, but instead I’m for voting for normal candidates who have their feet on the ground working for local issues who also understand the power balance that we face.
Labour is were am at the moment alough I’ll vote SNP in the general and I’ll keep emailing my local MP for the issues that I like that JC & Co roll out.
I suppose I’d be OK voting Labour if they had our backs on independence but I’m afraid that will never happen, tbh.
Take it to the Land of Hope and Glory thread if you like, as we’re had a few derails on this topic.
Well, I don’t know what everyone who thinks he’s a genius, or “extremely smart”, means. Like 1 in a 100 kind of smart or 1 in a million. Not that people can even be ranked like that in intelligence, but seems like most people who call him extremely smart mean it like, say some average starter in the NBA is extremely good at basketball. But nothing he has done is close to proving that’s true. In the smartness game all he’s proven is that he could maybe make the bench on a not very good NCAA team. Now that is being extremely good at basketball, but no cause for hero worship.
I’m only halfway through that thread, so no comment.
But I’ll Stan for microbet here.
Because if the words “I’ll vote for Trump” ever come for someone’s mouth I’ll assume their really really no smart even alough something something Maths 55.
If you think I’m using aptitude test results and genius interchangeably you’ve got the wrong guy. Genius is a special term for people that make breakthroughs in a domain using creativity or ingenuity. It’s not enough to just be brilliant. Also, their genius is almost always limited to a single domain. I dunno if Bill Gates is a genius, but if he is, his crowning achievement is basically mass-distributed ransomware.
These takes that he doesn’t have an incredibly high aptitude are bad though. Doesn’t mean he actually developed that talent in a meaningful way or that I want to hear his dumb ass opinions on tax policy. Decent piece about him here that reveals some strange personality quirks imo (also 7stud hi/lo content):
