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And go ahead and put "positions of power" ranking, not to be celebrated, but to be criticized when compared to something that benefited the country and the world.
let's find out for instance, if Stanford or MIT has a tech achievement rating of 88 for advances such as the transistor or graphic user
interface while Harvard has a 15 rating but a 95 rating for giving us presidents and congressmen, a group I think most folks don't respect. In fact in this day and age I'd say the only reason people pick a leader is because they hate the other leader more.
My guess is super elite schools give us nothing but super elitists and all the harm they do to civilization and technical or research universities give us tangible advancements.
I've done zero research, maybe everything that's good came out of Harvard, Yale and Princeton and Stanford and MIT folks only play pingpong and wear silly hats, but I'm thinking doing the research we'd mainly get a list of congressmen working for the elitist military industrial complex oligarchy coming from the first three brain-farms listed.
Oops, did I say that? Sorry, my tinfoil hat must have slipped for a second. Disregard. And hey, let's take a moment to praise our glorious leaders for all the great work they do for us.
The useless country comparison.
https://solability....ntellectual-capital
Has nothing to do with the individual but it was brought up so... [doctorremulac3, Jan 04 2024]
People who really hate telephones
https://en.wikipedi...%20of%20doing%20so.
I have nothing against them myself - I'm just saying you might be surprised by the lack of consensus on this point. [pertinax, Jan 09 2024]
[link]
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There is somewhere a ranking of colleges according to how many Nobel prize winners they've produced, which is close to what you're after |
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//I've done zero research// And... yes... we can exclusively reveal that the HalfBakery has come in exactly Last Place (Zero Points) for the twenty-fourth consecutive year. Congratulations and better luck next time! |
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//[-] Thinly disguised political rant.// |
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Thinly disguised mindless autobone. |
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The Nobel prize thing, who decides those? Is that an elitist cabal sitting in a smoke free room too like they do with the Pulitzer Prize? |
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But I would like to see a list of practical advancements that we could all agree were beneficial to society with nothing but a direct link from alum to the particular invention. Why put a comittee between those two? |
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And who decided "committee" would be spelled with two of each letter? Why not just go for it and spell it "ccoommiittee"? |
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I have a lot of trouble with this idea. First of all: What do you mean by “society”? What does “benefits to society” mean? In certain countries this would mean the invention of new weapons; deadly viruses or the study of yet more moronic religious mumbo jumbo. Where do the creative Arts fit in to this hierarchy, given the role of someone like me (for example) who for years have taught students how to question; be disruptive and be subversive to their so called society? |
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Okay hippo, good point, so I checked: |
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Harvard Nobel Prizes in physics = 11 |
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MIT Nobel Prizes in physics = 26 |
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The other searches were muddy so I lost interest, but 20 living nobel prize winners currently reside at Stanford. |
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As for the Nobel Prizes in general, here's the score: |
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Harvard = 161
UC Berkeley = 110
University Of Chicago = 100
MIT = 97
Columbia University = 96
Stanford = 84
California Institute of Technology = 76
Princeton = 69
Yale = 65
Cornell = 61
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Then with Johns Hopkins and below we drop into the 30s. |
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Now if those Nobel Prizes are in physics, medicine and technology or ancient druid tapdancing I don't know, but I've totally lost interest in the whole thing. |
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//I have a lot of trouble with this idea. First of all: What do you mean by “society”? What does “benefits to society” mean? // |
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Well, by society I mean people of Earth, but solid point. I'd say it would be the mythical "Venn diagram" of stuff we can all agree on. I'd propose stuff like: |
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- The semiconductor.
- The graphic user interface
- The telephone
- Radio and television
- The airplane
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The last one bringing up an interesting point, which of these great leaps forward were brought to us by people who DIDN'T go to college? I'd like to see that number too. |
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The ancient language faculty is on its feet!! |
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And to address the other part of this, here's where we get our glorious presidents: |
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Harvard= 8 (shocking)
Yale= 5
Princeton= 2
Westpoint= 2
Stanford= 1
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//Where do the creative Arts fit in to this hierarchy, given the role of someone like me (for example) who for years have taught students how to question; be disruptive and be subversive to their so called society?// |
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Do they encourage critical thinking? Questioning authority? Lack of allegiance to the hive mind? Standing up to ANY proposed one party political system? |
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Then I'd give them the Remulac prize. |
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But in closing to summarize, I'd just like to see this, doesn't even put a value on these parameters, just might be interesting to see something that a simple man like me could wrap his head around. |
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//As for the Nobel Prizes in general, here's the score:// - that's a very USA-centric list! |
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//But I would like to see a list of practical advancements that we could all agree were beneficial to society with nothing but a direct link from alum to the particular invention. Why put a committee between those two?// - the phrase "we could all agree" in your question is exactly what a committee coming to a decision looks like. |
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Obviously the list is USA-centric, because people who live in countries outside the USA are Hey wait, what? There are countries not in the USA? Who knew? And there are people living in those countries? Are you serious? Is this a wind up? Anyway that's enough discussion of the rest of the world, we'll be back after the commercial break. |
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//As for the Nobel Prizes in general, here's the score:// - that's a very USA-centric list!// |
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//what? There are countries not in the USA?// |
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Oh gosh, how stupid of me. Okay, is this less triggering? |
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Number of Nobel laureates by country: |
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US - 411
UK - 137
Germany - 115
France - 75
Sweden - 34
Russia - 30
Japan - 29
Canada - 27
Switzerland - 25
Austria - 25
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There, hopefully that was less USA-centric. The next 6 countries combined have a full NINE MORE than the US! What was I thinking? |
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//the phrase "we could all agree" in your question is exactly what a committee coming to a decision looks like.// |
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Millions of people weighing in, perhaps by poll, wouldn't exactly be a committe. |
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Ha, very funny - let me just correct that and add in the numbers of Nobel prizes per million of population:
US - 411 (1.2)
UK - 137 (2.0)
Germany - 115 (1.4)
France - 75 (1.2)
Sweden - 34 (3.4)
Russia - 30 (0.2)
Japan - 29 (0.2)
Canada - 27 (0.7)
Switzerland - 25 (3.1)
Austria - 25 (3.1)
Yay! Go Switzerland, Austria and Sweden! |
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// play pingpong //
It's called "beer pong" and is occasionally played even at MIT. |
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// wear silly hats //
Are you referring to graduation caps? |
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What even is society these days? |
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//Yay! Go Switzerland, Austria and Sweden!// |
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Okay, we're getting someplace. Except just not regarding the posted idea. |
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The idea was for ranking actual contributions to society by colleges, not countries. So let's break down the contributions by colleges in those countries. Or skip the whole country thing all together and stick with the colleges premise. I"m assuming Oxford which has been around since the Aztec empire is probably gonna have a little head start. |
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Let's see that number. Not Nobel prizes, that was somebody else's proposition, leaps forward in technology. |
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Hey, England invented the industrial revolution, let's start with that. |
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But again, the idea was colleges, not countries, and tangible contributions like airplanes, computers, electricity, rocket ships, telecommunication etc. (which came from all over the world obviously) |
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And most specifically, technical or research schools vs hoity toity elite stuff, but alum's contributions in things a dummy like me can understand, for instance something I use every day. iPhone and its precurser tech for example. |
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What [xenzag] said. I think we would not be very surprised to find out that the major tides of human endeavor and ‘evolution’ were not generated by guys in labs. We love them to death, but they are just one product of sweeping movements in perception and possibility. There has to be a base for movement that buoys all boats, science & tech are only one expression. That base does not qualify for Nobels but fertilizes all of them. “Let not the good be the enemy of the perfect,” as in OCD-speak. |
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And that's fine, but this isn't a quest for ultimate knowldege, it would just be interesting to see one or two different evaluation parameters from these institutions that are incredibly expensive. |
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Kids come out of these 100k in debt. My daughter's AA was a community college, but her bachelor's degree is gonna cost me a tenth of a million dollars by the time she's done. For her master's and beyond that's up to her. |
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Does it look like I'm a bit bitter about the education system? I did fine without ever going to school. Had to get a certificate here and there but spending 4 years in a dorm cleaning up vomit? I passed on that one. I think these things are going to be at the very least, greatly supplemented by AI if not replaced outright. |
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This "which is the most smartypants country" tangent I accidentally triggered made me ask "Okay, which countries have the highest intelligence capital index, which is a way to gauge the ability of countries to capitalise on the knowledge economy by assessing their environments for education, creativity and talent attraction. |
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Bout what you'd assume. (link) |
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So putting that to rest (hopefully) I'd still like to know which colleges, put it this way, create the best product for the world, smart people who do great stuff and advance civilization with real, tangible, measureable results. |
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And so we don't go down the pretty medallion contest rabit hole again, Nikola Tesla never won a Nobel prize so we can put that to rest as a measurement standard. Neither did Oppenheimer, Edison, Leanardo Da Vinci was never even nominated. (The Da Vinci thing was a joke.) |
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//something that benefited the country and the world// |
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Different people have different values and priorities. |
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If you take all those differences into account, then you don't get a single ranking, but a muddled and unhelpful set of different rankings. |
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However, if you *don't* take those differences into account, or if you hide them inside a weighting system which reflects your own values and priorities, then you *can* get a single ranking - but only by arbitrarily imposing your own values on other people, and then pretending that they are somehow authoritative - and isn't that the sort of thing that an evil elitist politician would do? |
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(Yes, my education taught me how to make really annoying arguments.) |
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I don't think there's anybody out there who doesn't think the telephone wasn't beneficial. |
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But okay, let's continue to rank colleges by what those colleges tell us they're worth without any critical evaluation from a different perspective. |
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So you'd like some independent "critical evaluation", such as a Nobel committee might do, to look at which colleges "do great stuff and advance civilization", but just as long as there are no "pretty medallions" at the end of it? |
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No, have a list of inventions by college like in the description. |
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For instance, Steve Jobs went to a place called Reed College. I never heard of it but it might also be interesting to ask important pioneers of technology if they think their alma mater significantly helped their success. There's probably someplace where Jobs referred to what impact if any that college had on his success. He only went two years but maybe he'll say that's where he dropped acid and it changed his life. |
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Although not sure Reed College would make that a headline in their brochure. |
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Anyway, kind of suprised this doesn't exist already. Maybe it does, didn't look too hard. |
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- and that's the problem (and also the problem with using Nobel prize numbers); any measure of 'benefits to society' from colleges is going to be very arbitrary and will probably not be measuring the right thing. On your Steve Jobs example, Reed College may have had a massive impact or no impact at all on how his life turned out. Steve Jobs may have said something somewhere about the impact Reed College had on him, but he may be wrong - we're rarely the best judges of our own lives. And finally, some people will see Steve Jobs' life as having had a positive impact on society and some will see it as having had a negative impact on society. |
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[hippo] just give every institution in the world the same score, slightly above average. That way everyone will feel they have done OK, but no-one will be seen as the winner or superior, and no-one will feel hard done by. |
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[pocmloc] That's the answer. To make the statisticians happy though, if all institutions world-wide are slightly above average there will have to be one institution (which might be fictional) which is so far below average that it makes the stats work OK. (e.g. there are 10,000 institutions which score 0.55 on a scale from 0 to 1 where 0.5 is the midpoint, so there has to be an additional, terrible institution which scores -499.5 to make the average score turn out to be 0.5) |
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That score is awarded to the Ranking Awards College. |
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Does leaded gasoline count in the plus or the minus column? CFCs? (Poor Cornell might start with a bit of a deficit solely due to Midgley). |
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Okay, those two are easy to judge. TNT, much harder. What about the cotton gin, which arguably extended chattel slavery in the American South? |
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Judging social benefit can be surprisingly difficult. |
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Also, on the whole Nobel as a standard thing, you've got to be careful. Were the laureates alumni, which means the school taught them; or faculty, which means the school bought them. |
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Elite schools love to brag about the number of Nobel laureates in their faculty. But Nobels are (almost always) awarded decades after the ground breaking work was actually done. |
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//Does leaded gasoline count in the plus or the minus column?// |
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Well there's an idea, let's have worst invention producing colleges. Where did the guy who invented the frontal lobotomy graduate from for instance? |
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Can we immediately revoke all bible colleges and such nonsense? |
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The worst education prize would probably be a tie between Trump U and Liberty U, with Bob Jones and Oral Roberts tied for runners-up. |
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