Points and vectors

originally posted by SFJoe:
“Some years agoa former chief justice of the Michigan supreme court, Thomas Brennan, sent a questionnaire to a hundred or so of his fellow lawyers, asking them to rank a list of ten law schools in order of quality. “They included a good sample of the big names. Harvard. Yale. University of Michigan. And some lesser-known schools. John Marshall. Thomas Cooley. As I recall, they ranked Penn State’s law school right about in the middle of the pack. Maybe fifth among the ten schools listed. Of course Penn State didn’t have a law school”
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That's pretty hilarious. Similarly,among the general public, Princeton Law School is considered one of the best. Too bad it shuttered in the 1850s.

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en.wikipedia.org
 
originally posted by MLipton:
As if any more data were needed on the subject, there is also the latest NRC rankings of graduate programs in the sciences. Whereas in the past they had gone with simple ordinal rankings, in the latest they refused to do so, instead identifying three separate categories which they then compiled statistics on. Still a flawed analysis IMO, but much, much more nuanced than before.

Mark Lipton
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I particularly like the way the new NRC rankings provide bands of rankings. It makes much more sense intuitively and could also help applicants make better use of the rankings. Instead of getting fixated on a hierarchical ladder they might start to realize that there are rough and approximate ranges in which schools cluster.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
I'm applying to Liberty University, when the time is right.
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Go whole hog, Ian, and get your degree from the University of Phoenix. They have their own bowl game, after all...

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
I'm applying to Liberty University, when the time is right.
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Go whole hog, Ian, and get your degree from the University of Phoenix. They have their own bowl game, after all...

Mark Lipton
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You can still pretend with the Liberty Bowl, and that way you don't have to forsake fundamentalism.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:

There is an amusing analogy to Car and Driver using the same scale to compare a Porsche to a Lotus to a Corvette that they use to compare SUV's to each other, and that sports car drivers might value things differently than SUV drivers.
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I have no children so the whole college thing is lost on me (that could also personally apply to me in the past tense but wtf, you knew that already) but that sports car/SUV thing is not only amusing but it's spot on the money (money that would probably be going into college tuition instead of sports cars and SUVs, if I had children)(but I digress).

Like I totally get where Gladwell was coming from on the car analogy - I've driven all of those cars and the Lotus would win hands down if it were a contest to get me to spend the money that would otherwise be spent on my non-existent children. It corners like a bat outta hell, you sense the road before you FEEL it (it's proactive driving rather than reactive as it is in the Porsche), and it's not like I need to drive fast in a straight line very often, so, while it would be nice to have 500+hp's worth of testosterone at my beck and call, the Corvette's brute power would be of little use to me.

In my own world, my Volvo sportscar gives me the thrill of victory as I slide through corners and careen down the street like one of the bad guys in "The Fast & the Furious". Of course, the agony of defeat kicks in when the car has broken down late at night on the wrong side of the tracks, plus there's not really much room in the trunk for anything deeper than a pizza because my subwoofers and 5000 watts worth of amplifiers take up a LOT of space, plus I've got my nitro pack and the hydraulic pumps and all back there. And then there's the fact that I haven't found anyone with courage enough to be a passenger in the car, so I find myself racing around really fast by myself, (but looking really bitchin') in my lovely sportscar.

Contrast that with my demeanor while driving my 2005 Ford Explursion, the ne plus ultra of SUVs. Yeah, it may look like a mom-mobile on the outside but I can stash about 14 cases of wine in there without getting in the way of the dual 36" subwoofers (powered by 1000 watts a side) I've got installed. And the Explursion has enough electrical juice to be able to run TWO sets of under-the-car neons and five DVD screens, not to mention a horn that tootles "The Mexican Hat Dance" at a sound level guaranteed by the manufacturer to exceed 137 decibels, enough to get the attention of the grandma in the Celica ahead so she'd move over but not enough to like, kill her or anything (unless her hearing aid is turned way up, but then that's her fault, not mine.

But when as human beings have we NOT compared apples and oranges to figure out what works best in a cherry pie? I predict that someday it won't really be that important to go to the ivy league school or Cal or even UCLA, because the seats will go to the highest bidders anyway, and not the most qualified. And it's not as if those people will need to be making money after they graduate anyway, so the appropriate schools will prevail eventually because they're serving people in the best way possible - giving them what they need, perhaps more than simply what they want. Or am I being Pollyana-ish here?

-Eden (thinking about getting an Airstream RV, 'cause it looks all silvery and cool and everything)
 
But the notion is that there are many factors that get distilled into the final ranking, and that the relative weights you assign them have a huge impact on the result. And that reasonable people could very easily disagree about the best relative weights.
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Sounds a lot like highly-paid Wall Street analysts...and getting things equally as wrong.
 
Three men rent a hotel room. The front desk charges them $30, so each man puts up $10. Later, the desk clerk discovers that he was mistaken and the room really costs only $25, so he gives $5 to the bell-hop and tells him to return the money to the men. Alas, the bell-hop is not entirely honest. He gives each man back $1 and puts the remaining $2 in his pocket.

Analysis: Each man paid $9, for a total of $27, and bell-hop has $2 in his pocket, which brings us to $29. Where did the last dollar go?
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Three men rent a hotel room. The front desk charges them $30, so each man puts up $10. Later, the desk clerk discovers that he was mistaken and the room really costs only $25, so he gives $5 to the bell-hop and tells him to return the money to the men. Alas, the bell-hop is not entirely honest. He gives each man back $1 and puts the remaining $2 in his pocket.

Analysis: Each man paid $9, for a total of $27, and bell-hop has $2 in his pocket, which brings us to $29. Where did the last dollar go?
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Very tricky, Jeff, but not quite as good as the Monty Hall problem.

Mark Lipton
 
I recall as a sophomore a shouting match and a classmate of mine storming out of a logic class while discussing the Monty Hall problem.
 
Jeff, maybe the missing dollar was used to buy some food for the goat in the Monty Hall problem?

-Eden (not a big fan of logic in any guise)
 
originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:
originally posted by SFJoe:

There is an amusing analogy to Car and Driver using the same scale to compare a Porsche to a Lotus to a Corvette that they use to compare SUV's to each other, and that sports car drivers might value things differently than SUV drivers.
Click to expand...

I have no children so the whole college thing is lost on me (that could also personally apply to me in the past tense but wtf, you knew that already) but that sports car/SUV thing is not only amusing but it's spot on the money (money that would probably be going into college tuition instead of sports cars and SUVs, if I had children)(but I digress).

Like I totally get where Gladwell was coming from on the car analogy - I've driven all of those cars and the Lotus would win hands down if it were a contest to get me to spend the money that would otherwise be spent on my non-existent children. It corners like a bat outta hell, you sense the road before you FEEL it (it's proactive driving rather than reactive as it is in the Porsche), and it's not like I need to drive fast in a straight line very often, so, while it would be nice to have 500+hp's worth of testosterone at my beck and call, the Corvette's brute power would be of little use to me.

In my own world, my Volvo sportscar gives me the thrill of victory as I slide through corners and careen down the street like one of the bad guys in "The Fast & the Furious". Of course, the agony of defeat kicks in when the car has broken down late at night on the wrong side of the tracks, plus there's not really much room in the trunk for anything deeper than a pizza because my subwoofers and 5000 watts worth of amplifiers take up a LOT of space, plus I've got my nitro pack and the hydraulic pumps and all back there. And then there's the fact that I haven't found anyone with courage enough to be a passenger in the car, so I find myself racing around really fast by myself, (but looking really bitchin') in my lovely sportscar.

Contrast that with my demeanor while driving my 2005 Ford Explursion, the ne plus ultra of SUVs. Yeah, it may look like a mom-mobile on the outside but I can stash about 14 cases of wine in there without getting in the way of the dual 36" subwoofers (powered by 1000 watts a side) I've got installed. And the Explursion has enough electrical juice to be able to run TWO sets of under-the-car neons and five DVD screens, not to mention a horn that tootles "The Mexican Hat Dance" at a sound level guaranteed by the manufacturer to exceed 137 decibels, enough to get the attention of the grandma in the Celica ahead so she'd move over but not enough to like, kill her or anything (unless her hearing aid is turned way up, but then that's her fault, not mine.

But when as human beings have we NOT compared apples and oranges to figure out what works best in a cherry pie? I predict that someday it won't really be that important to go to the ivy league school or Cal or even UCLA, because the seats will go to the highest bidders anyway, and not the most qualified. And it's not as if those people will need to be making money after they graduate anyway, so the appropriate schools will prevail eventually because they're serving people in the best way possible - giving them what they need, perhaps more than simply what they want. Or am I being Pollyana-ish here?

-Eden (thinking about getting an Airstream RV, 'cause it looks all silvery and cool and everything)
Click to expand...

+1! Even more fuckin' brilliant I'll have what she's havin' than usual.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Three men rent a hotel room. The front desk charges them $30, so each man puts up $10. Later, the desk clerk discovers that he was mistaken and the room really costs only $25, so he gives $5 to the bell-hop and tells him to return the money to the men. Alas, the bell-hop is not entirely honest. He gives each man back $1 and puts the remaining $2 in his pocket.

Analysis: Each man paid $9, for a total of $27, and bell-hop has $2 in his pocket, which brings us to $29. Where did the last dollar go?
Click to expand...

I pondered many an hour over this conundrum when my neurons used to work. The answer, of course, is that the bell hop's $2 is part of the $27, and we are set up and misled by the perfidious wording of the Analysis.
 
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