UChicago alum speaking. I loved the school, for reasons very similar to why I love Less Wrong. More students there are philosophically inclined, idiosyncratic, and generally willing to entertain strange arguments than at any other school I know of. LW meetups at their best remind me of the dining hall conversations at the U of C.
The proportion of atheists may be also high at some of the Ivy League schools, but that atheism generally has a relativist flavor rather than a rationalist one, and people there are less willing to deal with ideas contrary to that worldview. The traditional UChicago student will actually give an absurd but well-argued idea a genuine hearing!
Major caveat, though: graduate departments are always very different from the undergraduate college.
Wow - very nice. :) And very good points. :)
Do you know if PhD students are allowed to join these dining hall conversations?
So I'm applying for grad schools right now, and am visiting Yale, Brown, and UChicago this month (I already got accepted into UChicago, and also got invited to expenses-paid visits to both Yale and Brown). I'm visiting Yale in just 2 days.
So what are some cool things a LWer can do at those places? And which professors do research that a LWer could potentially find very interesting? Which universities would a LWer find himself/herself most at home at?
Also, is there anything else I need to know about those places?
I'm still waiting for decisions from Columbia and MIT (and got rejected by Caltech).