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I think more highly of Harvard's admission department than that. At the very least, Andraka has shown himself capable of finding a champion within the system through persistence.
Any particular reason?
My primary reason is I expect that they'll have the best one that money can buy- and I suspect that schools like Harvard explicitly look for a blend of students (since a system that gives them only Senator's sons or a system that gives them only brilliant kids will lower the value of Harvard to both, but a system that gives them, say, 30% Senator's sons and 70% brilliant kids will do better).
I think this is wrong. To be sure, they could have that if they wanted, but that doesn't seem to be where they actually spend their (considerable) money. From the book A is for Admission: An Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges:
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Yes, but they have a formula for achieving the blend they seek, and that formula is going to filter out people with low GPAs and such.
I know that the admissions staff are generally mediocre students who went to that school. But I would expect their system to notice things like "Intel Science Fair winner" and have that trump any GPA signal.
(More reasonably, I think they have a file of names called "admit these people", which it checks applicants against (and if they're on the list, sends it to a human to verify), and Andraka's win was publicized widely enough that he probably made it onto the list, and if someone is doing their job well they routinely import the list of winners from things like the Intel Science Fair into that list.)
I'm fairly confident that this is a thing that actually exists, because of the associated prestige. Universities would get this if they were optimizing for status, without optimizing for learning at all.
However, you also have to consider marginal payoff relative to the cost. Most Science Fair winners will also score high according to the standard formula (involving GPA et cetera); any additional prestige the institution would gain by also admitting the very few who don't probably wouldn't be worth the cost of having such a separate system.
Unrelated to my other points: When in your experience have universities acted efficiently, as opposed to just "do things that sound like they'll increase status"?
While in some senses I agree, the whole process of admissions just consists of people putting stamps on paper. If one of those people recognizes someone from a news article and just says "hey let's stamp this" it doesn't actually require more bureaucracy. Since all your processes are run by humans it doesn't actually cost anything to add human judgment to your system.
For example, I would be EXTREMELY SURPRISED if there was a computer program that STOPPED a university from admitting someone if they had too low a GPA. It's just that the computer program wouldn't present them to be considered in the first place unless they looked.
In terms of practical tests, I propose that if we look up the set of Intel Science Fair winners, see if there's information about their GPAs, and then look at what universities they got into, I hypothesize that if there are any with GPAs below, say, 3.7, they will still get in to high end universities that normally would only accept students with 4.0s (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins come to mind). I agree that it's unlikely that you'll find any with recorded GPAs below say 3.0, so the question may be purely theoretical anyway.
If you can find a way to settle the bet, I bet they don't do that. Universities would look extremely different if they optimized for learning in even the most basic ways. This is the should-universe you're talking about, not the is-universe.
I have a dean of admissions at a large university in my nuclear family. Eliezer is right, there's no list like this.
But on the other hand, "Intel Science Fair winner" will PROBABLY attract the attention of the admissions committee. It's basically up to the applicant to craft a good applications package (including essay and letters of recommendation) that will capitalize on their amazing, singular strength, and throw weaknesses like GPA into shadow. If the applicant can't do this, they won't be admitted.
It's a Bardic Conspiracy problem, really. It's a matter of storytelling and presentation.
I note that it also makes no sense to filter excellent scientists who aren't good writers or who take a long time to write (e.g. PhD dissertation test). If you can do the research, someone else should be able to specialize in writing for you.
It's remarkable how many barrier-to-entry professions revolve around the denial of professional specialization. A surgeon can't just be someone of moderate intelligence and exceptional dexterity who studies and practices one key surgery, no, they need 11 years of medical school that they'll mostly never use. A scientist is forced to write. And so on.
At the level where students are required to write professionally, you can hire someone else to do the writing for you. For writing, they typically call it 'dictation', and it used to be standard, to the point that you still see "this dissertation was typed by the author" in dissertations without dictation. For writing correctly, they call it "editing" and many an advisor has had more influence over the actual wording and structure of the dissertation than the person who gets a PhD because of it.
This can be done to about the degree that it's done in the actual professional life of a scientist: someone else can type your papers and grant proposals and make your presentations for you, and no one will know unless they read the acknowledgements. Typically that's not done, or only done on a small scale, because for most people it takes as long to tell someone else how to write it as to write it yourself. When it is done- like when a friend of mine dictated his thesis and then edited it- no one cares, because they understand that it's more efficient that way.
It also seems to me like it makes sense, since so much of science is communicating your results (and using the results of others). If a Gauss does great work, but leaves it in a desk drawer, what's the point? Why would the establishment want to promote that rather than sharing, especially since individuals are so terrible at accurately judging their creative output without external feedback?
Fair enough on the medical school thing, but is this really a serious barrier in something like physics? How hard is it for a talented researcher to learn to write a technical, scholarly document in a timely fashion? Do you know of any good, hard working scientific talents denied access to resources because of their writing ability? Because I know lots and lots of mediocre researchers who are nevertheless perfectly adequate scholarly authors. It doesn't seem like a demanding filter. In my experience most journal articles are terribly written (much worse than your sequences, for example), so the standards can't be that high.
For many people, writing is hard even if they are good at math. It is why Verbal and Mathematical SAT scores do not perfectly correlate. It's a different talent, and it will indeed filter people who don't happen to have it. Even bad writing is hard - and if you can't bear to write badly and don't have the talent to write well, it's much much worse. It filters people who want to do their jobs well and don't happen to possess author talent, because they'll revise, and revise, and revise, staring at their work and feeling the dreadful pain of how bad it is... yes, it's a needless filter!
I actually have a lot of affection for academia overall (my whole family consists of professors, and I like them, so I also have warm feelings toward the culture that supports them). But academic writing is one of the best examples of the kind of dysfunction Eliezer is talking about.
While there are a few rebels who attempt to write scholarly articles with clear and engaging prose, most academics are actually trying to do the opposite. They make their sentences as convoluted and jargon-filled as possible because it signals that their work is hard and advanced, and because they don't really want anyone outside their field to understand it. Often this would open them up to kinds of criticism they don't want. (This effect is pretty much confined to the humanities and the social sciences. Most of the hard sciences are already impenetrable to outsiders, so they don't need the extra barrier of thorny writing.)
So those journal articles might be written to a higher standard than you think, given that the standard is obtuseness and impenetrability.
In terms of writing quality, I've encountered journal articles I'd have been ashamed to have produced in middle school. I've often reflected that it might be an improvement to mandate "Writing for Scientists" classes, which teach clear and succinct written communication. The jargon barrier frequently serves to hide the fact that the authors of a paper aren't very good at communicating their ideas, even to people who're familiar with the specialized language of their field. This should be no surprise, since many people are bad at clear written communication, and a scientific education doesn't do much to select for this ability.
Sure, it's generally possible to read and extract the relevant information from a badly written article, but it makes the process of researching the literature considerably slower and more error-prone, so it's not as if bad writing doesn't come with practical costs
Of course, this runs into the same problem, that a person in, say, the 99.99th percentile of scientific ability and 40th percentile of writing ability is probably going to end up with a lower GPA than someone in the 98th percentile of scientific ability and the 90th of writing ability, although the former is almost certainly more valuable to their field.
Eliezer is perhaps thinking of someone like himself, who can write very well, but not very quickly.
Many people seem to assume that because Eliezer is highly intelligent, he would succeed in school. But personally, I think he would have a hard time. He'd be the Intel Science Fair winner with the 2.0 GPA. In fact, I'm not even sure he would make it through college, let alone high school (which is much harder). The reason? He described it in Two More Things to Unlearn from School:
The only way it would work would be if he had a powerful mentor looking out for him, so that he either wouldn't have to go through this insanity, or it wouldn't stop his advancement if he did it poorly. Absent that, he -- and probably a fair number of other similar people -- would fall through the cracks.
Yes. People achieve better results if they cooperate, but they are judged by what they do if they are not allowed to cooperate.
This system has an advantage of safety -- you can replace anyone in your organization and it keeps working, because everyone has some level of all the necessary skills. (You will never get stuck with the illiterate researcher and nobody to help them write.) So maybe I just underestimate the value of the safety. But maybe the system underestimates the opportunity costs.
Disagree about the med school part. Doctors are always running into strange and urgent situations, having to come up with some tentative diagnosis and fix that's more determined by what's available than by taught best practice. Or at least often enough that they can blog about it a lot. Intelligence and training in a wide array of situations is necessary. Learning all about chemical mechanisms you'll never influence at such a low level, not so much. The first years are also probably too general so switching to nursing is easier.
I think this covered in the point that Eliezer was making - why do we insist that the person who does our surgery has to be a Doctor (and thus capable of dealing with strange and urgent situations, tentative diagnoses, and so forth)? Why can't we train this one person to be a surgeon, and isolate them from the source of all these strange situations - perhaps by putting some sort of specially-trained Strange and Urgent Situation Handler professional in between?
Out of genuine curiosity, how do you know that? I thought you never went to university.
Personal experience, most likely. What little I've seen / know of his knowledge indicates in-depth mastery of multiple topics that would each have taken five or more years of university courses to learn.
Having learned them all from university courses without special exception being made (that is, taking full-term courses without any skipping of courses or taking more than six courses per term) is highly improbable.
Many of my thought experiments into forming universities or educational institutions in general more geared towards optimized learning (e.g. open-learning systems where each student is at different levels in different subjects, and takes tests when milestones are reached rather than at specific predefined dates) seem to strongly indicate that while many of them would be much better for making more intelligent individuals or letting people learn much faster, the optimal utility-maximizing situation for the "Institutional Governing Body" is the current system. In other words, the individuals in positions of power to change the institutions have much more to gain (at least in the short term on their personal utility scales) in maintaining the current system. All my calculations, estimates and observations so far have consistently been in agreement with this statement, though I suspect a great deal of personal bias is at work here.
The closest thing I can think of is contacting people in the admissions department, but I can't think of a cheap way to induce them to answer truthfully.
I'm also willing to consider humans part of the 'system', and so having that 'file' be "Bob recognized this applicant's name" would be enough for my purposes. But I don't know how much human attention their applicants get, and at what parts.