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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 asked a professor about this. She's works at the University of Chicago, in philosophy, but she's friends with a math professor she met as a grad student at Berkeley. Here's what she said, so far as I remember it:
I asked if this caused math talent to go to waste:
So what I took away from this was 1) I was wrong in thinking that math departments don't care about math-extrinsic skills. 2) I was wrong to think these don't filter people out. It hadn't occurred to me that there is more mathematical talent than there is money to develop it. It seems like the problem with academia is kind of just a lack of funding.
EDIT: I might as well add that, needless to say, writing ability was considered important to philosophy too, and a filter at every level, but that's not surprising. She didn't have anything to tell me about physics.
As it happens, a few months ago I saw an interesting paper examining the consequence of the fall of Soviet Russia and the subsequent exodus of top Russian mathematicians (with all their unique results and methods, obscure to the West) into the US. The upshot was that the effect was to push out of academia a lot of lower-ranked American mathematicians - it turned out to be a zero-sum environment... "The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians"
Wow. This is how I feel about my own writing, expressed more clearly than I could myself. I take ages to write a single sentence because none of the phrasings my brain suggests sound like the kind of thing that I'd want to read.
If you wish to write despite this struggle, I recommend breaking writing into two tasks: dumping and editing. Basically, force yourself to ignore the "kind of thing I'd want to read" feeling for as long as it takes to generate a bunch of sentences. Then you can turn those sentences into readable sentences, in editing.
This handy page will make it significantly easier to ignore the editing urge.
I think I should ask for empirical input at this point: is it your experience that good mathematicians or scientists are filtered out of academic advancement and access to research money and materials as a result of a poor showing in skills extrinsic to their field? By 'extrinsic' I mean skills that are neither necessary nor sufficient to do mathematical or scientific work well.
Well, it's needless only if bad writing turns out to actually not interfere with their ability to do their jobs well... e.g., if their job doesn't involve communicating clearly, or if it does but the way their writing is bad doesn't interfere with clear communication.
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.
This strikes me as so cynical that I'd want to see some evidence before I can take it seriously. Many academic write in the way that they do because they're writing to an audience of insiders (should they not?), but I can't imagine why they would want to be intentionally obscure.
I think this is going to stagger you. Check out this article: it deals with the academic theorists who are actually willing to state, in print, and repeatedly, that clarity of writing is not their goal.
"On one side stand academic luminaries like University of California at Berkeley rhetorician Judith Butler and University of Pittsburgh English professor Jonathan Arac, who take their inspiration from critical theorists like Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. Arguing that their work has been misunderstood by journalists on the left, these radical professors distrust the demand for 'linguistic transparency,' charging that it cripples one's ability 'to think the world more radically.'"
And here's Richard Dawkins on the phenomenon:
"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
(The article goes on to cite specifics and is well worth a full read.)
Okay, but this is a) a case where someone is writing obscurely because they believe they have good reasons to do so (not so as to make it seem hard and advanced), and b) has nothing to do with physics or mathematics.
If anyone here thinks, like, leftist critical theory is worth a damn, I'll be surprised. But that's not part of academia at issue.
Funny. All the people I know in academia place high value on good writing and complain about journal standards preventing them from writing as clearly as they would want (so this is in partial agreement that the system discourages bad writing, but more in the sense of annoyances that prevent an otherwise good paper from being very good). I will also note that, at least in my experience, there is a pretty clear correlation between institutional prestige and clarity of writing (better institutions produce clearer papers).
I think we're in complete agreement, actually! There's nothing you said that I would dispute. As you say, there's a widespread perception among academics that they're forced into a style of writing that's intentionally "bad" (unclear, obtuse). Some rebel against this standard. I think the individuals who would be most likely to rebel are those with solid results or substantive ideas that they want to share with a wide audience, and these high-value academics are most likely to end up at more prestigious universities.
But the bad-writing system is perpetuated because most academics aren't the cream of the crop. Most of them don't consistently come up with interesting new ideas or groundbreaking new results. They still have to publish articles. (For those outside academia: a professorial career--even at a "teaching" university, as opposed to a research institution--is largely driven by the pressure to publish or perish.)
Because of these pressures, it's to the average professor's advantage if he can publish papers that seem deeper or more substantive than they are. So the majority have an interest in perpetuating the current standard of academic writing, which is deliberately obfuscatory.
Hm...to me it seems more a case of status quo bias. This is the way it's been done, and it's risky to submit something that doesn't conform to the standards, so most people don't take that risk, and so we never have much evidence about what would happen if the standards weren't followed.
After all, being a reviewer is considered a high-status position. The reviewers for a journal have typically published in that journal before -- therefore the reviewers for a good journal tend to themselves be good. So the standards for acceptance to a good journal are implicitly set by good researchers. In fact, a poorly written paper is very unlikely to be accepted in such a venue.
Perhaps we are in agreement with all of this (since you seem to agree that this is not as much of a problem at the top). But then there seems to be a very simple action to circumvent all these issues --- only read good journals, and only submit to good journals. In particular, your statement
doesn't make sense to me if we really are in agreement.
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.
Check the name and institution. Science is done in English, but not always by native English-speakers.
I took one at my undergraduate institution. It was a good idea but a poor execution- basically, you could only do so much in four months, and there's too much diversity in required outputs (as different journals and fields have different formats). I did have enough pointed suggestions at the end of the class that I think widespread mediocre execution is possible, and with a clever professor the class can become good.
The issue is by no means exclusive to non-native speakers.
Having peer-edited papers from many fellow students throughout college, I was astonished not only by the low quality of writing, but the lack of improvement from first year to graduation. Of course, it's possible that most people are simply innately incapable of writing above low standards and these students had hit their ceiling, but I don't think there's any basis to infer this given that they weren't given any instruction or pressure to improve. Grading was only influenced by fluency of writing at the very bottom end, so there was very weak selection for writing ability.
Actually, I think our education system ought to put a lot more focus on teaching to write well at the level of middle and high school. The essays students are made to practice writing are poorly tailored to cultivate the sort of writing ability that students are likely to find useful in the future, and public education generally doesn't offer students much other instruction in writing well.
Agreed that this is also an issue for natives, and that improvement from first year to graduation is low.
Agreed, and I think the ability and inclination to communicate well is actually a reasonable standard.
In Physics? Math? I'm not sure. Is anyone here doing an undergrad program in this fields? How much writing are you expected to do, and how dependent is your GPA on your writing ability?
I wasn't claiming that this is currently the case in math or physics programs, but that it would be a consequence of mandating "Writing for Scientists" courses.
In my own science courses, the answers were "quite a bit, for a given value of writing," and "not much" respectively. Most non-math classes were "writing intensive classes," meaning that they involved considerable amounts of putting your own words to paper, but grading was very little dependent on the fluency with which you did so.
Thanks, that's about what I was expecting. In your own experience, to what extent is your grade dependent on the skills specific to your field, and to what extent is it dependent on extrinsic skills? Are you doing a BA, or are you doing graduate work?
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.
That may be. Has he tried seriously to get into academia? My impression is that he doesn't think it would be worth his time. I graduated high school with a GPA of around 2.0 as well, and I do okay. Being productive in school, if you really want to, isn't a very hard thing to get into. And if it is, for whatever reason, very difficult for someone to become productive then they're probably unsuited for research anyway. My take on EY is that he would do fine if he found the right institution and was really inclined to go through it.
This is the notion that I would like to disabuse you of. School filters select strongly for Conscientiousness and weakly against Openness; whereas the former plays at most a minor role in research as such, and the latter is crucial.
Someone might, therefore, have too much Openness and too little Conscientiousness to make it through the filter, despite having enough of these traits (a large amount of Openness, and a bare minimum of Conscientiousness) to function as a brilliant researcher.
And my point is that that is a big "if".
So, I've definitely both underloaded and overloaded myself academically (well, by 'overloaded' I mean 'had to drop all non-school projects to do my school projects well enough'). I feel tremendous sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, don't line up with the university standard: one of my friends in undergrad would be able to work solidly for around three months, but then have a breakdown for about a month, before the cycle would repeat. This was tremendously unhelpful, because semesters were four months long- but if he were on a trimester schedule, he would probably be fine.
And so people do slip through the cracks, who could probably be great researchers. (He had a terrible time keeping regular jobs as well, because they don't like to give three months of vacation a year.) But it's not clear to me how large an issue that is. Someone who can only do two courses a semester can get a college degree eventually- the system is just not set up to encourage that, and if you believe strongly in the importance of youth for research (which I mostly don't) then you might want to dissuade the people who be able to devote a smaller portion of their youth to research than others.
Okay, why do you think conscientiousness plays a relatively minor role in research? What do you mean by openness, and why do you think schools filter against it?
The former is the vast majority of research. And most things.
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?
You mean have someone check before surgery that patients probably won't have anything unusual happen, (not standing in the operating room going "let's not do the surgery, there was a misdiagnosis", which would cost even more)? That's bad for patients who do look unexpected inside, and cases where the surgeon messes up in a way that didn't come up during training. The cost may well still be lower than that of doctor training that rarely gets used.
There are specialized phlebotomists who do their job perfectly, and that's probably feasible (maybe actually implemented?) for much minor surgery.
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.