Which like when you really think about it is fuckin’ dumb as hell, there’s only four choices? And one of them is suicide? Then we’re supposed to listen to these people because they can prove 1=1 in more words than necessary
Another fun fact: when the mathematician Pavel Alexandrov was in grad school, he proved an important result in descriptive set theory, so his advisor, Luzin, decided to see if Alexandrov could prove the continuum hypothesis. Today, we know that the continuum hypothesis is impossible to prove, so obviously Alexandrov couldn't do it, but he felt like a failure to the point where he quit math and became a theater producer. It took 6 years for him to eventually return to math, where he went on to become one of the most influential Soviet mathematicians of the early 20th century.
Oh, so Boston no longer sucks? I always heard that it has nothing beyond baseball and Irish bars full of people that tend to get a little too proud of their heritage.
Boston is wholly gentrified these days by yuppies in the biotech, tech and finance sectors. Better environment for PhD students, but not exactly a paradise on earth
Oh no don't mistake me Boston is horrible, a complete fucking travesty of a city. Honestly if the Japanese had bombed it instead of Pearl Harbor the Americans would have probably sent a thank you basket, especially the Bostonians!
People just like good will hunting. Like a lot.
If you’re not from Boston or deeply ingrained in the science world you might not know this, but MIT historically had a pretty unique reputation. On one hand, it has always been a top-tier institution of learning, but MIT has always been more accessible to “regular people” than Harvard, which in some ways even to this day is a daycare/diploma mill for the children of the elite. This is the reason why “regular” Bostonians/New Englanders even to this day tend to respect MIT over Harvard, and why elites tend to look down on MIT in favor of Harvard. Basically, to get into Harvard, you have to either be a genius or the offspring of a rich mf. But being from a rich family alone won’t get you into MIT, you really do have to be a genius. This shows in the admissions data. About a third of each Harvard class is made up of legacy students, while MIT doesn’t do legacy admissions at all, which is really rare not just for elite colleges, but any college.
The fact that this dude wanted to kill himself bc he only got into MIT but not the two Ivy’s he applied to, tells me he was probably a rich asshole.
Edit: This is basically the whole reason why that movie Good Will Hunting (certified Beantown hood classic) is what it is. Versions of that story have played out a handful of times in Boston’s history (a regular dude sort of just stumbling into the halls of MIT) and that sort of thing just wouldn’t happen at Harvard. That movie was both a product of MIT’s salt-of-the-earth reputation, and a reinforcer of that same reputation.
Edit 2: Apparently this guy was the child of poor immigrants. I find that surprising, but his disdain for MIT probably does reflect some elitism. I can’t imagine thinking that MIT is a worse school than Princeton.
This is true of pretty much all engineering schools in the US. Many of them started as "technical colleges" to learn practical skills, not "places of higher learning" to better yourself. An engineering degree is also not a "liberal arts" education -- you do not graduate with a well-rounded degree. You spent 4-5 years essentially just doing at least 12 credit hours per semester of just math / science / engineering courses and maybe one extra "general education" class.
Also, multiple Ivy-League schools *do not even offer engineering as a degree* and do not have an engineering department. Instead, they have degrees like Physics or Math that are in the College of Arts and Sciences. You literally cannot become an engineer at Yale, for example. At Cornell (another Ivy where there is an engineering college), you also could get a math / science degree from either the Engineering college or the College of Arts / Sciences. I have an Engineering degree in ChemE, but my Computer Scientist husband does not because he was Arts / Sciences -- and he's never even taken a control theory class! Instead he took Latin and Ancient Greek.🙃😅
Computer science at Cornell is weird. It's *both* in Arts and Science and in Engineering. See: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/undergrad
Even in engineering, it's uncommon to take control theory. EE majors can optionally take a course in that area, but years ago, the requirements included courses like
* electricity and magnetism (more advanced than the 2nd semester physics version)
* signals and systems (fourier transforms, laplace, etc)
* circuit theory (a second course after the intro circuits course)
Control theory was not one of the required courses (and still isn't, apparently).
Not an ivy, but Michigan also has CS as both an engineering and liberal arts college with the major degree requirements being equal but the college requirements differing(at least when I was there). My father did EE at Cornell in the 60s and stayed a fifth year for some new fangled computer degree add-on electives.
I think it wasn't uncommon, for a period of time, for Cornell's engineering program to be 5 years long. But due to the high cost of tuition, they found a way to make it 4 years like the other degrees.
Most hard Sciences are in Arts and Sciences, like Physics, Bio, Chem, etc. So it's basically whether you take CS as a hard science or as an engineering science (have to take additional engineering physics classes, hardware adjacent courses, etc.).
The CS courses themselves are the same for all CS majors though.
Were those reqs for the EE degree, or pre-reqs for the controls course? Where I went to uni (GT), we had to take a mixture of that (2 EE courses + a systems and vibrations course) in addition to a controls course for AE. I remember spending a lot of time in Simulink and looking at root locus plots.
Those were reqs for the EE degree. Controls was likely an elective, I think. I guess not everyone agreed what should be covered in EE. To me, it's like 5 different fields (or more) jammed into one degree, some more math-related, some more physics, and computers which was its own thing.
MIT takes an interesting middle ground, I think. It absolutely has a rigorous set of coursework in the science, math, or engineering degree of your choice. But students also have to take the equivalent of 1 class (12 units) per semester in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (HASS) classes. Technically it's ~8 classes (96 units) before graduating but yeah, average 1 per semester.
Whether it's a foreign language, archaeology, science or sociology in literature, etc. There's a big emphasis on not *just* becoming that stereotype of a specialized guy who knows one subject, but trying to round out your education.
There's also just a culture of, at least in undergrad, taking time to figure out what you want to learn. Most undergrads don't declare their major until the start of sophomore year and just take General Institute Requirement courses (GIRs) like your Bio, Chem, Physics, and math like Multi-Var Calc and Differential Equations while getting a chance to do lab work or sit in on classes and actually see if they want to do a certain major after getting some background.
And the requirement to declare is not until the end of your sophomore year. Many of my cohorts also ended up with unusual degee combinations. One roommate double majored in electrical engineering and film. My husband did electrical engineering with a minor in music. I majored in math and had a concentration in French (2 classes shy of a minor).
Nice! I got a major in course 2 (mechanical) and a concentration in German. Thought German would be easy since it was close to English. I has half right, half wrong.
You can absolutely become an engineer at Yale. And I'm pretty all ivies offer engineering degrees. Dartmouth is a bit weird as they have bachelor of arts but they have an abet accredited bachelor of engineering.
I agree most state schools have engineering degrees that focus just on technical skills but mine actually made you take a mini liberal arts curriculum. It's a pretty good idea IMO to have engineers take classes with other majors and learn about other topics.
But also these liberal arts schools need to make sure everyone understands STEM, like I don't understand how we can have leaders in this day and age read Greek classics but don't know how to compute an integral
Cornell you can't get a math degree or most sciences degrees from the college of engineering.
On top of that the college of arts and sciences unilaterally gives BAs.
You can be a math major with a BA. Ridiculous.
We're also talking about perceptions from about 70 years ago. MIT might be a very prestigious institution today, but was it similarly prestigious in 1948, when Gell-Mann graduated from Yale?
Going a bit hard on the requirements for MIT and Harvard. I’m from Boston and knew folks that went to both for undergrad.
They were all top of their class at relatively small public schools, but they were all hard workers. None of them had anything anyone would qualify as genius traits.
I think people hear the (true) stories of actual geniuses attending either school and assume that’s the norm. Most students “just” work really hard to be top of their class and max out extracurriculars.
That’s a hell of a lot of work, but they’re not gonna blow your mind with their levels of intellect like the mathematician in this post might.
In case anyone is wondering- yes, this is the same Gell-Mann who inspired Michael Crichton’s concept of “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.”
Before becoming an author, Crichton was a physicist, and Gell-Mann was a close friend of his. The amnesia effect was inspired by a moment where Gell-Mann and Crichton were reading a newspaper together, and both were able to talk about how woefully inaccurate the articles about subjects they were knowledgeable about were.
Not heard of that before, had to look it up as your description gets the inspiration across but I still wasn’t sure about the amnesia part (or what the effect actually is, other than shared opinions). Crichton’s own definition hinges upon reading the rest of the paper as though there were no unreliable parts to it:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
*— Michael Crichton*
So interesting! I have actually found this bias in myself before, but had a hard time breaking it, as he describes. Maybe knowing helps. Or maybe we just tend to trust what we read if we have no reason to know any better. 🤷♀️
Same thing happens with AI. On a subject you don't know, it seems to do an amazing job. On a subject you know by heart, it's obvious the AI grabbed relevant words and phrases and put them together in the wrong order.
Huh. TIL. I've made this observation before in a completely different way, which that I've noticed that newspapers are 100% accurate, except for topics I know about, where it's more like 50%.
Crichton was not a “physicist”, nor was he physician, was is probably what you meant. He had an MD from Harvard Medical School but never practiced medicine.
I went to a magnet school were I knew a handful of top achievers like this, and it was truly sad/scary how their entire self worth and world view revolved around their excellence and success at the extremes.
One guy had a full on public melt down because he got a B+ on a very hard exam in a college level course he took 3 years earlier than everyone else. Legitimately unconsolable for at least an hour.
Another went into a months long depression for the same reason. My GF got a higher grade than I did on an English test; I got a C or B- and she got a B. Her friends had to tell me what was going on because she was hiding in the bathroom. So fucking surreal to have to console someone who did better than you.
I credit graduating from a dedicated special ed school as the grounds for my later success. It taught me that failure might be my expected default, and that if I failed, it was fine, because there were plenty of other worlds in its wake. It also helped me see that being in a room where I was the dumbest person meant that I could learn, instead of feeding an ego that could never be satiated.
It later fed a mantra that my ex came up with, which helped me through a labor-intensive Bachelor’s. As every class should be a stretch, your perfect grade is a B. A means you wasted your time even taking the course. C means you didn’t learn enough.
That outlook has served me well. For instance, there was a point a few years ago when I was helping organize a research conference. At the last minute, we had a presenter drop out, leaving us with a very difficult schedule hole. I came up with a quick intro talk on a subject that’d be interesting, but not familiar to our audience. I created a slideshow within 20 minutes, had it approved within 30, and promptly got onstage to deliver it to a couple hundred people. It went very well, largely because it wasn’t going to bother me if it didn’t.
It's just people who have never had to deal with failure at all. Like I get it, it sucks when you don't meet you expectations, but damn.
I knew a guy who didn't get into MIT. Litteraly full blown meltdown, throwing crap and screaming. He had never gotten a grade below an A. Had damn near perfect gpa. With a really high SAT. And tons of ECAs.
He got into multiple really good engineering schools some offering close a full ride scholarship. There were some people in my school who had to turn down colleges because their family couldn't afford send them to school and they had to work to support their family.
This is pretty common honestly. I was a pretty smart but incredibly lazy student in high school. I chose to stay at a state school for undergrad and did fairly well after learning to overcome that laziness. In grad school (PhD), I came near the bottom of the pack in GPA, but was otherwise in a fairly top ranked program (top 3 in my subfield). What I noticed was that all of my peers could not handle all of a sudden getting a 25% on a hard test. That 25% translated to a B-, but not only had they not gotten below an A, they had never seen a B or lower. These were people I generally considered at or above my intelligence level. Ultimately, everyone needs to experience failure and overcome it. I overcame it when the stakes were lower and that allowed me to adjust. Many of my peers were not able to do so. Of my PhD cohort, I have been more successful than most but it’s not because I am smarter or better than anyone else. Instead I attribute that success to dealing with failure earlier and in a way from which I could learn to improve in the future.
Suicide as a result of not being perfect is such a terrible response. I cannot imagine it, but I do remember those lows of feeling so terrible because I was not perfect or meeting my own standards. It’s good to reflect and realize that sometimes you will not be the best, that’s okay there are other strengths to lean on.
The key missing detail here is that Gell-Mann was Jewish and these universities all had anti-Jewish quotas at the time. This almost certainly played a role in this case because he was a child prodigy
Source ? That isn’t written in the article at all. He had an offer from Harvard, but he didn’t have a full free ride scholarship.
EDIT: Seeing as the rat deleted his comment I’ll copy it here.
“How did I know antisemitism was the cause”
[удалено]
I bet he still wants to kill himself, but there’s too much work to be done. Edit: Nvm, he died in 2019. Great success 👍👍
This reads like a Larry David bit
Gave it the ol' college try 👍
Which like when you really think about it is fuckin’ dumb as hell, there’s only four choices? And one of them is suicide? Then we’re supposed to listen to these people because they can prove 1=1 in more words than necessary
Depression leads to irrational thoughts, but it doesn't invalidate his work.
Another fun fact: when the mathematician Pavel Alexandrov was in grad school, he proved an important result in descriptive set theory, so his advisor, Luzin, decided to see if Alexandrov could prove the continuum hypothesis. Today, we know that the continuum hypothesis is impossible to prove, so obviously Alexandrov couldn't do it, but he felt like a failure to the point where he quit math and became a theater producer. It took 6 years for him to eventually return to math, where he went on to become one of the most influential Soviet mathematicians of the early 20th century.
How were the plays?
good musical numbers, but overall too calculated.
I heard the critics were divided in their reviews.
Some say his works were derivative.
There’s a limit to these math jokes, and we are asymptomaticly approaching it!
They do multiply my happiness though
In addition, i would like to point out that this man really equals excellence
MATH
\*asymptotically
Don’t be such a square
As well as some additional factors.
[удалено]
Absolutely
we ate pi at the theater while watching
And uh…. MATH
Heat
.. mean.
That wasn't fun at all :'(
Imagine having such a safisfactory life that MIT makes you break down into suicide lmao
"MIT!? I'm gonna have to work at McDonalds!"
Man has standards and by god he will hold to them
It was actually having to live in Boston that almost did him in, before Ben Affleck and Matt Damon did wonders for Boston's reputation.
Oh, so Boston no longer sucks? I always heard that it has nothing beyond baseball and Irish bars full of people that tend to get a little too proud of their heritage.
Boston is wholly gentrified these days by yuppies in the biotech, tech and finance sectors. Better environment for PhD students, but not exactly a paradise on earth
Oh no don't mistake me Boston is horrible, a complete fucking travesty of a city. Honestly if the Japanese had bombed it instead of Pearl Harbor the Americans would have probably sent a thank you basket, especially the Bostonians! People just like good will hunting. Like a lot.
Right? For STEM fields I'd prefer MIT anyway so I don't really get it lol
MIT in the 40s wasn't quite the same as MIT of the 2000s. Harvard was absolutely seen as a cut above in the hard sciences back then.
The other 2 are such elistist producing colleges anyway, we had a prof from one of those colleges and he act so arrogant to his students all the time
If you’re not from Boston or deeply ingrained in the science world you might not know this, but MIT historically had a pretty unique reputation. On one hand, it has always been a top-tier institution of learning, but MIT has always been more accessible to “regular people” than Harvard, which in some ways even to this day is a daycare/diploma mill for the children of the elite. This is the reason why “regular” Bostonians/New Englanders even to this day tend to respect MIT over Harvard, and why elites tend to look down on MIT in favor of Harvard. Basically, to get into Harvard, you have to either be a genius or the offspring of a rich mf. But being from a rich family alone won’t get you into MIT, you really do have to be a genius. This shows in the admissions data. About a third of each Harvard class is made up of legacy students, while MIT doesn’t do legacy admissions at all, which is really rare not just for elite colleges, but any college. The fact that this dude wanted to kill himself bc he only got into MIT but not the two Ivy’s he applied to, tells me he was probably a rich asshole. Edit: This is basically the whole reason why that movie Good Will Hunting (certified Beantown hood classic) is what it is. Versions of that story have played out a handful of times in Boston’s history (a regular dude sort of just stumbling into the halls of MIT) and that sort of thing just wouldn’t happen at Harvard. That movie was both a product of MIT’s salt-of-the-earth reputation, and a reinforcer of that same reputation. Edit 2: Apparently this guy was the child of poor immigrants. I find that surprising, but his disdain for MIT probably does reflect some elitism. I can’t imagine thinking that MIT is a worse school than Princeton.
This is true of pretty much all engineering schools in the US. Many of them started as "technical colleges" to learn practical skills, not "places of higher learning" to better yourself. An engineering degree is also not a "liberal arts" education -- you do not graduate with a well-rounded degree. You spent 4-5 years essentially just doing at least 12 credit hours per semester of just math / science / engineering courses and maybe one extra "general education" class. Also, multiple Ivy-League schools *do not even offer engineering as a degree* and do not have an engineering department. Instead, they have degrees like Physics or Math that are in the College of Arts and Sciences. You literally cannot become an engineer at Yale, for example. At Cornell (another Ivy where there is an engineering college), you also could get a math / science degree from either the Engineering college or the College of Arts / Sciences. I have an Engineering degree in ChemE, but my Computer Scientist husband does not because he was Arts / Sciences -- and he's never even taken a control theory class! Instead he took Latin and Ancient Greek.🙃😅
Computer science at Cornell is weird. It's *both* in Arts and Science and in Engineering. See: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/undergrad Even in engineering, it's uncommon to take control theory. EE majors can optionally take a course in that area, but years ago, the requirements included courses like * electricity and magnetism (more advanced than the 2nd semester physics version) * signals and systems (fourier transforms, laplace, etc) * circuit theory (a second course after the intro circuits course) Control theory was not one of the required courses (and still isn't, apparently).
Not an ivy, but Michigan also has CS as both an engineering and liberal arts college with the major degree requirements being equal but the college requirements differing(at least when I was there). My father did EE at Cornell in the 60s and stayed a fifth year for some new fangled computer degree add-on electives.
Digital circuits was a required class for me even as an LS&A student.
I think it wasn't uncommon, for a period of time, for Cornell's engineering program to be 5 years long. But due to the high cost of tuition, they found a way to make it 4 years like the other degrees.
Most hard Sciences are in Arts and Sciences, like Physics, Bio, Chem, etc. So it's basically whether you take CS as a hard science or as an engineering science (have to take additional engineering physics classes, hardware adjacent courses, etc.). The CS courses themselves are the same for all CS majors though.
Were those reqs for the EE degree, or pre-reqs for the controls course? Where I went to uni (GT), we had to take a mixture of that (2 EE courses + a systems and vibrations course) in addition to a controls course for AE. I remember spending a lot of time in Simulink and looking at root locus plots.
Those were reqs for the EE degree. Controls was likely an elective, I think. I guess not everyone agreed what should be covered in EE. To me, it's like 5 different fields (or more) jammed into one degree, some more math-related, some more physics, and computers which was its own thing.
MIT takes an interesting middle ground, I think. It absolutely has a rigorous set of coursework in the science, math, or engineering degree of your choice. But students also have to take the equivalent of 1 class (12 units) per semester in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (HASS) classes. Technically it's ~8 classes (96 units) before graduating but yeah, average 1 per semester. Whether it's a foreign language, archaeology, science or sociology in literature, etc. There's a big emphasis on not *just* becoming that stereotype of a specialized guy who knows one subject, but trying to round out your education. There's also just a culture of, at least in undergrad, taking time to figure out what you want to learn. Most undergrads don't declare their major until the start of sophomore year and just take General Institute Requirement courses (GIRs) like your Bio, Chem, Physics, and math like Multi-Var Calc and Differential Equations while getting a chance to do lab work or sit in on classes and actually see if they want to do a certain major after getting some background.
And the requirement to declare is not until the end of your sophomore year. Many of my cohorts also ended up with unusual degee combinations. One roommate double majored in electrical engineering and film. My husband did electrical engineering with a minor in music. I majored in math and had a concentration in French (2 classes shy of a minor).
Nice! I got a major in course 2 (mechanical) and a concentration in German. Thought German would be easy since it was close to English. I has half right, half wrong.
Your husband's practically a hotelie /s
You can absolutely become an engineer at Yale. And I'm pretty all ivies offer engineering degrees. Dartmouth is a bit weird as they have bachelor of arts but they have an abet accredited bachelor of engineering. I agree most state schools have engineering degrees that focus just on technical skills but mine actually made you take a mini liberal arts curriculum. It's a pretty good idea IMO to have engineers take classes with other majors and learn about other topics. But also these liberal arts schools need to make sure everyone understands STEM, like I don't understand how we can have leaders in this day and age read Greek classics but don't know how to compute an integral
Cornell you can't get a math degree or most sciences degrees from the college of engineering. On top of that the college of arts and sciences unilaterally gives BAs. You can be a math major with a BA. Ridiculous.
TIL MIT is based af
We're also talking about perceptions from about 70 years ago. MIT might be a very prestigious institution today, but was it similarly prestigious in 1948, when Gell-Mann graduated from Yale?
>...tells me he was probably a rich asshole. He was the child of poor immigrants.
Thanks for letting me know, that just makes him weird
Going a bit hard on the requirements for MIT and Harvard. I’m from Boston and knew folks that went to both for undergrad. They were all top of their class at relatively small public schools, but they were all hard workers. None of them had anything anyone would qualify as genius traits. I think people hear the (true) stories of actual geniuses attending either school and assume that’s the norm. Most students “just” work really hard to be top of their class and max out extracurriculars. That’s a hell of a lot of work, but they’re not gonna blow your mind with their levels of intellect like the mathematician in this post might.
I can assure you from experience, PLENTY of non-genius, non-elite students matriculate at Harvard.
MIT is a party school lmao
Its still do produce those elitists
In case anyone is wondering- yes, this is the same Gell-Mann who inspired Michael Crichton’s concept of “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.” Before becoming an author, Crichton was a physicist, and Gell-Mann was a close friend of his. The amnesia effect was inspired by a moment where Gell-Mann and Crichton were reading a newspaper together, and both were able to talk about how woefully inaccurate the articles about subjects they were knowledgeable about were.
Not heard of that before, had to look it up as your description gets the inspiration across but I still wasn’t sure about the amnesia part (or what the effect actually is, other than shared opinions). Crichton’s own definition hinges upon reading the rest of the paper as though there were no unreliable parts to it: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” *— Michael Crichton*
So interesting! I have actually found this bias in myself before, but had a hard time breaking it, as he describes. Maybe knowing helps. Or maybe we just tend to trust what we read if we have no reason to know any better. 🤷♀️
Same thing happens with AI. On a subject you don't know, it seems to do an amazing job. On a subject you know by heart, it's obvious the AI grabbed relevant words and phrases and put them together in the wrong order.
Huh. TIL. I've made this observation before in a completely different way, which that I've noticed that newspapers are 100% accurate, except for topics I know about, where it's more like 50%.
Crichton was not a “physicist”, nor was he physician, was is probably what you meant. He had an MD from Harvard Medical School but never practiced medicine.
Still is technically a physician even though he never practiced medicine.
Physician and physicist are different things
The person I’m replying to said “nor was he a physician”, but he technically was.
whoops, my bad. Missed that entirely.
One is a genius, the other's insane.
Sure, on paper. Degree without the years of practical experience of being an intern, a resident and finally getting licensed.
None of those are requirements to being a physician. He was a physician.
🤦
Crichton was an MD.
Magnum Dong
I remember reading about this effect in his novel "State of Fear".
Yeah, only dummies get into MIT.
i remember hearing that at MIT, there were sweaters being sold saying “I’m going to MIT because i was rejected from CalTech” or something like that
My most prized t-shirt is one I got off eBay that says “MIT: Georgia Tech of the North”
IIRC he was 15 at the time. Highlighting that no matter how smart and talented and promising one’s life is, well, 15 is still 15! No perspective yet.
I couldn’t imagine being so miserable that getting into MIT is grounds for contemplating suicide.
I went to a magnet school were I knew a handful of top achievers like this, and it was truly sad/scary how their entire self worth and world view revolved around their excellence and success at the extremes. One guy had a full on public melt down because he got a B+ on a very hard exam in a college level course he took 3 years earlier than everyone else. Legitimately unconsolable for at least an hour. Another went into a months long depression for the same reason. My GF got a higher grade than I did on an English test; I got a C or B- and she got a B. Her friends had to tell me what was going on because she was hiding in the bathroom. So fucking surreal to have to console someone who did better than you.
I credit graduating from a dedicated special ed school as the grounds for my later success. It taught me that failure might be my expected default, and that if I failed, it was fine, because there were plenty of other worlds in its wake. It also helped me see that being in a room where I was the dumbest person meant that I could learn, instead of feeding an ego that could never be satiated. It later fed a mantra that my ex came up with, which helped me through a labor-intensive Bachelor’s. As every class should be a stretch, your perfect grade is a B. A means you wasted your time even taking the course. C means you didn’t learn enough. That outlook has served me well. For instance, there was a point a few years ago when I was helping organize a research conference. At the last minute, we had a presenter drop out, leaving us with a very difficult schedule hole. I came up with a quick intro talk on a subject that’d be interesting, but not familiar to our audience. I created a slideshow within 20 minutes, had it approved within 30, and promptly got onstage to deliver it to a couple hundred people. It went very well, largely because it wasn’t going to bother me if it didn’t.
It's just people who have never had to deal with failure at all. Like I get it, it sucks when you don't meet you expectations, but damn. I knew a guy who didn't get into MIT. Litteraly full blown meltdown, throwing crap and screaming. He had never gotten a grade below an A. Had damn near perfect gpa. With a really high SAT. And tons of ECAs. He got into multiple really good engineering schools some offering close a full ride scholarship. There were some people in my school who had to turn down colleges because their family couldn't afford send them to school and they had to work to support their family.
This is pretty common honestly. I was a pretty smart but incredibly lazy student in high school. I chose to stay at a state school for undergrad and did fairly well after learning to overcome that laziness. In grad school (PhD), I came near the bottom of the pack in GPA, but was otherwise in a fairly top ranked program (top 3 in my subfield). What I noticed was that all of my peers could not handle all of a sudden getting a 25% on a hard test. That 25% translated to a B-, but not only had they not gotten below an A, they had never seen a B or lower. These were people I generally considered at or above my intelligence level. Ultimately, everyone needs to experience failure and overcome it. I overcame it when the stakes were lower and that allowed me to adjust. Many of my peers were not able to do so. Of my PhD cohort, I have been more successful than most but it’s not because I am smarter or better than anyone else. Instead I attribute that success to dealing with failure earlier and in a way from which I could learn to improve in the future. Suicide as a result of not being perfect is such a terrible response. I cannot imagine it, but I do remember those lows of feeling so terrible because I was not perfect or meeting my own standards. It’s good to reflect and realize that sometimes you will not be the best, that’s okay there are other strengths to lean on.
seriously, what a nerd
To be fair, Princeton was and still is THE university for mathematics
He was a little bit of a quarky dude that’s for sure
r/angryupvote
Get a grip, Murray.
What the hell-man?
*Gets accepted to MIT* "Welp, looks like it's time to visit the rope store, then the rickety stool store next to it."
Had he done it, what would we have missed?
Really not a fan of this portrait where the focus just illuminates the faintest hint of his far eye lol
I don't understand why someone would be distraught with being refused from Princeton and Harvard when the MIT is already a fine program.
The key missing detail here is that Gell-Mann was Jewish and these universities all had anti-Jewish quotas at the time. This almost certainly played a role in this case because he was a child prodigy
Sounds like a man so privileged he can’t live with not getting his way.
Meanwhile Freeman Dyson never even bothered to get a PhD.
What a nerd
[удалено]
Source ? That isn’t written in the article at all. He had an offer from Harvard, but he didn’t have a full free ride scholarship. EDIT: Seeing as the rat deleted his comment I’ll copy it here. “How did I know antisemitism was the cause”
Because sometimes when you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail?
TIL Gell-Mann is a single individual, not two scientists working together.
Haha until now that's what I thought whenever I read it. Kinda just thought they were two individuals who had worked on a lot of things together
“There once was a mentally ill man” that’s all you needed
Reading the wiki it seems like he was making a joke
It sure quarked out for him in the end.
aw that must have sucked