"He recalled in 2011 that he once asked students in an engineering class if they understood how the feedback mechanism in a toilet’s water tank maintained the water level.
“I asked them, ‘How many of you have ever taken the lid off a toilet tank to see how it works?’” he recalled. “None of them had. How do you get to M.I.T. without having ever looked inside a toilet tank?”"
This is really surprising. Then again, this is not the first time I've glimpsed the possibility that attendnce at a prestigious school is a very noisy signal.
There was a generation of engineering professors at MIT (and I'm sure elsewhere) like Forrester, Doc Edgerton, Doc Draper, etc. who represented a sort of hands on experimentation who I suspect would not have become faculty in a later era. Which I consider rather unfortunate.
It's a bit les surprising if you realise professor Forrester taught at the MIT Sloan school, which is the Business School. A fairly large percentage of the B-school students at MIT have an engineering background so it's still surprising they didn't know what the inside of a toilet's tank looks like.
I was in one of his classes and it was one of the best courses I ever had. Understanding of system dynamics has turned out to be surprisingly useful in lots of aspects of my career, not just engineering. Professor Forrester thought it might be good to teach it in Kindergarten, and I've come to realise that is not as crazy as it sounds.
“I asked them, ‘How many of you have ever taken the lid off a toilet tank to see how it works?’” he recalled. “None of them had. How do you get to M.I.T. without having ever looked inside a toilet tank?”"
This is really surprising. Then again, this is not the first time I've glimpsed the possibility that attendnce at a prestigious school is a very noisy signal.