This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.
If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.
There's also something else at play that isn't just "cream rises."
If you're a top student who chose a slightly suboptimal grad school for personal reasons (to be near a significant other, taking care of a family member, already have a house somewhere, etc.), you may not realize that the game became cripplingly hard for you until you're near the end of your program.
The top universities often:
(1) send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year,
(2) hire lab techs and admins, which allows grad students more time to do actual research, and
(3) make it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency.
And you know, maybe you hold out hope because your advisor let you and your lab mates volunteer stuffing all the swag bags the night before a conference that happens to be in your city that year so you can go talk to all the other folks at the top of your field. Maybe you actually get a grant funded, unlike your classmates. Maybe you put in that many more hours so you can handle your share of the grunt work on top of research you'll actually get published. No weekends for five years. Do you do it? Maybe.
You might do it if you were sure you'd actually land on the tenure track and get tenure. That's far from assured, though. Seems like most people reach 35 or 40 before they're officially denied tenure, meaning you've wasted your most productive years chasing a career that's not going to happen.
I recently paid a visit to one of Ivies for a postdoc interview and a group of professors there were discussing the study that this article refers to. They all believed that "cream rises to the top" wasn't sufficient to explain the studies findings, and acknowledged that there are biases built into the academic job search that go beyond selecting for raw talent. Completely anecdotal of course, but it was still striking to me to see how dissatisfied they seemed with the selection process that they (as tenured professors at one of Iviest of Ivies) were the gatekeepers of.
Furthermore, articles would be greatly puffed up if they had to preempt random arguments which uncritically mention notions like "top 1% of grad students". (Kind of depresses me that I'm immersed in such a tech/managerialist culture that this argument popped into my head too while reading the article, requiring me to spend time evaluating it.)
So what about any charitable effort that discriminates on the basis of a protected class. If you can't do something for free to help one group without excluding some others no charity would be possible. Should MIT/Harvard intentionally avoid captioning? No. Should the government force them to use CCing? Hell no.
Your charitable cause is putting some people at a disadvantage then. If your charitable effort somehow must discriminate, it should do it in favor of the less-privileged group.
Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.
I love watching P&T's Bullshit, passing the time counting logical fallacies. For example, the good old No True Scotsman in 'you don't have problems unless you're (registered as) legally blind'. Their ringers in that episode each had some point were they talk about true disabled people.
Also nice was the "zomg, an empty parking space, that's due to a gun put to the business owner's head!"... in a place where there are plenty of other empty parking spaces in shot. Curiously, this point is put forward by a prolific author with a disability, who they present as a typical example of people with disabilities. My favourite part was towards the end, talking about workforce participation: "The ADA has had no effect and hasn't helped increase workforce participation, which has stayed around 30%. That means it's done a lot of harm". What?
Rather curiously, Penn keeps talking about how you can't legislate compassion, and even make a point of it explicitly - "If this wasn't legislated, people would be more compassionate" - referencing the parking spaces in particular. But hey, nothing is stopping business owners from being more compassionate than is legally required. It's almost like the arguments they're making are... somethingsomething :)
P&T heavily editorialise their Bullshit show, use selective sources, and pull all kinds of psychological tricks to make their case (which they're fully aware of, being veteran magicians). If it were a different kind of show, it wouldn't matter, but it's pretty unethical to position yourself as calling out others on their bullshit when you're making up as much yourself.
It seems like Facebook's Bug Bounty Program payment processor bugbountypayments.com is down http://isup.me/bugbountypayments.com . Anyone have any experience with that site? I haven't heard of it coming up before in security program discussions on HN or elsewhere.
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online discourse.
Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.
I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.
The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.
Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.
I disagree. Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others. Environments where emotionally aggressive communications are the norm have a whole lot to do with gender roles in our society. And how someone deals with such an environment is effected by their gender socialization too, such environments are perceived and dealt with differently, as a generalized trend, by women and men. (yes, individual men and women can be on both ends of it, at different times).
> Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others.
My parents sure didn't raise me that way. Honestly, a large reason why so many people are aggressive when they communicate is simply because they just don't know how to communicate. It's not a male thing, nor is it a female thing.
It's a "I'm unable to express my unhappiness regarding this scenario in a well-thought out and respectful way, so I'm going to lob some insults at you to make my point" thing.
My dad used to say that if you need to swear then you've obviously lost the ability to express your opinion in an articulate, and polite way. I don't 100% agree with that statement, but it does have some truth to it when you apply it a bit differently.
If you can't tell somebody their code is bad without berating them for even being born it's not because you're a man or a woman, you either have a condition which prevents you from recognizing you're being a dick or you do not know how to communicate like a civilized human.
Being assertive, constructive, and listening well are three ways to be able to communicate like a decent person. Being subservient or aggressive, destructive, and failing to listen are three/four ways to communicate like a person with a lack of social skills.
I agree, formatting details seem to be very context-specific and this is a lab setup, not in the wild. I would trust much more some AB test results from the NYT or any media organization - line length is one of the most obvious things to test!
I tested page-widths (which forces line length) on my own site, using n=109k visitors (so, quite a bit larger than n=20): http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux A wide - but not the widest - version performed best.
This is exactly my opinion as well. We don't remove books from the library because the author had moral failings, or even if the author committed genocide. The content has value and should be preserved. The removal of the content from OCW is the step too far. Lewin absolutely should be restricted from further teaching at MIT or on MITx but the work itself should not be considered problematic.
It's weird. I'm all for punishing sexual harassment, but I just don't see how removing his content from OCW does anything but punish society. It's not like static material is suddenly going to start harassing people.
As you say, they wouldn't remove an author's books in this case. How are course notes and videos any different?
I've talked about this at greater length in another comment, but removing OCW content strikes me as a serious blow to any professor's legacy. For someone who invested years into that project, that's one heck of a punishment; it's one of the harshest things I can think of that MIT could do to a retired professor.
They're probably worried about being perceived as supporting the professor by having his lectures online. It's silly, but that's the world we live in. There are people who will absolutely lose their minds over the thought of this guy's lectures being online after a sexual harassment claim.
