What does Harvard do right? | Hacker News Reader

What does Harvard do right?

overcomingbias.com

30 pointsdigisth16 comments

I certainly agree there's a rich-get-richer phenomena, but I'm not sure there's evidence that mid-size VCs are disappearing.

The generic phenomena is "preferential attachment", which creates a power-law distribution (nearly indistinguishable from log-normal). It's common for observers to believe there's two categories of size, either big or small. This is the origin of "tipping point" theories. However, in a power-law or log-normal, there is no discontinuity. Observers are distracted by the enormous difference between the biggest and next-biggest that they don't notice the same relationship continues all the way down to the smallest.

It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to be the oldest university in the US therefore very prestigious therefore being absurdly wealthy (like Oxford/Cambridge in UK) therefore being able to recruit the best talent thereforee being very prestigious.... and on goes the cycle.

In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful outliers "do" right. Even if they wilfully did do something right (which they don't), it would not be replicable.

Not really; as Wikipedia accurately puts it in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_William_Eliot

Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university.

The article goes into a lot of detail about the transformation.

    It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to
    be the oldest university in the US therefore very
    prestigious

That can't be all of it, because other similarly old ones are nowhere near as prestigious. For example the College of William and Mary is 1693 and St. John’s College is 1696, which puts them older than Yale or Princeton, but far fewer people have heard of them.

    In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful
    outliers "do" right ... it would not be replicable.

Hanson isn't trying to replicate their success (found a top-tier university), he's trying to understand it.

Yes, it's interesting to hypothesise what the younger schools that do break into the top rankings are doing right. E.g., Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon in the U.S.. It seems to be a combination of heavy private investment, recruitment of name brand faculty, and structuring of internal incentives to be a competitive (grant-winning) institution.

This is probably off-topic, but in my experience a generation ago at Harvard, what they did right was have massive space.

Dozens of large buildings with libraries, nooks, sitting areas, auditoria with unlocked pipe organs (at Radcliffe), etc.

So one could always find a private area to study, read, think, play, and dream.

Silly, I know, but I think it's the ultimate educational luxury...

Well if that is the secret to success, Texas Tech should be at the top of the rankings. They have an incredible amount of space.

That is actually a major benefit. I went to a smaller commuter school for undergrad where most people would almost never hang around on campus (rather just drive home) yet there was almost no 'good' place to sit down and study between classes. There were plenty of quiet areas, but most were either not very comfortable, or didn't have enough outlets. By my senior year I had found a small nook in one of the buildings that had a table, whiteboard, and outlet. I eventually stopped going home immediately after classes because i got more work done there than anywhere else.

This may be the case in VC, but I would argue that in higher education, Harvard and its peers have better faculty than "worse" colleges. The better professors attract the most and highest-qualified students.

And what attracts top-notch faculty? Other top-notch faculty and an excellent reputation. You end up with roughly the same positive feedback loop.

Harvard has top performing academics, but not especially the best teachers or classrooms, especially for intro/undergrad topics.

I sonetimes describe Y Combinator as the Harvard of startup accelerators, for exactly the reasons mentioned the article.

Ack, fatfingers on my Nexus—I of course meant "sometimes".

Harvard is one of the two or three most important institutions in training future members of America's most powerful mafias. Was this a trick question?

Based on the name of the website I thought it might cover the recent news about the reverse affirmative action toward Asians at Harvard. I find it amusing that white are now also benefiting from affirmative action.

(I like affirmative action - to bring diversity)

That's hardly news. It's been happening for decades, and before that it was the same story except with Jews instead.

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