<p>@Halogen,</p>
<p>I got an A in APUSH copying course notes for hw and half listening to the lectures, and I’m not even a true genius. It would be an exaggeration to say I never opened the text book, but I could probably count the number of times on one hand. I didnt know everything on the tests but I knew enough to get A’s on most of them. If you really think APUSH is that hard then you’re probably an overachiever</p>
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</p>
<p>Are you serious or just ■■■■■■■■? I seriously can’t tell. No one with half a mind could possibly take your formulation seriously. Your lack of humanities background in addition to a scientific background (I have both) has: </p>
<p>a) failed to let you know when your argument is guilty of logical fallacy in the form of a straw man argument;
b) failed to educate you about the brilliant contributions these individuals have made.</p>
<p>Straw man #1: I never said smart people are only artistic (and philosophical - are you aware I listed philosophers as well? Do you know who these people are?). I proved you wrong by pointing out, with examples, that there are many brilliant minds operating outside the STEM fields, making the foundation of your argument irrelevant. </p>
<p>Straw man #2: You attempted to suggest that I claimed famous = smart. You must know that I did not. These individuals are not simply famous. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton are simply famous. These individuals are well known because they made brilliant contributions to society that fundamentally altered its course in some way. </p>
<p>My point, as I stated above, is that intelligence cannot be quantified and reduced to simple boxes as you are attempting to do. So you will not be seeing a reductive solution from me.</p>
<p>You’re obviously out of your league attempting to debate me but perhaps you are young and simply a victim of the blind spots that come with a lack of cultural exposure. I challenge you to expand your horizons beyond the boxes that currently trap your perception. It will serve you far better as a well-rounded person than your current trajectory.</p>
<p>@PT2009</p>
<p>Am I the only one that noticed your ridiculous overuse of the word formulate?
You seem to be stuck on the idea that only STEM majors can figure out what a problem is asking and then solve it adequately. This couldn’t be farther from true and this gross over generalization from the start makes it hard to tell if you really do believe that STEM majors are truly the only people that uncover and solve problems.</p>
<p>Honestly your entire argument seems to revolve around you ultimately coming to the conclusion that MIT is the most likely to have a high concentration of smart people. Which to me sounds an awful lot like you’re trying to justify your major/college you attend or plan to attend</p>
<p>
Missing the point… intelligence is how you use the information you acquire. Some classes don’t require the student to acquire much information but they require the student to use the information in complex ways that some people accomplish with less practice than others. Other classes require the student to acquire more information than a lazy student (at least by my definition of “lazy”) would be willing to spend the time to acquire.</p>
<p>applejack: Isn’t it a bit heavy handed, sitting in the comfort of your home in air-condition room, on a computer, using internet and social media to talk about ‘smart’ people not in STEM field.
I can quantify ‘smartness’. The people behind the technology that allow
<p>
Your argument is a naively simplistic one, reducing complexities of human psyche and society to the barest aspects that you, personally, can grasp, ignoring all the rest. I’m sure you can see the stupidity in that logic. You’re basically self-selecting a subgroup of the population and then “formulating” whatever your preconceived bias wants to find out by focusing just on those individuals. </p>
<p>“Wow! Guess what pt2009 discovered by assuming that only intelligence that can be quantified by invented products counts - MIT WINS!!!”</p>
<p>In other formulated news, if only Republicans had voted, Mitt Romney would have won in a landslide! </p>
<p>Wow. Pt2009 is brilliant!</p>
<p>A more complex mindset can grasp an appreciation for the intelligence that often goes into inventions like air conditioning and the defense contractors and federal governments’ creation of the internet, along with brilliant minds that have forged our understanding of human nature or the human condition or our understanding of history or sociology.</p>
<p>
And many people on Wall Street and in corporations were convinced they were among the smartest, yet their naivete and ignorance devastated our economy. </p>
<p>You seem naive to the downsides of those inventions, too - the fact that desert cities that only exist because of air conditioning are pillaging water supplies from far away to sustain themselves seems lost on your glowing admiration for the technology.</p>
<p>Those who develop ways for us to drive where we want or fly around the world haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that doesn’t pump tons of pollution in the air. </p>
<p>If these people were that unconditionally smart, they would have figured these problems out by now. They deserve a little credit for getting us this far but they’ve fallen far short of brilliance with their primitive contraptions.</p>
<p>So, even your contraption-based basis for judging intelligence is quite subjective when held to a higher expectation.</p>
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</p>
<p>Now you are backtracking, which is good. You’re realizing you were wrong without losing face by admitting it. That’s okay. Pride is hard to swallow. </p>
<p>What you say here is very different from your dis-proven claim above: “Since Im positive that non STEM field doesnt [sic] encourage much of [sic] problem formulation this narrow [sic] the field to STEM”</p>
<p>Obviously, whether a historian is trying to solve a problem about a period of history or a philosopher is trying to solve the problem of understanding the very nature of our reality or an artist is using fiction or other forms of creativity to understand and solve social problems, they are apt problem solvers. </p>
<p>For example, Mark Twain wrote extensively about slavery and the issue of oppressing black people at a time when the popular culture needed that problem to be solved. Aside from war machinery (are their inventors smarter than everyone else too?) not a lot of technology was involved in solving that political / social problem, yet somehow smart non-STEM people did.</p>
<p>What school has the smartest people?
I’ve read thru this thread and have agreed and disagreed with many comments, sometimes contradicting my own thoughts. This is a very interesting and very difficult question. Book smart. Street smart. Innovative smart. Intuitive smart. Lots of different smarts. I’m leaning towards kids who are so smart that they are not quite on this planet, if you catch my drift.
It’s not a coincidence that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell all dropped out of Reed/Harvard/UT – the university experience was too confining and not creative enough for their high-capacity brains. Maybe that’s why Peter Thiel (in SF) has a scholarship to pay young brainiacs NOT to go to school, but to invent, innovate and explore outside the classroom. Seriously!<br>
So, back to the original question: the school with the smartest student body? Smartest graduates? The question (for me) lends itself to a place that has a brainiac quality, totally focused on infinite intellectual challenges, and probably not filled with well-balanced types who can turn-it-off when they want to or need to. Someone mentioned Deep Springs, which I think is a good vote. Maybe Reed College, which on “paper” might not look the same as Harvard, but the nerdy-brainy nature of the school definitely leans that way. Or, Swarthmore, which as a smaller LAC style may indeed have an environment for planetary smarty pants. Cal Tech would be up there, too, since its size and focus attracts a certain level of “smarts” intensity. And lastly, MIT , which from a larger university POV, might have the largest number of socially-underdeveloped-but-brilliant underclassmen/women. This is strictly based on the initial question, and does not take into account so many of the factors of how to define “smart.” The HYPS tend to have lots of very intelligent people, capable/future CEO business leaders, lots of high-powered people who want to make a difference in the world, and quite a few socially connected “doers” who party their brains out but in the end will fit into society (if not lead it) and create a life-long network to be successful in life. The school with the “smartest” students may not have these types of personalities, so my vote is: Deep Springs/Reed/Swarthmore/Cal Tech/MIT. Wicked smart people go to these schools.</p>
<p>I think you would first have to agree how to define ‘smart’. Even at academically challenging colleges, you will have people with a range of capabilities. Not sure any of that should matter in deciding where to go. I went to college with several who were considered ‘smart/intelligent’ by most standards but lack the people skills to effectively perform in the working world once they graduated. Not sure there is any correlation between intelligence and your success after college.</p>
<p>First, it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>But, if you want my opinion: Reed College, St. John’s, MIT, CalTech, New College of Florida, Swarthmore, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and of course the HYP.</p>
<p>^^^ & Deep Springs.</p>
<p>26 intellectuals stranded in the desert have nothing to do all day but make each other smarter.</p>
<p>University of Pheonix. It’s the Harvard of internet universities.</p>
<p>I have never seen so many arrogant, pseudo-intellectuals on one page…</p>
<p>Here is my opinion:
There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. Intelligence is the capacity of information that your mind can hold. Smartness is how you use your resources to achieve your goals. In terms of intelligence, I would think it would be the Ivy league schools. In terms of smartness, I don’t think it can be gauged.</p>
<p>That depends on what you consider intelligence. And smart people can be found everywhere- in the best and worst schools. You can have a genius you quite honestly just could not care less about school in a bad university, and you can also have some unmotivated individual sitting at Harvard who got there by studying 10 hours a day and pumping up his r</p>
<p>The topic title is meaningless due to the enormous number of definitions of “smart”. For pure math and engineering ability, no doubt MIT, Caltech, Stanford engineering, etc have the people who are best equipped to solve textbook questions. </p>
<p>But outcome in life is dependent on many variables aside from intelligence. The most successful people are not necessarily the smartest. You can’t even say that Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are the smartest. You can only say that those people happened to have the overall best traits for business of their times. </p>
<p>If you put a young Bill Gates in Harvard today, he would not be worth $70 billion dollars in 30 years. </p>
<p>But that posits success with money. Like smarts, success also has many definitions. For example, biologically speaking, the most successful people (defined in biology as “fitness”) do not go to college at all. Instead, the census states that those having the most children are on government welfare.</p>
<p>Post #36:
</p>
<p>Exactly.</p>
<p>Also, grades in school mostly test your ability to remember information. That is not a terrribly valuable skill in life, since in real life everything is “open book.” The people who do well in life are those who know where to find information and how to use it, not those who can remember information.</p>
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<p>s4cfoundation-</p>
<p>Please do your research before making statements on issues about which you clearly know nothing.</p>
<p>Percentage of undergraduates who are “white, non-Hispanic”*</p>
<p>Harvard: 44.5 percent
UMass Amherst: 69.1 percent</p>
<p>Yale: 47.3 percent
University of Connecticut: 64.4 percent</p>
<p>Dartmouth: 48.3 percent
UNH: 83.5 percent</p>
<p>UPenn: 45.8 percent
Penn State University Park: 75.0 percent</p>
<p>*Source= 2011-12 Common Data Set for each school</p>