His alma mater. Meant to go to students with financial problems who aren't elite enough to have previously gotten academic scholarships.

And because there is something wrong with me the first thing I thought of was Steven Weinberg. Because the University of Texas decide to give him a gigantic salary so they could try to pretend that they were in the same league as MIT or Stanford, or those few other schools Weinberg would normally teach at.

Now John's Hopkins, heretofore a level below the top, can attract Ivy League applicants. So Bloomberg can, if the scheme works, feel like his school is in the top rank. If his main object was really to help the poor the money wouldn't be going to A- students who are willing to go to that one specific University.

Is there something to what I just wrote? Or is it just my illness talking?

Sometimes students with elite ability will not achieve elite outcome prior to college due to poverty.

These types of student will want to go to Hopkins precisely because of the scholarships.

He probably wants to increase the prestige of his University as well as benefit less well off students. They aren't mutually exclusive goals. Just setting up a general scholarship fund for any student to any school would maybe be higher utility but there's nothing wrong with wanting to benefit your alma mater. And it's a heck of a lot better than building a new auditorium or something.

You don’t understand Weinberg’s motivation for going to Texas and their motivation for paying him. He went to UT to head the theory group and to try to do for Texas what someone like Oppenheimer did for Berkeley. It was about attracting and creating a Department for top notch researchers...not about trying to be like elite/selective private schools. Nobody at his level cares all that much about teaching. Look at all the top level talent that leave Harvard/Princeton for the IAS.

"Nobody" is too strong. Weinberg at least, cares about teaching. Short of getting shot anyway.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/01...bel-something/

Yeah, to clarify I meant nobody at his level is making career decisions based on the students they will be teaching. Research obv is the main motivator both for Weinberg and for Texas for paying him.

Bolded is just false. Weinberg is (justly) noted for the quality of his textbooks. For another example, Yau left the IAS for Harvard so as to have students.

What might be true is that people at that level don't prioritize teaching, but many view education as very important, take doing it very seriously, and do it very well.

Yau left the IAS because he didn’t have a permanent job there. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anybody that had a permanent job at the IAS and left.

From wiki, I see that John Wheeler, no slouch of a physicist, was already at UT when Weinberg got there. If I get the ratings right, he got his PhD at second level Johns Hopkins, and went to third rate UT when elite Princeton discarded him at 65.

Wheeler was also quite a teacher. Among many others, he advised Feynman, who was also a noted teacher. Both advocated tutoring as a way of learning. Wheeler had a funny story about recommending tutoring to a student who was failing a class (not taught by Wheeler). The student tutored the only worse student in the class and it worked, he passed. The recipient of his tutoring failed, though.

Yeah, obv Sklansky’s tier system is sort of lol. Places like Texas or UCLA are elite research institutions and everybody in the community (aka not DS) knows that. Nobody cares that it’s way easier for undergrads to get in than MIT when ranking research institutions.

Wrong. He was faculty there for four years.

Others who left being a full professor at the IAS include Chen-Ning Yang, who left for Stony Brook, Abraham Pais, who left for Rockefeller, Lars Hormander, who left for Lund, and Luis Caffarelli, who left for Texas.

Tax billionaires more and use that money to reduce tuition. Problem solved with less vanity gifts.

My only questions are a) what is a hopkins? and b) what is so special about John's?

He wants to feel like he's a Rockefeller/Carnegie. What students it benefits might not figure much in his thinking.

Personally, I'm more impressed with this gift to John's Hopkins.

Investor's $75M gift to Johns Hopkins said to be largest ever to a philosophy department

I'm not. Philosophy departments deserve to die. Most of what philosophers write about is studied more seriously, by better methodologies, by computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, and economists. Philosophers bring very little to the table.

Well, other than inventing all those other fields.

Let’s discuss John’s Hopkins more.

Not really. Archimedes, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein weren't philosophers. Philosophers never contributed much but noise and distraction and religion.

All of these fields start as philosophy until the fields develop enough to be called something else. What we consider science, math, history, whatever, is the process we use to try to specifically analyze down the questions raised by philosophy.

Newton saw himself and was referred to in his time as a philosopher.

Only someone that knows no physics can write that.

Yeah, I imagine that’s true. It doesnt seem like Newton really drew a sharp distinction between the classification of conic sections, alchemy and religious numerology like we do today, namely math, honest attempts at science that turned out to be incorrect because of a lack of understanding between the electro-chemical to nuclear scale and outright gibberish. But I think it’s tough to pretend that interesting lines of discovery are birthed philosophy in modern times.

It comes down to semantics, really. We just don't call it philosophy these days when people consider the larger questions in an area of knowledge. The conceptualization of the Turing Test, for example, is more philosophy than computer science and that opened a few lines.

Philosophy, at least as we generally use the term these days, is going to appear to be a bunch of people prattling on about useless and absurd stuff both because blind speculation is going to turn up way more misses than hits, and because the times it does turn up something useful it stops being philosophy and becomes something else.

Yeah. I'll always have a soft spot for philosophy, but the corollary to the true statement that what is now science grew out of philosophy is that in the last 50-60 years a lot of the best philosophical works have been written by scientists (especially some classics in social sciences imo, like The Social Construction of Reality), or else written by philosophers but heavily dependent upon scientific research for inspiration (e.g. in philosophy of mind).