[abecedarius]

An insightful list, but one part bugs me: the approval of working so hard you can't stay awake. This is bad for learning, and apparently there are even experiments showing that it's bad -- which casts an ironic light on the part of this list about demonstrably knowing things vs. bullshitting.

Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.

[eli_gottlieb]

Indeed. I thought Lesson 8 was simply a statement of institutional-scale masochism.

>MIT students often complain of being overworked, and they are right. When I look at the schedules of courses my advisees propose at the beginning of each term, I wonder how they can contemplate that much work. My workload was nothing like that when I was an undergraduate.

Ok. How is that at all healthy, not just medically but academically? There are limits, and when you push too far past them, you reduce long-term performance. The human machine operates within engineering tolerances like anything else.

[abecedarius]

Maybe it works better at sorting people by ability (in some more visible sense of ability) than at helping them develop. I think that goal explains more about precollege education (as one of many goals for it, all fighting it out) -- at the college level the biggest sorting happens in admissions. I'm just guessing about all this, though.