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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (70756)	10/14/2012 5:26:30 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

"Stellar institutions" get to be stellar mainly because stellar people compete to attend the stellar place. It's very easy to be stellar if stellar people are crowding at the doors. It's easy to be a stellar individual pretty well anywhere. Johns Hopkins runs a talent search [or did 20 years ago - I shall ask Google if they still do; sure enough cty.jhu.edu ]. They tested 12 year olds with the Scholastic Aptitude Test around the world and ran a programme for the successful children. It was a bit too expense for us but many people would have taken up the opportunity. So Johns Hopkins thereby gets a good proportion of the talented people. But stellar people shine anyway, so it doesn't really matter where stellar people go. I argue that it's better in some ways to be out in the jungle rather than in a pressure cooker environment with like-minded people, because a broader experience of life and people is gained out in the jungle. "The best and brightest" can be quite dangerous because they can come to believe that what they think is right simply because they think it. Long ago, the Greeks had a word for it - hubris. For some things, the stellar places have facilities which lower ranked places like Auckland University don't have, so to follow some pursuits attending Johns Hopkins would be necessary. For example, a particle physics student would do well to have access to the Large Hadron Collider. Mqurice