Astral Codex Ten

Stanford

5 min read

Stanford

Article

Stanford is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 13, 2022 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “chairman of the math department at Stanford”; “to be held at Stanford in summer 2023”; “‘Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University’“. It most often appears alongside Europe, Wikipedia, 1890s.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: July 13, 2022
  • Last seen: September 13, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
At age 11, John went to high school at Budapest’s Fasori Gymnasium. This school has since attracted historical attention for the number of geniuses it produced; along with von Neumann and fellow Manhattan Project physicists Wigner and Teller, its alumni included Nobel-winning economist John Harsanyi and poet George Faludy. The faculty, too, were top-notch: young John’s math teacher was Laszlo Ratz, later to be memorialized by the Laszlo Ratz Prize given yearly for excellence in math education. But despite this enviable environment, it is unclear how much attention John ever paid in school. His brother writes about “frequent complaints of his high school teachers to the effect that when he was asked what the assignment was for today, he did not know; but he then participated in discussions with full competence and knowledge of the subject." Even Ratz was not fully confident in his ability to teach von Neumann, and eventually recommended a private tutor (according to MacRae, the tutor - Gabor Szego - would later become “one of the half dozen most distinguished Hungarian mathematicians of the twentieth century” and end up as chairman of the math department at Stanford).
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
23: Start A Biosecurity Center At Stanford (10/10) Allison Berke has hired three graduate research assistants who are now preparing manuscripts on their work, including “areas of overlap and potential for improvements in current gene synthesis screening algorithms”, “the capabilities of using AI-enabled protein tools to design toxins and viral sequences with enhanced sensitivity and specificity for known binding targets”, and “the current capabilities of biosensors for wastewater screening and continuous remote monitoring of genetically-engineered sequences and novel viruses”. She has gotten an additional FTX grant to put on a “biosecurity bootcamp for legislative staff, to be held at Stanford in summer 2023”.
Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
1. There's R1 (e.g., Ivy+, Stanford, MIT, ...) and not-R1 (typically liberal arts) institutions. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions are hired to do research and the teaching is incidental. It's flipped at not-R1 institutions. I believe tenure-track professors teaching at R1 institutions is mostly a historical accident that got cemented into every part of the tenure/promotion/grant process so it's basically impossible to change at this point.
2. There's also STEM/not-STEM. As a concrete example, the top-4 CS programs don't hire adjuncts in the way you think about them (e.g., Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University). This dynamic is very different in non-STEM.
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Musk would personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams. It was not unusual for him to call the students in their dorm rooms and recruit them over the phone. “I thought it was a prank call,” said Michael Colonno, who heard from Musk while attending Stanford. “I did not believe for a minute that he had a rocket company.” Once the students looked Musk up on the Internet, selling them on SpaceX was easy. For the first time in years if not decades, young aeronautics whizzes who pined to explore space had a really exciting company to latch on to and a path toward designing a rocket or even becoming an astronaut that did not require them to join a bureaucratic government contractor. As word of SpaceX’s ambitions spread, top engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences with a high tolerance for risk fled to the upstart, too.