Originally Posted by Sideout

Perhaps the profound sense of school spirit and pride that Queen's students have is misinterpreted as this so-called ego. When you went home at the end of your first year at McMaster, did you not find yourself talking to your friends and family about Frosh week and all of the great things McMaster had to offer? Did you find yourself talking about how the President said, "McMaster is only 1 of 4 Canadian Universities in the list of top 100 universities in the world!"? Your enthusiasm could also be seen as irritating or snooty, especially to outsiders. I think it's unfair to make judgements about another university based on a handful of personal interactions until you have at least become a member of that particular university.

Yeah, but we didn't talk about these things as if they were God-sent. I'm all for loving your university, but not to the point where people in a thread are talking about how annoying you are.

Originally Posted by Sideout

I think it's unfair to make judgements about another university based on a handful of personal interactions until you have at least become a member of that particular university.

I don't think the criterion you chose as replacement is any better than the one you wanted replaced. Humans make judgements by induction - if we want to make some conclusion about issue X pertaining to population Y, we "survey" a particular sample of Y on the topic X (the survey needn't be explicit, of course).
Generally, we do believe that given a large enough sample-size, we can make "accurate" (I'm not defining this!) judgments - whether or not we're justified in this belief is besides the point for now. So there's nothing more 'unfair' about making judgments based on a handful of personal interactions in this case than there is in any situation involving an issue particularly germane to a specific group of people. Now, there is a degree of bias in the surveying - a surveyor is constrained by some conditions (for instance, in this case we could say that a surveyor would be constrained in their judgement because they go to a 'rival' university and so on), but that's inevitable in any and every judgement of this sort.

I don't think your replacement solves any of the issues with this method, since it hinges on modifying the bias. You're simply changing the constraints (i.e. the environment), not fixing the method. In this case, you would change the constraints for the worse - to see this, let's induce a metric of sorts on the (subjective) notion of 'good' versus 'bad' constraints in the context of their effects on bias.
Let's say issue X directly pertains to community Y (i.e. it is 'about' Y), and the surveyor is part of community Z, which is directly comparable but not equivalent to Y - in other words, Y and Z share a property P which is not X. Phrased this way, we can conceive of a (pretty fuzzy!) metric - namely, we give X a 'property-class' (for instance, X can be 'snobbery at Queen's', which would be in the same class as 'snobbery at Mac' but not as 'eats ham sandwiches daily') and then define 'distances' between property-classes as a 'degree of overlap' (i.e. intersection of sets), as each property obviously has sub-properties and so on. Then we can define any such distance, since, when taken together, the set of property-classes must exhaust itself (I'm assuming a lot about cognition here, namely that the set of property-classes is equivalent to the set of human-computable things and so on, but anyway...), so we can hypothetically just keep taking intersections. So we have a justification (of sorts) for the statement "Queen's students would be more biased about issues pertinent to Queen's than McMaster students would".

(Much ado about nothing?)

So modifying the bias in this case would just make things worse...

Anyway... to answer missscarlett's question...

As far as I know, McMaster doesn't have some 'horrible reputation'. Your time in university is largely what you make of it. Avoid second guessing your decision to come to McMaster based on what others say. As you may have noticed, some people will have strong opinions about other schools. Take these opinions with a grain of salt. Everyone that went to Queen's isn't a conceited jerk, there is more to Queen's than a lake, and some UofT students may have a lot of school pride. Why else would the UofT have a long list of donors?

McMaster is a great university. I had great teachers, met great people, learned a lot, and had a great time. It will be difficult to understand what McMaster (and Hamilton) is like until you become part of the community. I only hope that you enjoy your time at McMaster as much as I did. Good luck!

Well, I haven't read the whole thread, but this is nothing related to the question that OP asked (I assume).

The only other bad part about Mac (other than the IT infrastructure mentioned a lot here), is that they don't give international students enough admission scholarship...even UBC awarded me 10,000 but I did not go cuz I know that 10,000 will just cover my first month living cost there? Who knows...

Originally Posted by Mahratta

I don't think the criterion you chose as replacement is any better than the one you wanted replaced. Humans make judgements by induction - if we want to make some conclusion about issue X pertaining to population Y, we "survey" a particular sample of Y on the topic X (the survey needn't be explicit, of course).
Generally, we do believe that given a large enough sample-size, we can make "accurate" (I'm not defining this!) judgments - whether or not we're justified in this belief is besides the point for now. So there's nothing more 'unfair' about making judgments based on a handful of personal interactions in this case than there is in any situation involving an issue particularly germane to a specific group of people. Now, there is a degree of bias in the surveying - a surveyor is constrained by some conditions (for instance, in this case we could say that a surveyor would be constrained in their judgement because they go to a 'rival' university and so on), but that's inevitable in any and every judgement of this sort.

I don't think your replacement solves any of the issues with this method, since it hinges on modifying the bias. You're simply changing the constraints (i.e. the environment), not fixing the method. In this case, you would change the constraints for the worse - to see this, let's induce a metric of sorts on the (subjective) notion of 'good' versus 'bad' constraints in the context of their effects on bias.
Let's say issue X directly pertains to community Y (i.e. it is 'about' Y), and the surveyor is part of community Z, which is directly comparable but not equivalent to Y - in other words, Y and Z share a property P which is not X. Phrased this way, we can conceive of a (pretty fuzzy!) metric - namely, we give X a 'property-class' (for instance, X can be 'snobbery at Queen's', which would be in the same class as 'snobbery at Mac' but not as 'eats ham sandwiches daily') and then define 'distances' between property-classes as a 'degree of overlap' (i.e. intersection of sets), as each property obviously has sub-properties and so on. Then we can define any such distance, since, when taken together, the set of property-classes must exhaust itself (I'm assuming a lot about cognition here, namely that the set of property-classes is equivalent to the set of human-computable things and so on, but anyway...), so we can hypothetically just keep taking intersections. So we have a justification (of sorts) for the statement "Queen's students would be more biased about issues pertinent to Queen's than McMaster students would".

(Much ado about nothing?)

So modifying the bias in this case would just make things worse...

I really wonder if anyone actually read that XD

Originally Posted by Mahratta

I don't think the criterion you chose as replacement is any better than the one you wanted replaced. Humans make judgements by induction - if we want to make some conclusion about issue X pertaining to population Y, we "survey" a particular sample of Y on the topic X (the survey needn't be explicit, of course).
Generally, we do believe that given a large enough sample-size, we can make "accurate" (I'm not defining this!) judgments - whether or not we're justified in this belief is besides the point for now. So there's nothing more 'unfair' about making judgments based on a handful of personal interactions in this case than there is in any situation involving an issue particularly germane to a specific group of people. Now, there is a degree of bias in the surveying - a surveyor is constrained by some conditions (for instance, in this case we could say that a surveyor would be constrained in their judgement because they go to a 'rival' university and so on), but that's inevitable in any and every judgement of this sort.

I don't think your replacement solves any of the issues with this method, since it hinges on modifying the bias. You're simply changing the constraints (i.e. the environment), not fixing the method. In this case, you would change the constraints for the worse - to see this, let's induce a metric of sorts on the (subjective) notion of 'good' versus 'bad' constraints in the context of their effects on bias.
Let's say issue X directly pertains to community Y (i.e. it is 'about' Y), and the surveyor is part of community Z, which is directly comparable but not equivalent to Y - in other words, Y and Z share a property P which is not X. Phrased this way, we can conceive of a (pretty fuzzy!) metric - namely, we give X a 'property-class' (for instance, X can be 'snobbery at Queen's', which would be in the same class as 'snobbery at Mac' but not as 'eats ham sandwiches daily') and then define 'distances' between property-classes as a 'degree of overlap' (i.e. intersection of sets), as each property obviously has sub-properties and so on. Then we can define any such distance, since, when taken together, the set of property-classes must exhaust itself (I'm assuming a lot about cognition here, namely that the set of property-classes is equivalent to the set of human-computable things and so on, but anyway...), so we can hypothetically just keep taking intersections. So we have a justification (of sorts) for the statement "Queen's students would be more biased about issues pertinent to Queen's than McMaster students would".

(Much ado about nothing?)

So modifying the bias in this case would just make things worse...

It's arguable that community Z has nothing to do with community Y, isn't it? In other words, as it stands I don't think it's necessarily worse to be part of Queen's university and judging Queen's compared to being at McMaster's university and judging Queen's.

In either case, like you said, there are biases (whether it be toward or against) liking their university. So I agree that by forcing everyone to go to Queen's to make a proper judgement, you are indeed merely changing the constraints. But by choosing students who don't go to Queen's you're also getting a bias, presumably in the opposite fashion.

I guess the best thing to do would be to use a mixture of both students who go to Queen's and those who don't, right? In that case the biases are most likely to cancel out?

Originally Posted by abelon3

I really wonder if anyone actually read that XD

Lol, I did! And compared to his usual posts this one was quite understandable, usually you need to have some next level third year abstract mathematics to understand what's going on

Originally Posted by woozyking

The only other bad part about Mac (other than the IT infrastructure mentioned a lot here), is that they don't give international students enough admission scholarship...even UBC awarded me 10,000 but I did not go cuz I know that 10,000 will just cover my first month living cost there?...

Try any at all! I didn't get even ONE DOLLAR. *coughcough* Just saying. They definitely need to improve on that aspect. I know even Waterloo gives around $4000.

Originally Posted by Faer

Try any at all! I didn't get even ONE DOLLAR. *coughcough* Just saying. They definitely need to improve on that aspect. I know even Waterloo gives around $4000.

Thankfully I'm graduated already

Originally Posted by woozyking

Thankfully I'm graduated already

Well aren't you lucky...

Originally Posted by Faer

Well aren't you lucky...

Stepping in to the crucial world now, no more egg shell for me

You are complaining about international scholarships, no offense but the money they give to domestic students is ridiculous. A huge part of my dilemma was should I go to carelton where with scholarships and OSAP and I would be fully covered and graduate with less debt, even at waterloo same thing, or go to mac where I could cover first year and not much more.

Originally Posted by MacPack

You are complaining about international scholarships, no offense but the money they give to domestic students is ridiculous. A huge part of my dilemma was should I go to carelton where with scholarships and OSAP and I would be fully covered and graduate with less debt, even at waterloo same thing, or go to mac where I could cover first year and not much more.

True, but there's still that entrance scholarship. Every dollar counts, and the most I received was from some Int'l student society (amount $1000). I entered school with a 95%+ GPA, so it was kinda ridiculous...

Plus, Int'l students aren't eligible for OSAP or bursaries or anything else, really.

Originally Posted by Alchemist11

It's arguable that community Z has nothing to do with community Y, isn't it?

That depends. If two things are comparable, they must have something in common - else they couldn't be compared in the first place.

In other words, as it stands I don't think it's necessarily worse to be part of Queen's university and judging Queen's compared to being at McMaster's university and judging Queen's.

I think that is the case. Since the framework is probabilistic, the crux of the argument is that it is more likely that a Queen's student will be more biased on such an issue than a Mac student would (because it's more directly germane to the Queen's student). So it could only be necessarily worse if some operation on this metric gave, say, 0 for Mac and 1 for Queen's, which is in itself quite unlikely.

In either case, like you said, there are biases (whether it be toward or against) liking their university. So I agree that by forcing everyone to go to Queen's to make a proper judgement, you are indeed merely changing the constraints. But by choosing students who don't go to Queen's you're also getting a bias, presumably in the opposite fashion.

Precisely. I would have said that, but I had an irresistible urge to make my intuition 'rigorous'...
Anyway, I think it's worthwhile rephrasing in more probabilistic language, just to clarify what I mean by 'bias' - I mean the term as denoting a (continuous) random variable - that is, a function from the sample space to the interval [0,1]. A greater value indicates a 'stronger' bias.

I guess the best thing to do would be to use a mixture of both students who go to Queen's and those who don't, right? In that case the biases are most likely to cancel out?

Exactly my thoughts. Again, the model is probabilistic, so it should adequately make sense of non-selected aspects of the sample (i.e. their personal biases independent of their university) by giving a probability rather than a 'definite number', so to speak.

Lol, I did! And compared to his usual posts this one was quite understandable, usually you need to have some next level third year abstract mathematics to understand what's going on

Hahah, am I really that abstruse?

Originally Posted by Mahratta

Hahah, am I really that abstruse?

Case in point.

Though I'm just kidding, 'cause I can pretty much gather what you mean.