Perhaps the moral here is that ranking colleges is a stupid way to do things, that comparing a large enormous entity to another large enormous entity is silly, and that when you're really good at what you do, the difference between #1 and #40 isn't much at all.

Also: Did you REALLY repost your comment because the first time you submitted this it got swiftly downvoted? I replied to this same comment only to find it had been deleted and replaced with a dupe. Not cool.

I was making a point beyond the general idea that rankings are stupid. These particular rankings, particularly of the California schools is terrible. There is a difference between ULCA and Berkley. Especially when looking at the metrics of very top level achievement, such as Nobel Prizes, the difference between #1 and #40 can be very large.

Nobel Prizes are not a metric for achievement. That's insane. It's the most selective and irritatingly limited metric you could come up with.

What I'm trying to get you to understand, xiaoma, is that if ranking anything is stupid, then it doesn't make sense to point to a certain ranking system and say "Gee, that's stupid." Of course it's stupid. It's ranking.

Since when was Caltech a large enormous entity? MIT admitted 1500 freshmen last year, about the size of all undergrads+grads combined at Caltech (~2000 students total).

I deleted it because the first time I accidentally posted it incomplete. I deleted it and posted the full comment above. It amazes me that anybody responded to it that quickly. I'd have left it if I'd seen the comment. I did reply to your comment after seeing it, if that makes you feel better.

I really don't care about karma. Apparently, you do and you dinged me twice. Congrats, but it's not really the kind of discussion I was looking for.

I should add, though, that having the entire comment greyed out, only with a single unfriendly response would be a bit disappointing.

Other people will respond if they have something to say. Isn't that how it always works?

Your current comment is the exact same as your other comment. You edited that one, then deleted it as it got voted down. I believe that you didn't do it for karma, but still it was silly.

Look, I delete all kinds of unfinished or mis-entered things on the computer all the time, including emails, comments, blog entries and pages in employee training manuals. Why leave something up that's in error?

When I was writing my comment originally, I wrote the first line, tabbed over to the article to get the quote and tabbed back to this site and saw that I couldn't submit the comment. I hit the back arrow and then cut and paste my quote into the comment. Then I saw a comment was already there, cursed the fact that light accidental taps on my ASUS laptop's mouse pad get interpreted as clicks, deleted my comment and posted the corrected version. It was then that I saw a response to the [deleted]. Then I refreshed and finally saw the multiple downvotes and your comment along with odd insinuations about my personal motivations.

The cruftiness of the delete functionality and the entire... fuck it. This is just pissing me off. Forget it.

What I mean is: Why did you delete it after you'd already edited the original comment? I'm curious.

I had intended to delete it, not edit it.

Not too long ago, I had an unpleasant situation in which I was locked from editing my own comment. That's why I don't have much confidence in the edit feature. I hadn't realized how the delete feature also sucked until this thread.