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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
Its a point I've made before.
Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.
And this means they're pretty much attuned to the Molochian incentives over their entire lives, and this thus sets their expectations for how the rest of their lives will turn out (spoiler: not great unless they get rich enough to just opt out of the race).
Yes, Algorithms have always been there, but now its more legible than ever. Or, ironically, less legible since most places keep their algos as black boxes. Its not like you can just ask "Why didn't you hire me?" "Oh, I don't like your tattoos/lack of experience/general attitude." Its always a nonspecific dismissal that even they can't explain.
So they're told to suck it up and try harder, keep going until they get a yes, etc. etc., but they're missing the 'feedback' part that might help them zero in on why they're failing and getting rejected. And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.
One hopeful use case for AI if it does not end all our problems at once (we're all dead, or its utopia) is it should be extremely good at helping match people with positions that work best for them given their preferences and the other party's needs. An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which, AND given constructive feedback as to why certain applicants aren't suitable or what they can do to improve. Same for dating, in theory, although the thought of AI mediated dating/mating disgusts me on a visceral level. Hmm.
I think @KulakRevolt had a good essay related to this. I can't find it right now, but he argued that in the past, most men were pretty happy to see increased military spending because it meant jobs. Relatively good jobs that an average man could get, no experience or credentials necessary. Nowadays we tend to think there's a tradeoff between "guns or butter" where increased military spending means less money available for all the nice stuff. But the more common pattern is the opposite- war opens up opportunities, while longtime peace creates a glut of men with no clear role in society. If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.
Kind of like the idea that the Black Plague was a good thing for the peasantry (that survived)?
Yeah. It's the same Malthusian logic- the population grows faster than the amount of available wealth. And even if the population is shrinking, the wealth is also getting concentrated into fewer and fewer hands unless the government steps in.
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