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Notes -
Speculation is half the game around here.
-The problem is that the people I’m talking about have confused the metrics for the reward and this has deleterious personal and social consequences. We’re not talking about breeding cobras, here, we’re talking about apparently irrecoverable psychological damage on a wide scale.
-Narcissists really do hate people who tell them the truth, yes. If you object to the n-word, just consider whether you’d want any kind of relationship with someone who hates being told the truth. It doesn’t matter what the clinical name is. Do you want to do business with guy? Do you want to date that woman? Want them as a neighbour?
-The omnipotence in question is granted by the narcissist to everyone else to affirm their identity, and he demands that they use it. They’re not asking you to move a couch, they’re asking you to affirm their self-image, and because that image is baseless (it is not backed by deeds) your affirmation is all they have.
You can advance this discussion by denying either the phenomena I’m describing, the causal links between them, or the significance any of it. I can’t advance it by giving you any sources since the system keeps finding itself to be working just fine.
See, I don’t think most people have confused the metric and the reward. A college degree gives you some combination of skills and prestige. Gaming a disability policy decouples your degree from your skills, but it doesn’t stop you from claiming some of the prestige. Maybe even a lot of it, depending on your field. Connections, investment, political backing, all sorts of benefits.
If what you most value is skill, you suck it up and go to a non-elite school. You’ll get most of the skill and none of the prestige. If you crave the latter, though, gaming the system is a rational choice.
The emperor’s sycophants complimented his new clothes because they were afraid of his anger. In your model, why are the universities going along with it? Are they stupid?
I think the narcissism label is a way to sneer at people one thinks are delusional. If they’re actually making a rational decision, it’s not a useful framing.
Echoing @gog below, I agree that gaming the system isn't necessarily indicative of TLP-style narcissism, if you're fully aware that that's what you're doing and have no illusions about it.
Think back to the Varsity Blues scandal, in which various wealthy parents (including your woman from Desperate Housewives) were found to have bribed elite universities to get their children places.
Now, if these parents were thinking "I know Little Jimmy isn't too bright, but I really want him to go to Harvard, and if that means I have to pay some apparatchik under the table, so be it", that's not narcissism.
But if, on the other hand, they were thinking "Little Jimmy is a genius, but he has a special kind of intelligence that can't be captured by a blunt instrument like the SAT. I know that once he gets to Harvard he'll flourish, and if I need to pay someone off to get him in, so be it" - well, yeah. You see where I'm going with this.
In real life, I imagine there are some parents who have no illusions about how smart or capable their children are, and are just using every exploit they can think of to get their kids into top universities they never could on their own merit, including specious requests for accommodations for disabilities their children don't have. Nothing narcissistic about that – dishonest, yes; selfish, yes; burning the commons, yes; making it harder for the legitimately disabled to be taken seriously, yes – but not narcissistic.
But I agree with @gog that there are a nonzero amount of parents who really think their children are exceptionally intelligent in a way which, for some reason, never manifests in an SAT-legible form, and for which special accommodations are required so that it can express itself. That is narcissism.
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I recall reading an article a few years ago (I'll see if I can dig it out*) that claimed that the absolute number of black Americans with engineering degrees actually declined in the years after affirmative action in university admissions was introduced.
The reasoning was elegantly simple. Like it or not, everyone in a classroom setting is acutely aware of where they sit in the hierarchy of their peers when it comes to how effectively they are understanding the material: people at the top of the class know they are, people who are struggling know it, people who are getting by know it. If you're a mediocre student in a mediocre school, you'll be doing okay: if you move that mediocre student into an elite school, he will be struggling, almost by definition. Ask yourself who's more likely to drop out of an elite school: someone getting straight As with ease, or someone barely scraping by with Ds?
This article argued that affirmative action in university admissions essentially migrated a huge number of mediocre students out of mid-tier colleges (in which their skill level would have matched the content they were expected to master, at the pace they were expected to master it) and into elite Ivy League colleges (in which they were bound to be near the bottom of the classroom distribution: if they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have needed affirmative action to get in). Faced with the demoralising prospect of always being near the bottom of the class, far more of these students dropped out before completing their degree, when compared to an earlier cohort of black students who attended mid-tier colleges. I don't know about you, but I think going to a mid-tier college and getting a degree is more impressive than going to Yale and dropping out after a year because you can't hack it.
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out with receiving a degree.
You're correct that getting the skills and the credentials is only one reason people go to college, end networking opportunities and so on are also a big part of it. But if you're doing a four-year degree and you drop out one year in, you'll have max one-quarter the networking opportunities that someone who completes their degree will have, so it may end up being a waste of your time anyway.
*I'm not sure if this is the article I was thinking of, but it makes the same general argument.
I think the overall point here is good, but that it only misses the magic “civilization is fucked” sauce.
In the 1970s, the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking didn’t exist. Even elite colleges were at least somewhat more likely to cut loose the lowest performers. But now, thanks to the wonders of journamalism, graduation rate is the single most gameable factor in maintaining school prestige.
42% of the score is strictly about graduation rates.
Harvard has a 98% graduation rate and the most common grade is an A. These kids are not going to drop out like a merely above-average black engineer might have in 1975. They don’t even know to be ashamed, and the college will do everything it can to prevent them from feeling shame.
We are not prepared for the stunningly brave world’s first Down Syndrome judge.
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They are delusional.
It’s only rational and not inculcating narcissism if you admit to yourself that you are gaming the system. Remember that I’m talking about high school, which affects many more students at more critical ages. These parents and their kids really believe that the kid is really smart even though there is no evidence this. They handwave the lack of evidence, and teach the kid to handwave it, because schools are there to say “don’t worry about actions, we will affirm your kid’s identity (that you, the parent, picked for him, usually as a projection of your own) by giving him extra equal treatment.” So you have all these vectors adding up to “your actions have nothing to do with who you are.” You can dispute whether that is really so bad, but you can’t dispute that it’s the implicit (and often explicit) message of all this.
Universities go along with it because of stuff like human rights law. I didn’t think that was controversial.
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