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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
Edit: typo
I have trouble sympathizing with any of this. An institution's prestige comes from the people that compose it. If you're competent, the institution doesn't grant you prestige, it leeches off you to obtain prestige. If you're useless, it is the institution that grants you prestige (at the expense of its own reputation).
Take James Watson. He recently had all his stickers revoked by the "status-granting institutions" he was a member of for being a bad man and saying mean things. Guess what? I cannot name a single one of those institutions off the top of my head. But you know what name I do remember? James Watson.
The way you respond to an institution not accepting you or granting you status is just to go succeed anyway. Then the institution will suffer the reputational damage of looking like a clown for rejecting you. What you definitely should not do is fail at life and then cry publicly that the institution rejected you, because that vindicates their rejection! You are literally granting status to the institution by telling everyone they correctly rejected a failure! If you fail, at least be quiet about it, so the institution doesn't get the status boost.
This is especially accented when you consider how many successful people abandon status-granting institutions of their own will. Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and apparently thought it was a waste of time, so he left. This makes Harvard suffer reputational damage (though I suppose they get credit for accepting him in the first place. But still, it's at least nominally supposed to be a school, which, ya know, is supposed to be telling you the Secrets of the Universe you need to succeed. If you just leave and succeed anyway, obviously none of those secrets were necessary). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also dropouts.
"Oh, well you're just choosing S-tier examples," you retort. "For regular humans, the world doesn't work like this." Ah, but check this out:
So no, it's not just S-tier exceptions. Competent people do not need institutional blessing. Only the incompetent do.
This even plays out in the finances of institutions. If you're smart, you get scholarships to attend university--they pay you to go there! Why would someone pay you to teach you the secrets of the universe? Well, they're not. They anticipate you're going to be successful anyway, and so they pay you a bribe to waste some time with them so they can act like they took some part in it. For all the people that they don't anticipate will be successful, they charge tuition. This reputational laundering is, quite literally, the business model.
This is true, but goes too far. Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.
It is the case though that pushing people out of the high-status established sinecures can lead to good results in the long term, as long as the new shoots are allowed to grow.
This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.
And yes, I do concede that universities have access to funding. But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense. Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. There's far more money than there is talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.
Funny you mention that:
courtlistener here.
The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level.
UC, as a specific example, gets several billion, as in starting with a B dollars in federal funding per year for research alone. When UC throws money at a complete scam, or has its staff or students commit overt fraud, these are genuinely nutpicks.
By contrast, Peter Thiel could, if he liquidated his entire fortune, do that perhaps for four years. Not, you know, in reality, but if we replace economics with a frictionless spherical cow, it's kinda close.
In the real world, his foundation gives out less than five million per year, and I don't say that as a criticism. I couldn't quickly find out his stake in Substrate, the chip scam you mention, but it's probably not a large portion of the 100m USD that Substrate has been dick-waving as its seed fund. This is Thiel's Solyndra, perhaps! (Wasn't Solyndra 500m+ USD in government-supported loans?) This is Thiel's A123 Systems!
Actually, it's worse than even that: a lot of the evaluation protocols have been absolutely braincored themselves. I can't give the full rant without self-doxxing, but suffice it to say actually interesting with these groups seriously will turn your stomach.
So the real answer is that a successful buyer must have a solution to reliably cut through all of this mess and evaluate decisions several orders of magnitude more reliably than government funding, or a successful seller have so clear a product and vision - and marketing capabilities and acceptable presentation and everything else - as to resolve all of those issues for them.
Otherwise, it's a game of dice.
I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.
Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.
Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.
Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.
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