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Notes -
On The Studied Irrelevance of Indian Schools
A note: this essay began its life as a reply to the wider discussion about Freddie deBoer and his god-awful takes on disciplinary standards inside schools downthread. I followed the link, encountered the paywall at speed. My prose went completely off track, sprawled out of control, and I've given it standalone status.
I would be more upset about all this if I believed my future kids stood to benefit from schooling. I cannot rule that out entirely, but I do not intend to start a college fund on their behalf unless the next five to ten years deviate sharply from my expectations. That isn't the same thing as not saving money on their behalf, which I absolutely do. Remember, money is fungible, and can be exchanged for goods and services.
I do not live in the States either, though some of these concerns map onto the British system, as dim as my understanding of that system happens to be.
My experience with the Indian education system, which I have more familiarity with than I would have wished, has left me with what I'd call a hot-take if most people back home wouldn't tacitly or vocally agree with me.
Bluntly: the schools you attend before college did not really matter. A prestigious name-brand private school could be expected to give you a marginally better education, but most parents who choose them are buying prestige and peer composition. The middle class and above does not send its kids to a government-run school if they can help it. The students at government schools are not particularly awful or ill-behaved, and we don't have the disciplinary problems Western schools deal with. Government schools are grossly under-resourced, and they serve a population whose parents cannot afford the parallel education system. Your kids would come out of it with an inferior social network, worse English, and a sense of shame. It's almost unheard of to pick one if you can afford better, even if that accordance requires severe tightening of physical or financial belts.
Why? The real answer is that nobody expects the teachers to actually teach you much in class. Including the teachers themselves. I am being serious about that. Even the best teachers at the prestigious school I attended knew, with the placid certainty of a thermodynamic law, that their star pupils and everyone else would be attending private coaching sessions outside school hours.
That's what you have to understand to make sense of anything that follows. School is the credentialing and networking layer. Coaching is the education layer. The two have been functionally decoupled for decades, and the entirety of Indian society organizes itself around the assumption.
You want numbers? I've got numbers. India's private coaching industry was about Rs 58,000 crore (about $7 billion) in revenue as of 2022, with projections to hit Rs 1.3 lakh crore (about $16 billion) by 2028. That's a parallel education system roughly the scale of a respectable national economy. In a country with around 250 million students in K-12, comprising almost 25% of the world's school-going children, that represents a lot of household income diverted from other purposes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 7.5 million students are enrolled in formal coaching at any given moment, with Kota alone drawing more than 200,000 annually.
The terminus, the thing all this preparation is for, is a small handful of murderously selective exams. 1.4 million students sit JEE Main each year for entrance to engineering colleges, of whom roughly 250,000 qualify for JEE Advanced, of whom around 17,000 actually get into one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology. The Computer Science seats at IIT Bombay close out around rank 60-70 in the country. Roughly one in a hundred thousand students gets a CSE seat at IIT Bombay. NEET, the medical-school entrance, runs on comparable arithmetic: over 2.3 million students sit the test annually for around 110,000 MBBS seats, of which fewer than 60,000 are at the more affordable government colleges. Harvard's acceptance rates are only slightly lower than the odds of getting any medical seats in India.
This is what your kid is competing for, and this is why your kid is in coaching from age fourteen, or twelve, or ten, or, occasionally, five.
I have my own theory about why parental coaching enrollment ages keep dropping. It's not a particularly original one, since it reduces to the logic of any arms race. If the median competitor starts at twelve, the marginal advantage of starting at ten is large. Once enough people start at ten, the advantage shifts to eight. There is no obvious floor, until we've reached toddlers still crawling there. ThePrint recently profiled a five-year-old in Jaipur who attends two hours of tuition after a five-hour school day, carrying eleven books in his bag. His mother has already decided he will be a doctor. He might struggle to count to thirty. I strongly suspect that we won't be recruiting doctors by the time he turns twenty.
Back to the school itself. Why don't the teachers care?
Several reasons, layered on top of each other, mutually reinforcing.
The first is selection. A physics or biology teacher actually good at teaching physics or biology can run their own coaching center. This pays better by a significant multiple and selects for higher-functioning students who actually want to learn. The teachers who stay in regular schools are typically the ones who cannot, or will not, make that jump. A few of my schoolteachers moonlighted as coaches on weekends, and the fact that they could not sustain it full-time tells you where they stood in the talent pyramid. The very best teachers I encountered were either independent coaches or worked at the apex coaching institutes.
The second reason is incentive. Schoolteachers are paid the same whether their students learn or do not. A coaching center operates on something closer to a results-based payoff structure. Parents pay a coaching center for performance on entrance exams, and they will pull their kid out and switch institutes if results are bad. It's much harder for the school to lose your tuition this way, because admission to a desirable school is itself a scarce good. Parents pay for the brand and for the peers. They do not pay for instruction. They pay out the nose for that elsewhere.
The third reason is information. Everyone in the system knows everyone else knows. The teachers know the students are getting taught elsewhere. The students know the teachers know. The parents know everyone knows. School ends up being an attendance requirement, a social environment, and a credentialing function. Nobody with their a functional frontal lobe mistakes it for the place where the learning happens.
Imagine this scenario: you're an Indian parent, and dear Ramesh (I had to pick a maximally stereotypical name, because my skin color allows me to get away with it) can't solve the Riemann hypothesis. He can't even prove the transcendental nature of pi! You accost his school teacher, and harangue him on the deficiency of his didactic approach. He is genuinely shocked. “But madam, I gave him the homework exercises. I told him it'll come on the test. I scribbled hastily on the blackboard and rapped knuckles, including his. I made sure nobody was snoring in class, or using their phone. What more can you expect of me?” You deflate, and feel suitably chagrined. You are overcome with shame, you grab Ramesh by the wrist and drag him off to whatever sprawling network of coaching centers is in vogue today. I haven't quite kept up.
The end result is a level of self-aware double-bookkeeping that I do not think most Western observers fully grasp. When you ask an Indian student "did you learn this in school?" they will laugh, albeit internally. The real answer is that they learned it in their evening coaching, with a private tutor, or by self-studying their books.
The coaching layer functioned as its own form of tracking. The smarter, harder-working students would study on their own or get more intensive and dedicated tutoring. The smart but constitutionally lazy ones, like me, attended too, probably with worse results. My ADHD was at the time unacknowledged and unmedicated, which I now realize accounts for considerably more of my misery than I appreciated at the time. Lucky for me, my parents ensured I had 1:1 private tutoring for most subjects for most of my life. It's hard(er) to daydream or procrastinate when someone is watching you like a hawk for two consecutive hours. Thanks, mom and dad? I suppose it worked.
There was also more explicit tracking, which I expect that American educators would find appalling. The duller kids got diverted into the humanities by 8th or 10th grade. Kids from mercantile backgrounds who wanted to stay in the family business opted into commerce. The would-be engineers, doctors, and professionals took the science track, with some discretion over whether to include biology, programming, and so on. Maths, physics, and chemistry were core and immutable. English literature and a native language rounded things out. I'd like to claim I did History and Geography until 12th grade, but it has been long enough that I genuinely cannot remember. On reflection, the answer is probably yes.
I have younger cousins, and I vicariously observed a rather interesting trend through them. An increasing fraction of Indian parents have recalibrated on the importance of sending their kids to the “best” schools, or at least have decided that the return on investment isn't worth it. So it went with them. They moved, around 10th grade, to a “worse” school. Why? Because that institute had subtly advertised that it did not give a hoot about in-person attendance metrics or regular grades. The understanding was that the students enrolled only as a legal formality, they were expected, even encouraged to not show up to class and instead spend that time studying on their own or attending private coaching. A remarkable innovation, really. I wish it had been around in my time. I'm surprised it took so long to show up, that's what every incentive leant towards.
After high school: well, bud, better give the college entrance exams your best shot. Your future hinges on them. For the sufficiently wealthy, paying out to put your kid in a private institution was an option, though it came with a degree of stigma. Everyone knew that the kid who got into a government-run engineering college like an IIT had more intellectual horsepower than the best private alternatives. I will set aside the affirmative action issue, partly because I do not want this essay to be about that, and partly because anything I say about it will infuriate someone. Same went for medical schools, law schools, business schools, the entire prestige hierarchy. Government meritocratic top-tier sat at the apex, followed by a long tail of private institutions of variable quality, some genuinely excellent and some basically diploma factories.
The dimmer kids? Too bad. Barring their parents, nobody expected much of them. Did they learn anything in class? Who cares. Did they learn anything from the extra coaching? If the answer was no, that was on them.
I should admit I do not have great visibility into what happens to the genuinely subpar in academic terms. Even the dullest tools in my school shed came from reasonable wealth. They probably had a sinecure waiting for them in a family business, a comfortable middle-management slot somewhere, or some equivalent arrangement. The default outcome for those not quite so lucky is probably a dead-end job and a long slog. You cannot expect better from a poorer nation. They manage. They have to, because there are hundreds of millions of them.
Disciplinary measures were far stricter than in the West. Expulsion for unruly behavior was a rare but real possibility. If you were a bad student, you had better be a well-behaved one while lessons were happening. I’m just about old enough to remember going from corporal punishment being the norm to mostly frowned upon. Mostly. The legality of it was never the primary concern for anyone involved, including the parents who knew it was happening and either silently approved or tolerated it as the cost of having their kid in a serious institution.
Reading the Freddie deBoer discourse from a distance, I am consumed with cynicism, mostly because I perceive it as charitably misplaced idealism. The Western debate around discipline often proceeds as though the alternatives are "strict enforcement with consequences" versus "permissive chaos," and we are arguing about which moral failure to commit. After serving time inside the Indian system, I observed that strict discipline turns out to be the easy part. It isn't hard to produce a quiet, orderly classroom through any number of methods, some humane and some less so. The hard question is what happens inside that quiet, orderly classroom. The answer in India is: surprisingly little, by design, or by tacit acceptance.
Do I think this is a good thing, something to advocate for? Oh god no. I find it depressing. I'd like to claim that better schooling inside the schools would help, but surely you've understood that this is another Red Queen race right? You run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and making everyone faster doesn't change the composition of those making a podium finish.
Kota, the city in Rajasthan that has long been India's largest coaching hub, makes the Indian news with depressing regularity because of student suicide. A handful a month, from memory. There would be more, if they weren't incredibly strict about preventing them. If you imagine they achieve this by improving living standards or reducing the load? There's no hope for a quokka like you. They just make it harder to kill yourself, including through the kind of anti-suicide measures usually seen only in in-patient psychiatric wards, combined with draconian surveillance. The students are teenagers, sent away from home to live in hostels and crammers, with the expectation that they will spend two years of their lives doing nothing but preparing for one exam. Most of them will fail. A small number will pass and go on to lives of unevenly distributed satisfaction. The wager their parents made on them, financial and emotional, will turn out to have been a bad one in the median case. They were never going to be in the top one percent. Almost nobody is. The maths doesn't math.
If I had to place this in wider context: imagine something halfway between the laissez-faire approach of the West and the all-consuming grind of East Asia. Thankfully it was not quite that bad. I am not fond of the system at all. It almost chewed me up and didn't quite spit me out again, and the only affirmative defense I can make of it is that the chewing has not stopped since I left, despite my having moved far, far away. It is just not as bad as it could be, which I say while noting that explaining why sacrifices were made to Moloch is a different exercise from condoning the practice or wishing it to perpetuate into the future. We burn our children to prepare them for the flames ahead. The fires do not really cool off once you are out the other side. The forms of suffering reorganize themselves around your changing life circumstances, and that is roughly the most many of us can hope for.
What I can say is that I had some slack. I had opportunities to be a child rather than meat slurry waiting to be packed into a mold. The front-loading of suffering arguably bought me optionality for the future, though I am no longer fully confident this is true. Well, it's the thought that counts.
As someone who was on the local equivalent of a pre-med track, I might have spent between two and four hours after a full school day with private tutors, but the real pressure ramped only up after 10th grade. I can't blame my parents for that either. They weren't tigers. They were on the slightly upper end of strict by upper-middle-class Indian standards, largely because they had gone through the whole ordeal themselves and knew the value of higher education in a country where higher education is the one ticket out of a great many situations. I would do the same with my kids if I had to. I do not expect to have to. If I have kids, I hope they grow up somewhere the pressure is not nearly as bad.
Then again, it is hardly that much better in the West. An aspiring American doctor better start working on extracurriculars well before finishing high school. In the US, even more years of their limited life get spent in pre-med coursework, after which they apply to medical schools that admit a small fraction of applicants and that publicly weight non-academic considerations heavily. All you have done is trade the legible, harder-to-fake signal of excellent grades for excellent grades plus sob stories about digging wells in Africa, plus the presidency of the Underwater Basket Weaving Society, with an added interest in supporting weavers from under-represented minorities, which should help look past the uncomfortable fact that you yourself are not an under-represented minority.
The Indian system is more legible and crueler about it; the American system is less legible and crueler about hiding it. I'd have to be a touch daft to claim that the former is superior to the latter, I know which one I'd choose for my kids, warts and all.
It could be worse! South Korea has roughly 75% of students enrolled in around 100,000 cram schools nationwide, and Japan has over 65% of ninth-graders attending juku. India's coaching enrollment is enormous in absolute terms but smaller as a share of total students, largely because most Indian families simply can't afford the fees. Our middle class might out mass the entirety of the United States (albeit not in a literal weighing setup; gotta wait for the Ozempic to kick in to make that a fair fight), but there are a lot of poor people here. They never had a chance.
There are games where the winning move is not to play. Those Indians should consider themselves lucky that they can't afford to play them, at such a scale. Somehow, I doubt they'd feel comforted if I were to tell them that. In fact, I strongly suspect that they'd get angry at me.
At the end of the day, schools (or education in general) are a selection device for a tiny number of slots in professions that pay disproportionately well in societies where most professions do not pay nearly as well. As long as those differentials hold, you can expect parents to pour everything they have into making sure their kids end up on the right side of the divide.
Good thing all of it is about to be moot anyway. I am writing this in 2026, after all, and you know what I expect of the near future. I will not belabor the point. Anyone reading this knows what I am referring to. If you don't, well, you have other things to worry about than your kid's MCAT score, and this essay is not the place to acquaint you with them.
God. It sucks to grow up and realize that your parents, despite their flaws, loved you and wanted what was best for you. That the pressure they put you through, or the pain they expected you to endure, was for your own good. Positive expected value, at minimum.
It would be easy to rail at my parents. I have, on bad days, indulged the temptation. I would have done the same in their shoes, however, and I would have hoped my kids forgave me for it later. The forgiveness comes easy now, long after I have passed the stage of needing my parents to shove me out of the nest, and discovered the entirely different qualia of suffering that is charting your own path while holding yourself accountable. I am told that some people find this easy. Good for them. I will settle for prescription stimulants and a regularly-examined internalization of parental expectations, which turn out to be remarkably portable and follow me wherever I go, whether I want them to or not.
I do not much like that fraud, Freud, but this is classic super-ego stuff. Where’s my suspiciously penis-shaped cigar? I could use a smoke after letting all of that out. Or, given the times, at least a good puff on a vape.
I considered bringing up the issue of the caste system and why it triggers such a visceral resction in a lot of Westerners in last week's thread on Indian immigration but I felt it might come across as uncharitable or needlessly antagonistic. But now that the topic has come up again I might as well say my peice.
All the talk of Indian cultural and genetic diversity is a distraction from the root issue that there are really only two sorts of immigrants from the subcontinent.
The first sort is people like yourself and other users here who see the caste system as simply "natural" and "correct". (Note that I am purposefully side-stepping the question of whether it is "good"). Thier reasons for leaving the subcontinent and coming to the West are ultimately opportunitistic, they're chasing a better job or a better school that they can leverage to raise thier status amongst thier peers back home.
The second sort are the ones who leave the subcontinent explicitly to escape the system.
Ive known plenty of both and have always found the latter far more amenable to work with than the former because as a rule they work harder and are far more grateful for the opportunities presented to them.
Americans love an Apu. What they hate is having thier good will exploited by people who not only do not share thier values, but who actively look down thier noses at those values and the people who hold them.
To be very brief: the fuck?
No, seriously, I invite you to find any evidence of me arguing that the caste system is "natural" and "correct". Please. Take all the time you need.
I am incredibly impressed by the sheer chutzpah on display here. Apparently I've moved to the UK, and want to move to the States to "raise thier status amongst thier peers back home"? That's news to me. I should take notes.
Anyone who knows me would find your accusations laughable. Anyone who doesn't know me should at least check before saying something this remarkably, fractally incorrect.
It's astounding that you can read that whole-ass essay and decide that this isn't a working description of me. I really want to know the chain of logic that lead you to that conclusion.
To be painfully specific:
It would be too much to hope for an apology from you, so I'll settle for receipts.
I agree that this is a factor, but I do find it funny how many Indians I know who are in the 'upper middle caste' and will go absolutely berserk about scheduled castes and whatnot taking their opportunities inside India. Then three breaths later will go on about how the Western society they moved to is biased against them and that white people should roll over and move out the way since they've had it so fantastic for so long. Which isn't necessarily a massive contingent of people, I just had a housemate for a year in Australia who was the daughter of an Indian Air Force General and granddaughter of some mid-tier nobility who owned 10 cinemas throughout Hyderabad, and would go on about this stuff endlessly. Especially galling when the majority of anglo-Australians she was deriding as privileged were multi-generational peasant/working-class descent.
It's broadly funny to me how a lot of Indian migrants have an incredibly-honed awareness of how to play bureaucratic affirmative action games (since they need to be great at them to get anywhere inside India, and if I were in their position I'd 100% do the same thing), are critical of how big they are inside India and then immediately try to install themselves as a scheduled caste in the West. Which I'm not accusing you specifically of doing, but I just find it endlessly amusing.
This is incorrect, I'm afraid. You can't use that kind of identity politics to get ahead the way you can in the States. When do you get the tangible benefits in the form of reservations and quotas for being lower caste? When you have a certificate from the government that says your ancestors were lower caste.
Can you get a fake one? Technically yes, but you'd be spending a lot of money on bribes, and you'd be rather screwed if you were caught. I don't know anyone who did this, though I'm sure it does happen (as I always say, India is a big country, with many Indians).
No, the sad reality of it is that the kind of person you spoke to learned to play that game in the States, or were intelligent and unprincipled enough to be well prepared before they got there.
I mean more in the sense that 'my average Indian friend has a way-keener understanding of admission/job hunting to be a game that you need to play to eke every possible point out of due to the system in place in India' than necessarily 'they were able to squeeze stuff into existence inside of India on the basis of caste'. I remember seeing my Hyderabadi helping another friend apply for jobs in Australia, and the sheer incisive effort they put into optimizing every part of the resume and process for somebody who barely spoke English was impressive, but also did a huge amount to explain to me why Indians are very good jobgetters
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Like i said, i initially held my tongue because i understood how my statement could be read as uncharitable or antagonistic. It was not my intention to offend you, and if did i apologize.
That said, can you see how someone might come away from the your post with the impression that you believe that demographics determine individual outcomes more than quality of schooling? If so, do you understand how such a claim is going to be read by a lot of Americans?
That is an utter non-apology after serious, unfounded accusations.
"It was not my intention to offend you, and if did i apologize." Your intent is not my primary concern. The factuality (or lack thereof) of what you said about me is. An acknowledgement that your accusations are baseless would be an improvement. If you wish to persist in that mischaracterization, then provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory it is. In this case, a simple search on the index for this site should suffice.
I am not sure what linking to an ancient press release from GW Bush is supposed to help with. It's a 2006 address about Republican outreach to African American voters, the Voting Rights Act, HBCU funding, and the legacy of slavery. It does not mention Indian immigrants, the caste system, or any framework for distinguishing "good" from "opportunistic" immigrants.
It certainly doesn't help with misrepresenting me as having made claims I have literally never made, and then not walking them back.
Look around, my man. Do you see any of the other Americans in this forum full of Americans accusing me of endorsing the Indian caste system? No? Not surprising at all.
You have the gall to make a clear Motte-and-Bailey argument on the Motte? You didn't "intend" to be offensive, but 'oh, some readers might come away with that impression'. I wasn't born yesterday.
Would you agree with the statement that demographic factors determine individual outcomes more than quality of schooling?
If so, i would argue that my accusations are far from baseless.
Please recall that i very purposefully side stepped the question of whether the caste system was "good", to focus on whether it was a "correct" or "natural" way to organize society. I never claimed you liked or "endorsed" it. Please also recall that in that in the line I quoted you implied that the US also has a caste system and that it is simply less legible.
The link was to George Bush's famous speech about "the bigotry of low expectations", which is the first thing that is going to come to a lot of Americans' minds if when they hear someone trying to argue that some demographics are just bad at stuff.
You've offered three rationales for the original accusations in three consecutive replies. First they stood on their own. When I asked for evidence, none came. Then it became "some readers might come away with that impression," which is the motte-and-bailey I already called you on. Now: if I agree to a proposition you've just invented, the accusations were "far from baseless."
This is what bad faith looks like when it's trying oh-so-hard to stay within the realm of what won't be moderated on this forum. Impressive work, law school must have helped.
Pick a position. Defend it properly. Or retract. Don't waste my time by manufacturing new justifications until one of them sticks.
The "demographic factors determine individual outcomes" question is empirical, and the real answer is "it depends." For caste-correlated outcomes in India specifically, I think genetics likely plays some role. I said so openly upthread. That is a descriptive claim about how the world is. Endorsing caste as "natural" and "correct" is a prescriptive claim about how the world should be. These are not the same thing and you're not getting away with laundering one into the other through sleight of hand.
You now want credit for "very purposefully side stepping" whether caste is good, in order to focus on whether it's "correct" or "natural." Please examine what you've just said. "Correct" is straightforwardly normative. "Natural," deployed in defense of a social arrangement under attack, is also normative. You picked loaded words, fired them at me, and are now claiming a neutral reading was always available. Nope.
You're claiming I implied "the US also has a caste system." That paragraph is about American pre-med admissions and the difference between rank-ordered exam grinds and "holistic" admissions weighted with extracurriculars. The "it" in "more legible and crueler about it" refers to the selection function of education, which I had just spent several thousand words describing. Reading "caste" into a sentence about MCAT prep is a failure of your reading comprehension. It does even worse as an argument.
You found a phrase that sounded adjacent to something you wanted to say, linked it without explanation, and are now reverse-engineering a rationale rather than concede the link wasn't doing what you needed it to.
Yeah. Right. Being against Indian affirmative action or the US focus on "holistic" admission criteria is "the soft bigotry of low expectations". Sorry, I'd say it's the opposite. Eschewing explicit AA or putting primacy on standardized testing, without lowering the bar for certain demographics? That is called having the same expectations of everyone. Words have meanings, whether you like them or not.
Now, I specify (with rapidly diminishing patience): you made specific claims about my views and my motivations. That I see caste as "natural" and "correct." That my emigration is opportunistic. That I am chasing status among peers back home. Three replies in, you have produced zero quotes from me supporting any of these and have shifted the goalposts twice without retracting an inch. Substantiate the claims with what I actually wrote, or withdraw them. I am not here to argue whichever question you'd prefer to be answering instead.
I am not offering you different rationales I am trying to walk you through a chain of reasoning step by step, link by link.
When taken together, your comments in @Gaashk's thread on Freddie DeBoer and your top level post here appear to be arguing that what school you go to and how well you do in it doesn't really matter, and that instead we (as society) should pay more attention to demographic factors.
The obvious question that comes to mind is "Why pay attention to demographic factors at all?" the obvious answer that comes to mind is "As a means of predicting (and thus potentially manipulate) individual outcomes".
Now If "demographic factors determine individual outcomes" And "we want to predict (or potentially manipulate) individual outcomes" Than "It is rational to discriminate on the basis of such factors".
If "It is rational to discriminate on the basis of demographic factors" Than We have just established the "correctness" of instituting some sort of demographic caste system from first principles.
Again, please note that at no point have I made any statement regarding whether said system is "Good" "Moral" "Just" or even "Desirable". "Correct" is not a normative word, it is a descriptive one. If I wanted to make a normative statement I would not be using words like "Correct" and "Incorrect" I would be using words like "Right" and "Wrong".
Is there a step in the above chain of logic that you feel is in error? If so, which step?
Meanwhile "The Bigotry of Low Expectations" isn't something that I just pulled out of a hat. It's been a recurring GoP talking point for over a decade. It is most commonly deployed in opposition to Affirmative Action, and declining educational standards. The "bigotry" in question being the unstated assumption that some demographics simply can not compete on a level playing field. Ask @FCfromSSC if you don't believe me.
Blue Team: Students today just don't have the attention spans to read the classics, we need to revise our expectations.
Red Team: Students today would be able to read the classics just fine if you actually tried teaching them to read.
You made specific factual claims about my views and motivations across four replies now. You have produced no quotes from me supporting any of them. The syllogism you've finally offered, even if it worked, would not establish that I "see caste as natural and correct," that my emigration is "opportunistic," or that I'm "chasing status among peers back home." Those were the accusations. They remain unsubstantiated.
Even granting some form of statistical discrimination as efficient on some specific measure, a caste system is not just any discrimination.
Why? Because it's hereditary, hierarchical, totalizing across social, economic, marital, and religious domains, and self-perpetuating across generations independent of individual merit. That is literally what caste means.
You're skipped roughly the entire content of what makes a caste system a caste system, and now you're calling the missing steps "from first principles." Perhaps you'd like to examine my debate with @2rafa where I advocate for meritocracy as pure as can be feasible? I'd like to see you reconcile that with accusations of casteism. Group differences, even if real, require additional values being injected to decide what to do about them. Balanced standardized testing would be the strongest form of Bayesian evidence against any accusations of inferiority wrt background. I'm all for it.
"Correct" not being normative? Pure sophistry, poor sophistry. Calling a social arrangement "correct" is necessarily a judgment that it is a proper way to organize society. There is no descriptive sense in which a social system itself can be "correct" or "incorrect." You can describe whether it exists, whether it produces certain outcomes, whether participants endorse it. The moment you call the system itself "correct," you have endorsed it as proper. And worse? This isn't just something you're doing yourself, it's something you've accused me of doing.
I'm out. I've asked for receipts multiple times. You've produced none, and have instead built impressively rickety scaffolding around the original claims while refusing to retract a word of them. Anyone reading this thread can decide for themselves what that pattern indicates. I have an exam to study for.
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The irony comes through in the public/state schools not being any good, so everyone who can goes private (grinds/tutoring) then it flips to the public/state universities are the best of the best (because of rigorous competition for places) and private is an admission you were too dim to get into public university.
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I don't think you've made a good case that what college you go to really matters, at least in th US. The US isn't hiding the correlation between what school you go to and your success....it just isn't a very strong correlation. I can't speak for other countries, but look at congress and you'll see state schools galore. There's a correlation, but non-Americans don't seem to realize that in America the schools aren't the selection process in America. Koreans spend a gajillion hours and bajillion dollars on studying because if you don't pass the test to get into a chaebol you're shit out of luck. But if you pass you can get a job and not produce anything as long as you work 60 hours a week and look like you work. Try that in America and see how it goes. Part of this is culture--confucian culture has instilled that testing is the best way to determine ability for more than a millennium--but part of it is labor law. If it's hard to fire someone it's almost impossible to make a meritocratic labor market. Instead you try really hard to weed out anyone who isn't willing to waste years of their lives studying for something very arbitrary. Does it work? No. Do you have another choice? Also no.
Honestly, I would guess that what grade school you go to does a much better job building up your intuition for class markers and job opportunities than university. Yeah, the diversity hire at Harvard is getting a good chance, but they'll have a lot harder time fitting in at Anthropic or a fintech firm than the guy who was raised in that culture. Harvard is a better selection marker, but that's not the same as doing a better job at forming someone into the type of person who is successful. Instead, it's weeding out the people who can't succeed.
I don't think I've said much, if anything, on that topic? That simply isn't an argument I've made. As far as I can tell, it's not even one I've made by implication.
All I have said is that the college you go to matters a great deal more in India, which really is true. That's the real reason everyone goes crazy trying to put their children into the better ones.
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I have a lot of thoughts on this. I tried to connect them but I don't think they tie up neatly. So first I think you have way to much of an Asian perspective on Western education and are missing a few key things.
But the issue is Western classrooms and Western pedagogy are are not doing that. You may say it's easy and for sure it is but if teachers are not allowed to use the methods that would produce that and are taught that doing so is wrong in teachers colleges, then it doesn't matter how easy it is. There are a whole bunch of factors that prevent Western teachers from establishing discipline in classrooms so until that is fixed it doesn't matter what teachers do. And prior to the collapse of discipline and tracking and all the things that Freddie DeBoer complains about there was quite a bit of learning going on in Western classrooms. AP courses are almost exactly what you describe for tutoring centers. They are advanced classes which give college credit and have an Exam at the end so there is an objective measure for the teacher.
And on that topic I think you are way off on tutoring centers. As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, they are not selecting for better teachers simply more entrepreneurial ones. The fact is that virtually any teacher except the bottom 10% will be much more effective in a tutoring center environment. Because of smaller class sizes, often even one on one tutoring, and a more motivated student and parent body. Regardless managing the constant shifting schedules of working in a tutoring center is very different then A school. Additionally while school admins are often apathetic bureaucrats training center admins are often just after the bottom dollar and have no particular concern for education
I think this is a function of the yawning chasm of Indian society in general, you could end up a shipbreaker or something equally horrible, and Asian education style in general. America. while the red queen race exists it's much less of an all or nothing proposition. Virtually any above average American can be a doctor. Don't have good grades in high school go to community college. Don't have good college grades do a post bac. Don't have money for school join the military as a medic get healthcare experience and a full ride. Still have only an ok application apply for DO schools instead of MD. There's just so much more flexibility then an all or nothing exam that determines your entire future. I think another aspect is that in general it's much easier to make money in America then India. Kids who are just after the bottom line do an MBA or study computer science or hell start a plumbing business the entrepreneurship and opportunities make it much less of a win lose zero sum propostion.
Isn’t getting into med school in the US actually quite selective and requires a rat race ahead of time?
Of course you don’t have to be a doctor to be successful.
Yes but it's a lot more flexible and you can run it at your own pace. You could decide you want to be a doctor at 40 do a post-bacc and build an application. If all your med school applications get rejected you can strengthen your application and try again. It's selective but less zero sum because you can always improve and try again.
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I have little to say on the topic of the regulatory and cultural failures that prevent stricter discipline within Western classrooms. Which is why I didn't get into that topic. What can I add that someone here can't do better? This is more of a comparative analysis of a very different system, with minimal focus on discipline because classroom discipline isn't what makes that system what it is.
I don't think that selecting for entrepreneurial tendencies is mutually exclusive with selecting for better didactic skills. Quite the opposite. If you're a poor teacher, you are simply not going to be able to pull off the moves I've described.
Note that I went to a good school, whatever that means. High tuitions, teachers with stronger credentials, above average students to be taught. There was a massive gulf in skill and effectiveness between how they taught and what the better class of private tutors (including the ones with larger class sizes) demonstrated.
In fact, the best tutors had bigger classes. I remember cramming in 20 to a room for some of them, the main limit on class sizes beings the size of the room. Many of these private tutors taught from their homes! They physically couldn't fit in more students! 1:1 teaching was never their core concern, at best, they'd be more open to talking to individual students and clearing up idiosyncratic confusions or answering questions.
The ones who specialized in 1:1 tutoring at home (theirs, or the student's) were usually not as talented. If they were, they'd be organizing larger classes.
Even the comparison to AP lessons is somewhat misguided. The syllabus for normal schools and what gets tested on those college entrances exams are the same. The private tutors simply tend to teach it better. They put more effort into making things intuitive, they devote more time to teaching specific tricks. The teachers at even the best normal schools are phoning it in, even if they could technically go to such lengths. They don't, because they know that would be somewhere between pointless and redundant, for the better students, since they're going to private coaching anyway.
Remember, nobody cares about the dull ones. Their failures are on them. They may or may not go to the private lessons, but that's usually just their parents being unwilling to give up on them.
I agree with your later points. After all, I do know that you don't have to go to a top 1% or even top 5% institute in the States to have a good life or make a lot of money. Even a mediocre doctor makes a whole lot more than I do in the UK, let alone India. The competition is nowhere near as stiff to have a decent life in general.
But I think a lot of the reasons that modern American education fails is basically cultural. We don’t have a meritocratic culture. The closest thing we have to a meritocratic culture in America is actually select sports. The system rewards athletes who not only have talent, but those who work hard to develop that talent to high level. That system is the tryouts that athletes go through if they want to play. Nothing beyond the ability to play the game will get you on the team, and nothing but performance will get you on the field or court. Not good enough? You’re off the team.
Compare that to American education. In American education, you don’t have to do much work to “earn” a place. You don’t even get rewarded if you’re better than average. Advanced classes are often under threat because they are selective and not enough “disadvantaged students” get in. The law doesn’t mandate them, and if there’s a budget issue, advanced classes are often first to go. There’s no advantage given to tge child who is good at school, and they quite often end up bored and develop poor work ethics because they’re actually much smarter than the class is designed for, and thus they aren’t challenged, and can get good grades without having to work for them.
Minimal focus on academic achievement and discipline are a predictable result of a system designed primarily to warehouse kids in peer groups regardless of whether or not those kids are academically in the same league, have the same work ethics, or have parents who care about either issue. The parents who are trying to keep their kid chugging along despite the fact that he’s not achieving nor even trying to achieve don’t help creating the environment that rewards work and achievement. And since we elect school boards, those noisy parents mad that their children are going to fail (despite the fact that they don’t study and don’t understand the material) and demanding the standards be lowered.
The other problem is that colleges are not incentivized to be selective. All student loans are guaranteed, no matter what happens to the students after they graduate. This means admitting a kid who cannot read or do math at grade level (which is honestly a low bar) is not a problem. And since millions of relatively low achieving students can now go to college, the need to make sure that the kids graduating from high school are prepared for college or trades is really not there. They’ll graduate, continue their education and not be a problem for the school system they graduate from.
When no part of the system is punished when kids graduate incapable of doing anything productive, they don’t care if those kids achieve anything or learn the habits that make achievement possible. The school doesn’t lose anything if vast swathes of their graduates are economically useless. There are no “games” that the “team” must win to stay relevant. If they graduate an entire class of illiterates, the schools don’t close. They don’t lose anything. They still get to have the same structure. A baseball team that continues to place last will quickly fail.
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This is the place where I counter signal and make it known far and wide that I never had or needed any after school tutoring to get to where I am. The absolute numbers of people sitting these countrywide enterance exams is massive but 95%+ of them are abysmally bad, the real competition is within the top 2-3% and you'll know if you're in with a realistic shot well before test day. Otherwise you might as well be playing the lottery here, except that the lottery has better odds.
You were at Cambridge, where tutoring is a core part of the service.
I'm not seeing how it benefits the UK in practice, but graduates of elite British universities have received a more rigorous university education than graduates of elite American universities. I think Eton provides a more rigorous pre-University education than traditional-elite American prep schools, and I'm absolutely sure that Westminster and St Paul's provide a more rigorous education than Sidwell Friends and similar bougie private schools in Blue cities.
Fair point, perhaps my counter-signalling should instead be that I never had any tutoring before beginning my university education and then afterwards I only got what everyone else with me also got, I didn't have to do any "special" guided learning that me or my parents paid for to give me an edge.
Supervisions though are genuinely one of the things that make the experience unique and yes, I'll admit I wouldn't be as comfortable with my academic learning if I'd instead gotten the UK's bog standard university experience where classes have 15+ people on average instead of supos.
Absolutely agree on this. I've had the (mis)fortune to meet more than my fair share of US elite graduates through my job and otherwise and apart from the MIT grads none struck me as particularly impressive on average (this includes Harvard, Yale and perhaps surprisingly Stanford, but my Stanford sample size is low). All I'll say is I'd wager 60% of elite US students who major in what I studied would have likely failed our end of year exams and been thrown out (fun fact: effectively no resits, you get one shot; if you fail, you are out), this is not an exaggeration and the rest would mostly have gotten thirds or lower second class honours. I refer back to my post here on why I think the US higher education system for undergrad is fundamentally broken.
Didn't go to Eton but I can believe this, my Etonian friends (who made it to Oxbridge, so not an unbiased sample) were not merely more polished than the average in terms of social interactions but also tended to do better. Same for Westminster, Oundle and the Leys.
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From what I have seen, Westminster/St. Paul's will ask/soft-require students to do the kind of research papers you likely wouldn't see as assignments until a 200-level college class in the States, then submit them for prizes (one I recall hearing about was on the origins of state criminal prosecution as a concept in medieval England). This is on top of exams - all British schools are forced to teach heavily to the test, and the exams are extremely formulaic, but the essays they ask for are more complex than those generally asked of American high schoolers ("evaluate the arguments for and against this idea and come to a conclusion" rather than "argue for your position"). No idea about STEM, but basically I'd say that non-STEM students from top British schools come to uni roughly equivalent to a comparable American student who already has one year of college under his belt.
Tutoring is common among these kids in three broad categories: kids who aren't bright/focused enough, kids who want to study a subject not offered at their school or study more subjects than the school lets them take at once (after 16, British kids typically narrow down to 3/4 subjects), and kids looking at American universities taking American-specific tutoring like for the SAT. There are probably some tiger parents around but generally the Asian kids going to top British schools have much chiller families and assimilate into school culture well.
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Can you counter-signal by appending a string to every comment saying "I'm not self_made_human" please?
To be fair, I haven't needed any dedicated tutoring since med school either. Turns out that Ritalin can help my brain convert the horsepower to actual propulsion. At the cost of wearing out the transmission, but we all make sacrifices.
See, this is why we should've kept all the bots and such from rdrama. You could have made it so that people have to put "I'm not self_made_human" in their posts, and it would be extremely funny for 5 minutes or so. Worth!
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At some point, defenders of this form of meritocracy must ask themselves:
Is the occasional smart ‘poor’ kid [actually a middle class kid with tiger parents] who tries really hard getting an “elite” job really worth ruining the lives of tens of millions of children?
Why did you, the child of a doctor, have to work so hard to get the same job your father had and so would for fundamental genetic and cultural reasons likely also perform well at? Why did I have to work so hard to get into the same business as my father? And despite this, half the doctors I know come from medical families and half the people I work with also have or had a parent or both in finance. What a waste of everyone’s time.
This also has nothing to do with, as is sometimes mooted, the risk of socialism or the movement for workers rights (a product of 1890-1950, whereas popular PMC meritocracy is a product largely of 1985-present). The working classes cared about well paid jobs, working conditions, being able to buy a decent home, not about whether their kids could become investment bankers or ambassadors. If you speak to them today they still don’t really care about the latter, so it’s not even to placate them as some have suggested.
If I had to explain it, I’d say I think it’s about highly paid people wanting to justify to themselves that they got there fair and square. They are willing to hurt their own children for this, to feel like they operate in a “fair” system, or have helped create one. To me this has always felt particularly evil, and I use that word rarely.
I feel like you have this backwards. The point isn't to provide the occasional talented kid from a disadvantaged background (in our 2+ generations of total societal filtering), it's keeping the fail-sons out. In order to do this we must test people, which leads competition.
This is unavoidable. Having the talented compete isn't some grand tragedy, even if we probably should do our best to curb excessive competition and granular examination of talent. What is a tragedy is forcing way too many people to go to university for no reason, take on debt and either get a useless degree or not finish one.
You don’t need this to keep the failsons out. If we admitted all willing children of doctors to medical school they’d still have to pass all the exams, go through gruelling residency, become qualified, and maintain their license in the face of clinical negligence claims or complaints if they existed. If you’re nepotism-d into a trader or asset manager role and you lose your clients’ money, people aren’t going to want to do business with you. Jaden Smith’s acting career is not currently thriving.
Failsons reveal themselves in the natural course of life. And, of course, if they’re really failsons they’re unlikely to be motivated enough to complete medical or law school or even an undergraduate degree (or even high school) anyway, so the whole point is moot.
Im not tapping @faceh's sign, I'm slapping it like it owes me money.
Yeah, and in many ways this is a consequence of meritocracy, just another failed form of it. If we had the great-grandchildren of the people who ruled San Francisco and Chicago in 1930 in power now both places would likely be far better.
That's not meritocracy, that is credentialism.
Not at all. Chesa proves the hereditary principle. Bad egg parents created a bad egg son. This strengthens, rather than weakens, my argument, because the inverse is also true.
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Medschool isn't difficult, neither is studying finance. Barely anyone wash out of either and testing with bringing in less talented people show that it doesn't affect graduation rates much at all.
The point of filtering is that the eduction itself isn't difficult and evaluating results later often is. How much money are we going to allow these traders to lose? How many people should the doctors kill?
There are clearly other ways to avoid a competition arms race and this seems more like a fantasy for you to not have had to expend any effort in your youth, instead of meritocracy whipping you into usefulness.
I don't think this is true at all.
With respect to pure academic difficulty Medicine may not be the most difficult, but it does have pretty much the highest volume of content. Keeping up with years of punishing pace (often while doing multiple other things) is incredibly difficult. Once clinical years roll around you are doing things like rotations that could be over 80 hours a week while studying for an academic test, working weekends, pulling 24s and all kinds of other hellacious things.
That bit aside - the selection pressure for Med School is intense. The average MCAT score in an accepted individual corresponds to an 86th percentile. That's a phenomenal amount of filtering out. Once you get to school the drop out rate is pretty low - somewhere in the 3-5 percent range. That is with the intense selection pressures however.
Additionally a dirty secret is that schools will drag you to the finish line (maybe requiring extra years) knowing that doing so will leave you unable to match. Completion without advancement isn't really that, but it is part of the stat juking and realistically residency completion is a much better reflection of "washing out" or not. Advancing through to get your MD and then independent practice is a really different number, if you start with possibly the best reflection: "intention to be a doctor" to "finishing the path" then the completion percentage is probably under 20% or something else obscene.
Things are different in different countries.
In Sweden, medschool student absolutely aren't doing 80 hour weeks. They're working a lot, but the studies that have been done on the subject show that they're in the mid/high 40s, which is the highest of any major program, but certainly not 80. For contrast, finance students on average study less than 20 hours a week.
My suspicions mostly come from how greatly increasing access to medical school spots and providing other avenues for entry doesn't seem to affect graduation rates at all (or the people taking other entry routes having no worse graduation rates), as well as what my doctor friends have told me, some of whom transferred out of my major.
I don't disagree that being a doctor is difficult nor that getting a medical degree requires a lot of work. Medschool filters for diligence but you need more than that to be a good doctor, hence we need filtering, preferably beforehand. This isn't unique for medicine, most of higher education is a poor filter for both intelligence and conscientiousness (like finance for instance).
Sure other countries are different, the US is notorious - they should still be doing 24s at least though, no?
Those are effectively illegal in the entire EU, with very few exceptions.
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Then why not simply have Raven’s Progressive Matrices administered to every 10 year old in America and base every life path on that? The meritocrat defends the worst possible version of even his own idea.
Conscientiousness is as important, or even more important than IQ. The only working test we have for conscientiousness is a long track record of diligent work.
Furthermore, childhood iq tests don't have that good predictive power for adult IQ. You might get away with them if you do them post puberty but then we run right back into the issue of conscientiousness.
To be clear though, I support a tracking kids into wide categories with wide error bars, kind of like what they're doing in Germany.
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Equality. Most people, including the proletariat, and protected categories like women and minorities, do poorly on IQ tests. They can be smuggled into nice places under a big long education system through DEI. It also creates sinecures for them, like philosophy professor, high school teacher, or university administrator. All of this is at your expense as a smart person of course.
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Raw IQ as a ten year old does not really tell much about dilligence or attention to detail, which are at least as important for a lot of jobs.
I'd much rather have a concencious 115 IQ doctor than a 130 IQ doctor who doesn't care.
Raw intelligence is necessary for a lot of high-prestige jobs, but it's not sufficient.
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I'm seconding this for equivalents in the US. I don't know about conditions for bright working class Indians, I have no idea if they have a decent shot of making it into the middle class and having a decent life. I do know that truckers, nurses, teachers, tradesmen, cops, restaurant managers, accountants, paralegals, is not even scratching the surface of ways Americans can make a decent living with no rat race involved, and without exceptional talent. 'Meritocracy' in the US context mostly just makes childhoods worse.
I'd say they do. Med schools are full of students who come from not particularly well-off families. That ex of mine, who I lamented? Her dad was a minor clerk in a government post. Her mother was a housewife, who inherited his post when he died (that's the local approach to job security, they try and give the post to NOK if viable). Absolute middle of middle class by Indian standards, which means they lived in a small apartment and owned a rickety old car instead of a motorbike. She attended a significantly more reputable med school than I did, even if it wasn't the best of the best. Shame that my academic performance quickly eclipsed hers, and there's a reason I'm training in the UK and she's not. As much as she nearly ruined my life and drove me to near insanity, I loved her, and I mostly wish her well.
Anyway. She's a good representation of the typical med student in India. I'd be considered to have come from a relative privilege. Most of them come from humble backgrounds, and are the first doctors in their family. Parents were clerks, farmers, small businessmen, minor merchants, average engineers and so on. A doctor in the family was a big fucking deal to them.
In my cohort of about a hundred med students, maybe a dozen had medical parents? I'd say that that's the system working as intended.
(I will protest that I would have gotten into much better med school if my ADHD has been treated while still in school. Oh well, one of the many things I've forgiven my parents for. They're not perfect, they did their best.)
In other words, if you were a 120 IQ+ student in India, regardless of family background, you have a fair shot at climbing further up the rungs of the social ladder. It won't be easy, by any means, but it's expected.
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I question the premises here. They're faulty.
Your sampling is not representative.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322895020_Characteristics_of_Medical_Students_with_Physician_Relatives_A_National_Study
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10174736/1/Joanne%20Harris%20EdD%20thesis%20final.pdf
From what I can tell, in the US and UK, somewhere around one in eight to one in four medical students/applicants have a doctor parent or close relative. In Indian samples, the figure looks similar, probably one in seven-ish, possibly higher in some cohorts.
That is very, very far from 50%. We are grossly overrepresented, but we are far from the majority. The actual data doesn't support claims that we could just give up on selection and admit them by default.
Sui Dynasty China? You're off by 1400 years. Meritocracy is not new. The pains are not new. I'm swallowing the bitter pill.
You do recall that essay where I said that my dad didn't come from a pedigree of doctors right? That he was a refugee without two rupee coins to rub together? That meritocracy lifted him out of the gutter? I hope you do. After all, it was the largest salvo I've fired in our ongoing debate about meritocracy. You should realize that this standard, applied honestly, would mean that he never became a doctor, and that I wouldn't be here because of it.
I did not enjoy the selection process required to become a doctor. I have been vociferously complaining about the further selection required for me to become a shrink. I still support strong meritocracy, because my commitment to my principles is stronger than my desire to make my life easier for myself.
It's the same reason I never bothered to apply for reasonable accommodations on my exams. I'm fully eligible, because of the ADHD. Call it a chip on my shoulder, call it a struggle with impostor syndrome or an inferiority complex, psychoanalyze me the way I psychoanalyze everyone else (look at what I'm doing here). I don't mind. I'd rather suffer in a fair system than flourish in a biased one.
If I couldn't hack it as a doctor? Too bad. If I can't hack it as a psychiatrist? That would suck. But while I have a laundry list of issues with the way British psychiatry pipelines work, the meritocracy isn't one of them.
With narrow-sense heritability of intelligence in the 0.5 to 0.7 range, children of two parents at +2 SD will average around +1.2 SD, with substantial variance. So even in your preferred world where you select by parentage, you'd need a filter to catch the kids who regressed below the competence threshold. Otherwise you get incompetent doctors who happen to have a doctor father. And I know a lot of fail-sons and fail-daughters of doctor parents. I was always scared of becoming one. I still am, even with all the objective evidence against it. Mostly because the further I go, the stiffer the competition becomes.
Do I really have to dig out the citations on the strong correlation between intelligence and performance for doctors? Or simply grades (which are IQ+conscientiousness)? I have the Paper B. You've nerd sniped me already. I can't afford the time, but I'm here nonetheless.
If heritability did all that you claim, the children of doctors would breeze through medical entrance exams and the selection would be costless. The fact that they don't, that even doctor-parented children grind in coaching alongside everyone else, is itself evidence that selection does something beyond filtering for pedigree.
My dad worked his ass off (and still does) so he could give me a headstart. The money for extra tuition. The general support and comfort of knowing what the hell you're supposed to do in a med school. I consider these entirely legitimate advantages, because I had to sit the same tests as everyone else. He also didn't hand me as many of his SNPs as I'd like, or perhaps he waited too long and his swimmers became senescent. ADHD with above average intelligence is an unpleasant combination.
I intend to do everything I can for my kids. Money. Emotional support. A proper childhood. Hopefully a smart partner so they get another helping of the alleles that contribute to intelligence (and maybe better looks). I am happy with that. I am tolerating the pain of the struggle to get there, because I'm dangerously close to preferring death over hypocrisy.
The folk conception of biology and evolution that people have is still very Lamarckian in this way. Even among intelligent families, children are still very much a crapshoot. I’ve wondered at times though whether you can breed out some of the most fundamental characteristics in humans.
In any population, you can select for a certain trait and by encouraging its reproduction within the population, greatly increasing the frequency of its heritability and expression. Could you theoretically do the opposite? Take say a trait from the big 5 like neuroticism. If you outright banned the reproduction of all highly neurotic people, could you with time extinguish that feature of human personality entirely or merely suppress the strength of its intensity and the frequency of its appearance?
Looking at other animals, how many species could you confidently express have “personality” in a way that’s as discernible with what you find in humans?
Of course you can. Some humans are born without these characteristics. Many lack sex drives, or intelligence, or morality, or basic health.
You're probably picking up on sibling genetic variance being 50% of population genetic variance. That means your childrens' genetic IQs have standard deviations of 10 points. If e^2 > 0%, then the sibling SD is even higher. Empirically it's like 12 points or something iirc. But the median sibling has the same gene score as the parental median. So, 120 IQ parents (genetically) can somewhat easily have a <108 IQ kid, a 120 IQ kid, and a >132 IQ kid, which are pretty stark differences.
This ignores regression to the mean. The 120 IQ parent's children will tend towards a longer term average of the ancestors of that parent. Roughly speaking. So the distribution is not symmetric. An especially smart, outlier person's children are more likely to go downwards in IQ than to go upwards.
Gene scores do not regress to the mean. And therefore neither do 100% heritable phenotypes. I was speaking in gene scores. Regression to the mean comes from e^2. People with above average traits have above average e^2, but their children have an expected e^2 of exactly average.
But yes, this is true in real life since the e^2 component of IQ is between 20% and 40% Also, the expected effect of de novo mutations on offspring gene scores is small but negative.
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Neuroticism specifically has some pretty clear advantages when it comes to surviving in times of adversity when those around you are untrustworthy or dangerous. This makes it pretty hard to select against; Once the neurotics find out what you are doing, they are going to hide away and work hard to minimize it showing.
I guess modern society and social media is kind of doing it though. The neurotics can seek safety in their room bathed in light from their screens whilst minimizing interaction with the outside world. Meanwhile, the western world is safe enough that most risk takers are likely to survive and will have many opportunities for procreation if that is what they desire. Caution may have been a winning strategy a hundred years ago, but now it seems like taking risks is the way to go, as you can bank on modern medicine saving your life if something goes wrong. If the modern west continues unimpeded for a thousand years, perhaps neuroticism will be considered a weird mental illness, and our descendants will all be men of action. I wonder what kind of society they would create.
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You're looking at polygenic selection, which would be significantly slower than selecting for traits dominated by a handful of genes. But in principle? Absolutely. It would just be a massive pain in the ass, but we've done it for dogs and cattle. There is evidence for weak selection for specific personality traits over human evolution, but I forget the specifics.
No, it's not. If you set heritability when the allele is at 50% frequency equal to the polygenic heritability of the other trait, mendelian selection is slower because heritability is usually under this value, due to additive genetic variance being smaller when the allele frequency is under 50%. Polygenic selection is faster in general. And it's not a massive pain in the ass, it's pretty easy to get a shift of >0.50 SDs per generation when you can control the selection differential.
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CC for @Tretiak below.
When it comes to trait-based selection, whether a trait is polygenic, monogenic—or anything in between—the genetic architecture doesn't matter for the response to selection. Only thing that matters is heritability and selection differential (how "drastic" your selection is).
Breeder's Equation for a quantitative/continuous trait (e.g., neuroticism) is R = h^2 * S, where R is the response to selection, h^2 heritability, and S the selection differential (how different the mean of the selected parents is relative to the general population).
Heritability would be the dominant form of the equation, but you also can’t factor out the epigenetic influence (I would think) unless gene expression itself can be further reduced to strict biological determinants. Which is to say gene expression is also heritable. I understand what you’re saying here but I’m still unsure as to whether it answers the question or not. Or maybe it’s a poorly formed question. I probably don’t have the background here that you do.
Incidentally what does the equation say about people of exceptionally gifted talents that have no known biological pedigree found within their family ancestry?
Epigenetic variance explains ~0% of phenotypic variance. You should probably just not refer to it again and epistemically audit whatever process led you to mention it like it was important.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about its role in gene expression.
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In the 2000s and 2010s there was massive hype and hopium around human epigenetics being A Thing, largely to fight against the crimethink that the variance in traits such as cognitive ability could be primarily explained by heritability. This hype and hopium had already mostly died down by the late 2010s/early 2020s.
It doesn't directly nor does it need to. The usual parent-offspring equation (Y = a + bx + e, basically almost the simplest linear regression one can think of) and the normal distribution describe it well. Exceptionally gifted parents tend to have more gifted children, on average, than unremarkable parents. However, unremarkable parents far outnumber exceptionally gifted people. Thus, it'd be no surprise that exceptionally gifted people sometimes come from unremarkable families.
I remember that time as well. Quite well in fact and immediately knew it was being over hyped and sold by the media; probably on purpose.
Only 1%-2% of genes code for traits. The rest you can resign to the scrap heap, whatever else (which is still an enormous amount) is involved in genetic expression (epigenetics). That’s all I mean to emphasize. I’m not at all taking the form of an argument produced for the target audience you’re referring to. But even so, the argument does nothing to rebut the importance of epigenetics, properly understood.
The side note about gifted children I meant more about the emergence and origin of these traits from a lineage of unremarkable people. Are they simply dormant or latent because of epigenetic suppression? If you look at a Michael Jordan for instance, there was nothing to suggest in his biological lineage that he would’ve been the kind of person he was. Just in raw genetic factors alone his brother was 5’8, which is quite the contrast. Same with a LeBron James. So what gives in that instance?
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Polygenic selection would take a lot more time, yeah. But it still isn’t clear to me if you’re just diminishing the normal signal an otherwise healthy instinct might have or would you succeed in eradicating it entirely, overtime?
I’ve seen evolutionary analyses (much more on the speculative end) done for other questions like, “Why are children in the west much more rebellious against their parents unlike in China?,” and people have seriously proposed explanations like, “The amount of wars and rebellions China has been through and put down over the centuries have produced a socially Darwinistic byproduct of executing those members of the population who revolted against the leader.” Meaning there literally isn’t a genetic basis for rebellion in China as there would be in a place like the US, because they were all killed off. That was the premise of “collective punishment” if you were disobedient, they wouldn’t just wipe out you, but also your family.
I mean thé obvious counter argument is the history of China, which is nothing but peasant rebellions.
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What's the Indian education system like in terms of academic integrity? I was a TA in college and Indian international students were disproportionately getting in trouble for plagiarism, handing in identical assignments, or trying to cheat on exams. A common excuse was "this is a cultural difference, this was allowed (explicitly or tacitly) in India". With all the weight for admissions being placed on one entry exam, is there genuinely just a more cavalier attitude about cheating on other work, since its perceived as busywork that doesn't matter?
Actually digging into this a bit further, there have apparently been major NEET cheating scandals in 2024 and this year. I suppose with so much of a student'a academic (and therefore economic) future riding on one test, there is a lot of incentive for it. American admissions criteria might be less legible, but they are at least less vulnerable to being gamed by cheating on a single test.
Uh.. Probably more lax than in the West? The important exams, like the NEET/JEE or the post graduate NEET for higher training in medicine are heavily proctored and surveilled. Cheating there is extremely difficult, and usually takes incredible levels of gumption or a dedicated cheating ring and bribery. That is not the norm. If you're caught, you're screwed. Barred from the test. Legal action.
It's far more heterogeneous when considering all institutes of higher learning. I have only attended one med school, after all, and I can tell you that people were caught and subject to disciplinary action for cheating on the test. Of course people try to cheat. I can only point out that they can and do get caught and subjected to serious punishment.
Funny story, a very good friend of mine was unfairly accused of cheating during our med school finals. She'd taken a box of stationery with her into the test, and forgotten that she'd left in a tiny strip of paper with a list of things to revise (chapter names and page numbers) from last night. She was subject to a random search during the med school finals, this was detected, and she was sent to a disciplinary committee with accusations that she'd been carrying a literal cheat sheet. I wrote a letter defending her, which she shared with the board. They were flabbergasted and asked her if she'd hired a lawyer. Nope, just me. I suppose you'd use ChatGPT for something like that today, but back then it was just ChatGP-me.
If it makes you feel better I actually cheated on behalf of a younger cousin.
Years ago before ChatGPT was a thing, she approached me one day yelling, “Cousinnn! Please I need your help!,” begging me to write her finals essay that was due literally the very next day (that she hadn’t even started… at the end of the school year…), which took the form of arguing a position on a particular issue. So I sat down at her computer that night and spun out a 12 or so page essay, properly formatted, footnoted, the whole 9 yards for her to turn in tomorrow.
Turned out she didn’t even read the original assignment at all; she was too busy partying the whole school year. One of the requirements of this specific essay was that it had to be read, explained and argued out loud, in class, on the day. When the day came and her friends were all sharing what they wrote, they looked at hers and said “there’s no way you wrote this…” She was insistent that she did. But she got up to read hers aloud, she was slowly pronouncing words, and later texted me and says, “what the hell are you saying!?” I told her “Just hold your head high no matter what! Act like nothing, 😤.”
The teacher wanted her to stay after class and demanded to know where she plagiarized it from. She said she didn’t, she wrote the whole thing and it took her a lot of time. Then they said they’re going to thoroughly research where she got it from and she was going to get an F. The word I later got back was that the teacher was frustrated and mad as hell because they couldn’t figure out where it was plagiarized from (it wasn’t plagiarized, it was original work; I wrote the whole damn thing), and he gave her an F on it anyway. She was so upset she took it to the administration and got it reversed so she was able to get a passing grade for the class; but I was pissed off if the teacher was going to fail me, I wanted to walk in there myself and demand a passing grade; because I was damn proud of my work.
To be fair to the teacher, it wasn't "this is terrible work", it was "this is way too good for you to have produced, you must have swiped it from somewhere" and that is what your cousin did. She pretended she wrote it as her own original work, and it was not: it was all yours.
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I have to ask, in hindsight, were you trying to fail your cousin? Because it's pretty funny.
No, I was seriously supporting her to get her to pass (which she did); since her lax attitude throughout the school year left everything hanging in the balance with how she performed on this final assignment. I’d already been out of high school for years at this time, but I was just winging it and found the assignment a breeze. It didn’t even occur to me to write it in such a way that would seem like it came out of her mouth. When she read it she was pronouncing words like “genes” as “gen… iss…,” etc.
I can see why you'd do this for family harmony, but otherwise it's a bad idea. You were helping someone who had not done the work get a fake qualification which they would then use to get a job where their inadequacy would be exposed, but perhaps not before they had done harm to someone. If the essay contained "genes" then clearly it was on biology and that might be medicine, and there are enough fraudsters in that field without helping one more.
EDIT: Though if this was high school and not college, much less harmful and it might have alerted her parents to the fact that she was wasting her time and not studying.
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Just curious then, why help her at all? Does enabling a family member who partied all year and asks for your help the night before on an important paper seem like it would be good for her in the long run? What would be the worst case scenario for her without help, being expelled from her high school or repeating her grade level?
It seems you reinforced a lesson that lying and plagarism can make up for a consistent work ethic? And that when she gets caught she should double down in denial no matter how obvious the deception?
The inability to pronounce genes is just terribly funny though.
It's a realistic/pragmatic life lesson for teenage girls and young women, though, way more valuable than some finals essay and one that they'll eventually learn anyway if they haven't already. Whine and cry enough and the men around you will try and solve your problems for you. Whine and cry enough and men and women alike will eventually grant you a pass from any negative consequences of your actions, if they didn't already immediately do so.
It's like the inverse of "My name is Jeff".
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Short answer (don’t seek a justification in this response, only an answer), because biology overwhelms logic at every turn. I have no logical argument against that because I agree with you. But she’s my cousin and I love her; and that overrides everything else. We’ve always had a very close relationship and I’ve viewed her as a younger sister I was bailing out. We’ve been partners in crime like this all of our lives and had each others backs, so to speak. Does it help long-term? Not at all. My strongest support for her has been to support her family and kids (now some of my youngest cousins). And she’s quite successful professionally now. I’ve helped her through school, building resumes, coaching her, etc. So she’s learned a ‘lot’ over the years.
I've been roped in to "help" with homework as a kid, and though for the family member it was not down to partying (they had been very sickly throughout childhood and missed a lot of school as a result), it didn't help them in the long run and I ended up resenting being emotionally manipulated into doing this by parents.
I have to agree with @Sloot that this was teaching the wrong lesson: just do what you like, blow off responsibility, then cry a bit and someone will help you out. What happened in the end? Your cousin continued lying even when everyone knew (but could not prove) she was lying, she went to higher authority to get the fake result, succeeded, and came away having 'won' by cheating and deceit. This isn't good for society as a whole or for the individuals concerned. She hasn't learned anything except that you're a soft touch who will always come through and fix her problems for her, and she can coast on charm, attractiveness, and doing what she wants while you will always clean up her messes and even look after her kids for her. How can she learn when it's you "helping her through school, building her resumes, coaching her, etc."? She did none of the work, she learned nothing, and worse, the next generation (her kids) are learning the same thing: don't worry about messing up, cousin Tretiak will sweep it under the carpet for us, the old fool!
Has her professional success benefited you? Has she done anything to help you? Or is it always turn up, turn on the waterworks, and my simp cousin will sort it out for me?
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Makes sense. Women do good with an older brother figure, especially if the dad is checked out or otherwise absent. That she was allowed to even party hard in the first place makes it seem as if one or both of her parents were not that involved in her education.
My friend's cousin in the strip club, her dad killed himself early on in her life and her mom is also a party girl. There was no older male relative to have her back, so her life got messed up. Last time I saw her she was clearly on meth and dropped out of a full scholarship in state college to strip for a customer base of lonely, desperate men. The men she met there were mostly of low quality (gamblers, dealers, etc), and the higher quality men were not looking for something long term with her.
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An idea from the old thread: instead of testing students and separating them into different schools, each student should learn at their own rate in the same school, via a vast universal online curriculum.
Additionally, instead of one final exam, there should be many interspersed exams. To save proctoring resources, each student could have a random subset of their exams strictly proctored, unknown before exam day.
Students would graduate either at a certain age or after passing certain lessons, whichever comes first. Then they could optionally keep taking lessons and exams (at home online, or by paying to enroll in an adult school). Enough progress in a specific subject would award them a Master’s degree.
Problems? I think it would still be unfair, stressful, unreliable, etc., but better than the current system. Students who don’t have access to coaches would be less disadvantaged, because the online curriculum would cover practically every subject and be designed by the best teachers. With many exams, students may be less stressed and hampered by exam-day sickness, since one bad exam grade is negligible. With many exams and random proctoring, cheating would be harder, even if proctoring was less strict to compensate for frequency.
I went to Catholic schools.
Everyone went to the same campus. Discipline was uniformly strict- although we didn't have corporal punishment at all after the sex abuse crisis and it was definitely on the way out beforehand, suspension was a real possibility that happened regularly and there was the occasional expulsion. Flip side of that, no hallpasses, and in high school you didn't even need to ask permission to go to the bathroom, because if you abused the privilege you got in trouble. There were honors and regulars classes for every core class except religious ed, with real tracking for math in the secondary grades. Starting around 10th grade finals declined in importance, I think when I graduated there was one final exam(Latin) and that's it, we had essays and projects and whatnot for everything else. It was by no means unheard of for a particular student to be on, say, the honors English/basics math track, or vice versa. Very importantly, your parents could not get you moved to a more rigorous/prestigious class, although sometimes teachers could, and you could transfer credits in from community college if you wanted. Electives existed and were unsegregated, although a few of them had pre-reqs which kept it to kids in honors in related classes. It's probably as close to what you describe as could reasonably exist.
I went to a public school, and my experience sounds similar.
We had a separate elementary and middle/high school.
Discipline existed, including suspension and expulsion, but wasn't especially strict. Students acted out, but I never saw anything compared to horror stories I hear today.
We had honors classes, and math branched into calculus, statistics, and discrete.
Most classes had finals, but they were a small fraction of the overall grade. Some finals were multi-week projects.
I think it was OK, but I wish there was less busywork, higher-level advanced classes, and more computer classes.
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All reading about all this dysfunction does is make me wonder why anyone participates at all. Where is the Indian Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who sees money on the table, drops out, and changes the world?
But that just takes us right back to the big obvious question. If India has so many great engineers, doctors, scientist, etc, why can't they achieve great things in India? Why do they need to come here with all the externalities they bring with them?
What you are describing is not an education system, it's a system for fleeing the country and/or other Indians. Because for whatever reason, nothing can be achieved in India. So everyone with any sense at all has one goal, get out by any means necessary. The rest will sort itself out later.
25 years ago we were saying this about China and laughing at their shitty plastic exported toys. It's entirely possible that 30 years from now, your children will be sitting in your chair bitching about our industries being hollowed out by Indian companies.
It is possible though India's issues are kinda different from Japan/China in that it's not like there's been a massive war or communist effort that's rendered them a big laggard to the rest of the world. There's been no reason of that caliber why India cannot compete previously. They've been permeable to outside investment, they're not recovering from being razed to the ground and there are parts of India that are perfectly functional/developed already.
Losing the war and being occupied by the allies was probably the best thing that could have happened to Japan's economy, as opposed to dragging them down.
The American occupation broke the Japanese military-industrial complex and forced them into exports and free markets, funneled them large sums of capital via Korean war procurement, American market access and technology transfers, and extended Japan the American security umbrella. The Japanese economic miracle wouldn't have been possible without losing the war and getting dragged into a modern economy by force.
While they never went full communist like China, there's a good argument that India could be decades ahead of where they are now without Nehru and Gandhi fucking around with poorly implemented socialism. The over-emphasis on heavy industry, licensing and central planning, failing to implement any real land reforms, and essentially being closed off to trade prior to 1991 were practically the completely opposite conditions as to what made the four Asian tigers so successful.
While I agree that India has different issues to East Asia, having a 50 year disadvantage on Japan and a 10 year disadvantage on China in liberalization did them no favors either.
I mean Japan had already had an economic miracle to get to the point of being strong enough to even engage in their expansionary activity. The close relationship with the USA helped put the afterburners on it, but there was clearly a capability to modernize there already.
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People forget there was a time Japan had the same reputation for producing junk. Nowadays look what they’re known for. They learned from their experiences overtime. It’s possible China may do the same.
The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition. The smart people have been predicting the ascent of East Asia and the possible surpassing of the West almost since first post-Renaissance contact.
India, on the other hand... the early Western explorers were like "They literally just stand there in the parade and let themselves get trampled by elephants. What the hell lmao"
There was and still is resentment toward East Asians among upper class whites, for providing a robust source of competition in knowledge work and the education credentialist system, and/or making more fashionable minority groups like blacks look bad.
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The ascendancy of East Asia was a problem with the timeline, not the above ground factual observations people were making of them, Japan developed after WW2. Yeah, they didn’t overtake the US as everyone was prophesying with the “yenification” of the world economy back in the 70’s-90’s. China has also “ascended today,” whether that translates into a “triumph” over the west remains to be seen. Kishore Mahbubani is probably the most eminent scholar to date that makes this case but he’s been heavily assailed too.
The west doesn’t see India as a particular threat except maybe insofar as they have competing economic interests, although why the US aids Pakistan against India isn’t something I know about in great detail, except only to say we see it in our strategic interests.
US aids Pakistan because Pakistan surrendered oversight of CIA activities in the Hindu Kush listening posts entirely in exchange for having its own free hand to do its own dastardly shit, and from there the Pakistanis leveraged their place as 'useful assholes' for many players globally, a role India never managed because India saw itself too important to aid foreigners at all and so was bypassed by major powers. The Pakistanis asked for US help and offered something in return, India always said it could chart its own course while begging for aid whenever shit hit the fan (request for US carriers in 1962 war, request for USSR submarine support against the US carrier group in 1971, requests for SU30 technology transfers, requests for IMF bailouts, requests for waiver for purchasing Russian/Iranian oil, etc etc etc)
Kishores own reputation within the international commentariat is a byproduct of market demand for a non-Chinese articulate ostensibly neutral heavyweight that isn't bogged down by domestic political considerations polluting the discussion: Kishores commentary and analysis is hardly more breathtaking than informed western China observers that seem similarly dispassionate about capability convergence inevitability like basically the entire US Chamber of Commerce circa 1998-2013, or Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Nye if you want to be intellectual about things.
However, Kishores own media ascendancy is also a byproduct of a deliberate internal tension within the Singapore foreign policy establishment where a pro-US advocate is always raised up at the same pace as an anti-US advocate, and the two actually switch positions depending on the needs of the moment. Kishores antithesis is Kausikan Bilahari, who himself enjoys some time on the media circuits when a counter to the China ascendancy is also sought. You can see the same pattern in others, there is also Chan Heng Chee and Tommy Koh, but that gets too deep into the weeds of Singapores arcane adversarial-cooption civil service modality.
Also, and lets be fucking frank here, Kishores pro-China anti-US sentiment comes from what looks like a fairly obvious chip on his shoulder. His first book was 'Can Asians Think', a direct rejoinder to a presumed racial contempt that supposedly existed in the western policy establishment which denigrated asian (specifically southeast Asian (singapore) at time of writing, but later extended to China and the subcontinent) intellectual ability and execution capacity. Thing is, even at that time of writing the US policy establishment and broadly the west as a whole recognized asian capability and its necessity to be actively managed. Kishores voluminious presence on the media circuit is downstream of what looks like obvious status reassertion, and that there is an especially receptive audience because US domestic political considerations make people cast about for an ostensible 'neutral' just happens to direct that gravy train straight to Kishores lap.
Huh. Thanks for the analysis on that one.
Kishore’s analysis seemed too idealistic and off the beaten path to me. I’ve read his books but he seems to constantly pull out the wrong tools and metrics of analysis to bear on the discussion. You could see it also on Samir Saran’s face whenever Kishore got the mike and seemed to be droning on. His “Civilizationalism” doesn’t seem to be an analytically powerful concept to apply in strategic circles. Insofar as he contributes to the influencing the discussion, he’s worth taking seriously.
I’m curious to know what your background is if you don’t mind sharing. You seem pretty knowledgeable about this topic.
Kishore is definitely smart, dont let my conveyed irritation at his playing the pop geopolitics circuit distract from the strength of his simplistic reductive concepts. If anything Kishore is an aberration to the Singaporean institutional resistance to highfalutin grand theory, their operational modality is see the world as it is not as you wish it to be and maintain internal red teaming to avoid blinkers.
My own experience is unimportant. On the internet I could be Kishores disciple or a disgruntled taxi driver or anything in between, what matters is verifiability. Kishores own books give the necessary info and in the professional sphere if you encounter a single Singaporean in any eliteish profession like finance or tech anywhere globally you're two kevin bacons away from knowing someone with deep insider knowledge of the Singaporean civil service operational modalities which really aren't that opaque anyways. That contact could be any one of us. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be - ok its me I know these dudes directly.
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Personally I think it's likely that China will continue to produce a lot of junk, even as the top-line quality of their manufactures grows. (Basically, this has already happened.) It's possible to find some of the highest quality goods in the world in Guangzhou and Shanghai. But if I were a random manufacturing company in Europe looking to source parts I would not trust a random Chinese factory. I suppose given time the free market would correct this, but I think China also provides some unique qualities that could allow them to keep making junk for a long time.
No doubt they will, but they’ve definitely improved in some areas. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur in the west it makes economic sense to contact a Chinese outfit and get them to prototype a product you’ve designed. Plenty of people do it at low cost and reliably but you can also fall into traps. Word is that Vietnam is trying to make itself look very attractive to western companies by upholding their intellectual property and patent laws, and is undercutting even China as a lower cost destination for business to flourish. Not saying I’d easily trust them either, but provided you do your vetting, it makes business sense.
“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China and defines a lot of the activity about the way the manufacturing sector operates. Western companies are somewhat afraid to dip their toe in the water there (not that I blame them) for fear of getting burned by linking up with a bad partner. Last I read though is that’s beginning to change.
This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).
I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.
That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:
“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.
I find this incredibly difficult to take seriously. Medieval and Renaissance Europe was full of patronage networks, as was Rome (and its client states), and the Sui-Tang period is precisely the point in history where China develops the institution of meritocratic examinations for the civil service. If anything, you would expect the reverse.
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The difference is that the Indian government isn’t powerful enough to make the decisions the Chinese government has either made or didn’t need to (because communism effectively reset property rules and forcibly collectivized smallholders).
India can’t modernize until it deals with agricultural subsidies and inefficient farming which essentially leave vast sections of rural India under a form of quasi-feudal quasi-socialist economic relations. Even Modi wasn’t powerful enough to slightly change this, revolts forced him to back down when he tried.
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Believe it or not, many talented Indians stay back in India because they want to, not because they're forced to. I know medical peers who are simply better doctors than me on every single front, and they're happy living and working in India. That is the norm. Only a minority of doctors, engineers or programmers try to leave, even considering those who have the resources and credentials to leave.
India is not Somalia. It is perfectly possible to have a decent life there.
I won't deign to answer this question. It's beneath me.
Honestly in today's world, as somebody who bailed from a top-tier Western democracy to a 'mid tier' economy, this is a large part of why I find a lot of desperate migration pushes to be silly. If you're capable of getting into the upper-middle class of like 80% of the world's countries you're probably gonna be broadly fine. Urban development has largely plateaued for a decade or two now, especially in the West where the sheer expense of construction and associated red tape means that the nicer parts of the mid-tier countries are on par/better since they can actually develop things (and keep the homeless out). I'm in Malaysia now after leaving Australia, and from what I can see a lot of white collar quality of life outcomes are essentially equal between here and Australia. You might be earning 40% the wages you would in Australia, staying in Malaysia, but large portions of your expenditures (especially housing) are about 30% the price they would be in Australia.
The Malaysian Chinese demographic have historically been prone to emigration since they're filtered hard from University placements inside the country and therefore go overseas to pursue higher education. 20 years ago they were a lot more prone to just staying in the UK/Australia/wherever else they went, but now the perceived gap in quality of life has shrunk immensely. Same for Chinese. And like I have no doubt that the Somalias of the world still exist where every day is suffering and a battle for survival, but also there's a correlation between immigrants from those places and being unlikely to actually contribute to their destination country.
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The answer is that Indians are, for all their many positive traits, not a martial people, and have largely given up on exercising any real control of their domestic underclass. Indian elites live in their pristine multimillion dollar apartments in Mumbai skyscrapers while the street outside (literally right outside) is squalid, covered in garbage and has a random cow or three walking around it - and this really is the state of the most expensive neighborhoods there, it’s not an exaggeration as you probably know. What can you do with that? It’s unclear if it can be fixed. No other major civilization has this issue to the same extent.
India's dysfunction is more about having different lines for what they consider an acceptable levels of grime. If you're a junkie or a homeless person and cross into an area that is off-limits you're getting handled a lot more physically by security than you will be in any Western democracy.
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But enough about San Francisco.
And I'll take the cows over the junkies. I know cows shit a lot, but they'll shit less in public walkways than the junkies do. They're animals but they're not animals.
The San Francisco situation is different. Not only because most of America isn’t like it, and because the truly wealthiest areas of San Francisco have it but less so than eg the tenderloin or whatever, but because we know why San Francisco has its permissive attitude towards the homeless and public squalor. It’s not a mystery. It is, in fact, the core conflict at the heart of the existence of this forum itself. If you ask a progressive San Franciscan elite why they let junkies piss and shit on the street they will tell you. If you ask an Indian elite why they will shrug, maybe mumble something about ‘village people’.
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SF has shitting junkies but India doesn't?
I doubt the Indian ones are drug addicts or that they're allowed to shit anywhere near rich people. Designated vs non-designated, etc.
It's hard to exaggerate the very worst I've seen in San Francisco. Having personally seen human shit on the ground right outside comically expensive condos is too obvious an observation.
Hmm. I'm not entirely sure because I haven't beent here myself, but I have heard things to the tune of India being a land of extreme contrasts and widespread filth even in rich neighborhoods, or very close to them.
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Yeah. Junkies exist but most asian societies are a lot better than current year Western society at atleast moving them out of the nice places. This is facilitated by greater cultural affinity to gated communities and whatnot, but policing is just generally more civic minded
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Not a martial people? That term is so poorly defined that I don't know what to with it. It's not like it's that different in Punjab, which is full of Sikhs, who are as martial as it gets.
Nepal? Full of Gurkhas. Similar grime levels.
My schizo theory is that generations of being divided into castes made indians not see themselves as a unified one: "it doesn't matter that those people are shitting on the streets, that in that village they bathe in cow excrement, they are not like me, it doesn't reflect poorly on me that they do. In fact how dare you imply that it does #notallindians".
My understanding is broadly similar. Caste system gives an easy solution to both 'should we help them' and 'why are they like that'. You can easily designate a lower caste an outgroup, their struggles are self-evident proof of their inferiority and it can be treated as natural law of the universe
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You need money. I think you don't realise how much money there is floating around in the US. I'm working on a startup in the UK that has a clear use case, a major client, a solid business model, and industrial trials agreed next month. It's almost impossible to get anyone to fund the ~50k pounds we need for dev work, equipment and support over the trial, let alone the 200k we would need for stability and to take on a few high quality engineers for a year without them/us taking big salary cuts.
The government refuses to fund anything that isn't 100% up and running and used elsewhere. Venture capital is thin and risk-averse; it's focused on specific and very over-saturated sectors, and requires your stuff to be proven and to have a customer already buying from you, by which time you don't need venture capital. Foreign venture capital exists but mostly focuses at home and is more reluctant to invest the more local and less footloose your operations are. Regulation certainly doesn't help, but it's not the main issue.
Who is paying for Indian Bill Gates' equipment, workers and office space? Who is paying for his food? Potentially for his wife and kids?
Aren't second-tier European countries the worst case scenario for this kind of range? You're looking at high cost of living and salary expectations. Indian Bill Gates can get things done on a comparative shoestring (and living in a similarly-cheap country you'd be amazed how often the initial seed capital will just come out of a family member's small-medium business)
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Yeah, people say the UK and Europe are generally bad for startups however the US showers even shitty companies with so much cash that I'd treat a random UK company that managed to raise £100k from UK investors as being more promising than a US startup that's been handed $2 million for their idea. Seems like an allocation inefficiency for humanity as a whole with a corresponding deadweight loss that can be avoided if the US VCs were funding the UK companies instead of Juicero v2.5 (now with electrolytes!).
Instead of getting Trump to sign meaningless promises on data center investment in the UK when he visited Starmer would have been much better advised to get him to make promises on forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term. That would genuinely have been a lot better for the country than yet another mega datacenter when we have some of the highest industrial electricity costs in the world.
The amount of cash shoshing around in the US is obscene, relative to basically anywhere else in the world.
Except you can't force them, and American VCs will expect that any successful startup will move to the USA for reasons (we're the centre of the universe, here is where the money is, you need the Silicon Valley/Wall Street connections, etc.)
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American VCs aren't going to do that, because UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term are guaranteed not to make money. Although perhaps it wouldn't be worth fighting with Trump over it if they could do it with pocket change like £200K. Still, Trump knows these are losers as much as UK investors and US investors do, so he's not going to do it.
Yeah, there's nothing stopping American VCs from deciding that the funding a UK start-up wants is chickenfeed and they lose nothing by throwing a few hundred grand their way, except the expectations that your start-up wants to make it big and to do that you need to eventually be US-based.
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The problem in the UK is actually the opposite. We have startups that have working viable products with actual repeat customers and they still have trouble getting funding a lot of the time, especially Series B onwards (Seed funding is better resourced). These companies are usually already making money, they just need further funding to expand their offering which is unfortunately not available here in the UK for various reasons.
I mean this is just broadly where West Europe, Australia and Canada have landed. You're not getting the cost effective quality of life you would in nicer emerging countries and it's a lot harder to set yourself up for home run money outside the USA
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Hasn’t the UK in whole been suffering enormously the last couple of years due to its own self-inflicted policy decisions? It isn’t just a lot of red tape inhibiting new development from taking places but across all sectors there’s a massive national underinvestment in research, infrastructure and basic labor productivity. I’ve heard of the tax system being so punitive over there that it’s choking the fuck out of otherwise ambitious people. I’ve read of cases of doctors getting taxed in excess of 60% for taking on more shifts (there were other qualifying factors as well), but it would kill my motivation too. University graduates are also no longer the golden ticket to success they once were. That’s increasingly having an impact here in the US too.
All of these things are true, but they hit much harder and are more difficult to avoid when there's less money in the system overall.
You said it yourself: the tax system is punitive, and there's massive underinvestment. So either you have to raise taxes to pay for investment, continue to underinvest, borrow to invest, or explain to the pensioners and the disabled that the government is going to significantly reduce the support they receive in order to give the money to posh boys like me so we can become rich(er).
That last has to be followed by looking for your genitalia because the mob has cut them off and nailed them to a tree in Rutland haha.
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.
The options are:
The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2, the left and half the right won’t stand for 3, so we get 4.
——
Edit: the Mauritius stuff really is unforgivably stupid. Stopping it certainly won’t save Britain but spending the 10bn it’s going to cost us on 50m small business investment per year for 20 years would certainly be nice. Doesn’t change the fundamentals though. Britain isn’t poor because the government is wasteful, it’s poor because the alternative is letting people freeze/starve/die of illness while we could save them and choose not to, and we aren’t prepared for that.
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
I'm sorry, then I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about 'asylum seekers' in general and using Afghans as shorthand.
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Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
The turnbacks worked in Australia because they towed the boats out into international waters, and left them with enough fuel to reach only Papua New Guinea. I guess we could technically do the same with France - and would even be up for trying - but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.
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They're coming "on their own accord" because they know they will be welcomed by the government.
If the general public can tolerate how the rape gangs were being handled, surely they can handle either of these two. At the very least it's worth a try.
What's the logic here? Too expensive?
Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.
Violation of their human rights to be sent to a potentially unsafe country. For some any country bad enough to deter people from showing up and making asylum claims is too bad to send potential refugees to. Rwanda is either too bad or too expensive for not being bad enough.
The home countries may not want to receive them back, assuming they didn't burn all identifying documents. Which they do.
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Broadly my model is that 95% of the Labour party and 35% of the Tory party don't want restrictions on 'refugees' no matter what, so they're a dead loss. 3 is therefore viable but very difficult to get through Parliament in its current configuration.
The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.
is difficult practically. There are three questions: how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them, and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?
Mostly the relevant countries don't want these people back and / or it would be unpopular to be seen to take them back. So dedicated transports are unlikely to be permitted to land. For weaker countries you could always start landing unapproved somewhere, but that is difficult and expensive and technically an act of war. If you can't do that, you could put them on passenger jets, but that's expensive and you need a minder to supervise them and passengers / airlines are likely to protest or grandstand.
Not saying it's impossible with enough will, but it's not straightforward. By and large it doesn't beat the Rwanda plan.
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Yeah, and that's the problem I was alluding to. Because these policies failures compound among one another. I can’t imagine immigration is helping this along either, unless you’re relying on them as a permanent underclass to finance your way out of crises. Good luck resolving that problem. There’s even been an exodus of people out here where I am in the US, moving into other states that are less socially and economically hampered by bad policy.
Agree on all counts. My initial post was more responding to @WhiningCoil by explaining a little bit of why sometimes systemic context means that Indian Bill Gates can't drop out of his obviously pointless schooling and start achieving great things. A lot of things have to go right in your country before 'drop out of school, change the world' becomes an option even for the best of us. In a landed aristocracy things are different - you gate your geniuses by accident of birth but those of them who are lucky get the resources to do something useful with their time.
Unless his suggestion is that Indian geniuses should drop out of school and apply immediately for emigration since that is their ultimate goal anyway, but AFAIK visas are gated on credentials not IQ so that doesn't work.
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What happens for the students who achieve the objective? Do those top colleges provide any teaching, or is it self made graduates all the way down (all the way up)?
According to my Indian friends, it’s self teaching all the way down. The professors read off PowerPoint slides because they’d rather be doing research, and the students skip class to watch YouTube videos from random Indians explaining the course material (among other things).
Although the Indians I know are software engineers who left India, so it might not be like that at all the colleges.
I feel like they were slightly exaggerating for dramatic effect. Isn't the default expectation in higher education that you try and grapple with most of the material yourself, including through auto-didactic approaches or reference to online material? I seriously doubt there's a single reputable college anywhere where the students come in, get taught literally everything they need in a lecture hall, and aren't expected to do anything when they leave.
The situation your friends describe wouldn't apply to any med school. The lectures are thorough, but you still have to go home, crack open the books and make things stick.
Teachers are obligated to teach and students have an obligation to learn. This was brought home to me once by a really formative experience I had in high school I’ll never forget.
I once did a placement test across a couple subjects because the faculty didn’t feel I was properly suited to the classrooms I was in. I scored well above everyone else and I got switched to go into a calculus class one school year with a lot of other students. The whole time, the lot of the students didn’t like the class and complained that it was “too difficult” and our teacher was an older but good instructor that increasingly got upset with the low performance of a lot of us. So one day he switched things up.
We come into class in the morning and he announces there’s a pop quiz for all of us. He hands out a multipage, stapled document face down and tells us to very closely follow the instructions before taking it. Once he told us to begin I flipped it over, read everything on the first page, turned it back down and moved it to the corner of the desk. Literally every other kid dove right into answering problems. I was the “only” guy who got an A on the assignment. Every other kid in a class of near 30 failed it. F.
On the very bottom of the first page, there was a sentence that said, “Do not take this assignment.” He gave the whole class a very long lecture the following the day, when everyone got the exam back. His point was one I greatly internalized later in life. I’m no different than anyone else is. I was simply good at whatever I chose to pay attention to. If I put my focus on reading Instagram reels and Facebook posts all day, I’ll be on top of the world as far as what goes on in that realm. If I place my attention in my studies and apply myself, my knowledge will increase for that as well. The other kids in class complained that it was difficult, but they never applied themselves or paid any attention. The teacher did his job. The students did not.
Star Wars had it right.
That teacher was being a jerk. Maybe by following the teacher's instructions with exact literalness you can pass, but the world doesn't work without making assumptions and writing a test like that deliberately violates reasonable assumptions of the type you need to make to do anything at all. I bet that if you had followed some other unusual literal instruction of the teacher on some other day, the teacher would have graded you poorly and said you know what he meant.
(And actually, it's not clear that you can follow the instructions literally. If you follow all the instructions, you have pages full of "do X" and then one sentence at the end which says "don't do X". You have no reason to believe that later instructions should be followed in preference to contradictory earlier ones, so the correct answer would be to tell the teacher that the instructions are contradictory and can't be followed, not to assume that the instruction at the end takes precedence.
And that doesn't even consider that "don't take this assignment" is part of the assignment, so it tells you not to do itself.)
The teacher was a great guy. Stern but dedicated to his craft. The kids in that class were intelligent but weren’t strong students and that’s just as important as being able to teach; which was his entire point. Teachers are responsible for teaching. They aren’t responsible for what you learn. That of course isn’t to say there’s no such thing as a bad teacher, I’ve had several; but not every teacher can be a pedagog. Kids have an obligation to be good students. It isn’t a daycare.
Just as in professions and throughout life, when you’re in the company of those who know more than you, you have an obligation to listen. In sports as a star athlete you have an obligation to be coachable and not a showboating, egotistical hothead. It generalizes throughout life. And by learning the distinction it’s opened a lot of doors I wouldn’t have otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pass through.
I'm pretty sure that if a coach told an athlete to do a whole bunch of things and at the end said "by the way, ignore all my instructions including this one", and it was not something like a hazing ritual or April Fools Day where having ridiculous instructions was the point, the coach would lose respect, and "the coach knows more than you so you have to listen" wouldn't matter.
In our case it represents a failure to follow instructions.
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You actually do get taught things in colleges or uni. I've restricted myself to describing the conditions up till high school.
How well are you taught? Depends. But the prestigious institutions everyone fights over are prestigious for a reason. They have excellent teachers and the resources and time to teach to proper standards, even if I can't make a direct comparison to the West.
I feel like medicine is a different track to a lot of other fields since there's a far clearer suite of knowledge that you're expected to develop and then practice. Business school is always gonna veer somewhat towards bullshit.
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Wait a minute… if the standards for actual schools are so lax as to make them effectively pointless, and parents are spending enormous sums on tutors and exam coaching, why not have a private school where the curriculum is just exam coaching in the first place? Or just “home school”, i.e. tutor the child during schooling hours instead of wasting their whole day?
Seems like home schooling and alternative schools are legal in India already, so why bother with the whole charade?
The officially recognized curricula for most boards till 12th grade mandate additional subjects that don't get assessed on pre-med or engineering entrance tests. You'd have to enroll your kid in a school anyway, and you'd need them to study subjects that aren't cram-worthy. STEM-track subjects are implicitly strongly weighted even inside normal schools.
Exams like the NEET/JEE also require that you graduate from specific accredited boards, usually government-recognized ones. Homeschooling probably doesn't count if you mean exclusive homeschooling without signing up with an "official" school.
Homeschooling is legal only after the age of 14, and how many parents do you think have the time for that here? It's not even super common in the States, where the existing culture is more favorable.
How are the additional subjects assessed? Is it “you must have done 200h of humanities”, or additional end-of-year exams?
My question is mainly, why don’t the coaching centres become accredited schools where you fly through the government mandated curriculum in like the first hour of the day, then spend the rest of the day on the important tutoring? If there’s lax schools where they don’t even measure attendance that well, wouldn’t a combined coaching centre + high school be possible and an immense success?
I think that’s kind of the US model of the prep school, and similar to the one I attended. On many occasions a teacher would sigh, say “this is for the official curriculum”, we’d fly through it in 15min, then they’d teach the actual insanely difficult material we cared about. As long as we passed the (very easy) annual official tests and bought the official textbooks, the teachers had more than enough leeway.
It doesn’t have to be administered by the parent, my thought was that you could have the same tutor you’d be paying for coaching at the start of the day, then you just need basic supervision to ensure they’re studying and not playing on their phones.
The is what Hong Kong does, where highly sought-after schools (ranked by their college acceptance rate) fly through government mandated curriculums and spend most of the time running exam or actual tutoring, with officially optional but in practice mandatory after school lessons from the very same highly credited teachers whose job based on student's standardized exam result, competing with their teacher peers within the same school, forming a highly competitive market between teachers.
Then, after these after school lessons, student can go to other private tutoring class where they finish their homework and get semi-personalized tutoring to fix their weakness or strengthen their strengths
A typical high performing student in there study from 8am to 7/8pm, with maybe a total of 2 hours in between
If you include all the prep work of teaching/tutoring, you realize this cannot be done by a single teacher per subject, and capitalism determined that running coaching centres with per subject enrollment is the equilibrium, as parents can select the best tutor and studying environment based on their child's characteristics
And then you have all of these magnificently qualified Hong Kongers who go to Stanford or Berkeley or Caltech or Columbia who come back to Hong Kong and work mid level back office jobs, at least in my experience, which I always find crazy. Maybe the good jobs all go to HKU or indeed Tsinghua grads but even a lot of them seem to end up in the middle leagues. Is it elite overproduction gone crazy?
It goes from upper middle class to lower middle class depends on qualification, due to the none existance of middle class safety net many choosed to remain in a middle class lifestyle with their middle class job instead of starting a business or joining startups
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No idea. I presume there are written standards somewhere, with each recognized board setting their own requirements and then getting signed off by the government. My best guess, without devoting more time to the question than I can afford, is both. Mostly the latter.
It's a big country. I've only attended one school, and that was well over a decade ago. It's entirely possible there are places like this, all I can say is that they're not the norm even today. There could be minimum teaching hours per subject, and pushback from the teachers who would feel miffed if they were only expected to conduct a single class on Shakespeare once a week for 5 minutes. Students and their parents aren't the only relevant stakeholders, teachers do have some degree of say in things.
See my earlier point about needing to have completed an accredited course through a school board before you're eligible for the college entrance exams. In practice, you need a school to sign you off for that. In the kind of school my younger cousin went to, attendance wasn't required. He'd come home early and attend private tuition. The best private tutors organized larger classes instead of 1:1 lessons, much more money that way. The distinction between that and "pure" homeschooling is academic.
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This link? It's not paywalled.
Huh? I could have sworn it cut me off halfway when I tried opening it yesterday, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not quite sure what's going on here, and I hope it's not a psychotic break.
It's a "do you want to subscribe?" wall. You can just click the X.
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It's possible that it was originally a subscriber-only post but then he unpaywalled it, though I've never known Freddie to do that.
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Those kids not needing to physically attend school are getting tons of extra time to rest, study, or be tutored in the red queen's race. This has to become the new norm, the time advantage is simply too powerful.
What's next, performance enhancing drugs? Anything for the extra edge.
You'd think so, but no. This was surprising to me, especially after I learned about the ADHD pill-mill in the US. The same thing just doesn't happen in India. I wager it's because the stigma around mental illness is so strong, and awareness so limited, that parents are unwilling to even pretend that little Ramesh could do with stimulants, or they don't even know it's an option.
Seriously, most people don't know anything about ADHD back in India. Most doctors knew fuck-all about it. My own peers in med school didn't take the pills, I only did because I had a legitimate diagnosis. They didn't even look at me and go "huh, maybe it's a good idea to go ask a psychiatrist for some?".
Also, we don't have the casual/easy to abuse reasonable adjustments system seen in the West. Unless you're legally blind or similar, you're not getting extra time on the test. Med students or pre-med applicants are known to give their exams from the hospital bed. My own cousin did that while in med school.
Your cousin was otherwise normal but had the setup to get reasonable accomodation, right? I suppose your cousin is a physician now, perhaps gearing more children to game the system. Can't fault people for taking every advantage they can get.
No, he was suffering from malaria. Which I hope is not a heritable condition. All that afforded him was the opportunity to write the paper with an IV drip running, with a proctor physically present. I am unsure if the exam had a section on the prophylaxis or management of malaria, which is about the only scenario where this might provide an undue advantage.
Ah, I thought your cousin faked a reasonable accomodation need with so much determination he used a hospital bed as a prop.
I was really respecting his hustle! Too bad (in both ways) it was actually malaria.
Used to be stories in the Irish media back in the 80s about kids doing their Leaving Certificate from their hospital beds, so not solely an Indian phenomenon 😁 Haven't seen one of those in ages, so presumably we've relaxed things on the "this is the make-or-break exam of your life and if you fail it you will continue to be a miserable loser from age seventeen onwards" front.
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Tbh having been involved in the magnet school system I do think there's a considerable aspect of 'when you have already filtered for the top 5% academic achievers to even get in the door, how much good/bad are the teachers really doing when those kids have the homelife, educational infrastructure and genetics that put them in that box'.
Also what is 'good teaching'. The teacher who'd be able to say get a bunch of 120 IQ students who actually buy in/have significant cultural pressures towards education to maximize their possible SAT scores is likely a very different person and educator than whoever'd do the best in a test of being parachuted into a random 10th percentile school and achieving the best possible results with that population.
I noticed a pretty significant level of variability in teacher quality even in the advanced classes that benefited from strong filtering. In particular there was a notably excellent advanced physics teacher that caught that an "advanced" math teacher had failed to teach me the quadratic formula and corrected that. Filtering does raise the "skill floor" for teaching, in that you really can't do that badly with smart, well socialized students. But in the same vein I think it also dramatically raises the skill ceiling-- you need a good class and a good teacher to pull kids through an accelerated curriculum.
Yeah but there's also a skillset involved if you get dropped into a bottom-tier school and manage to get people to actually graduate. That skillset is likely not going to pay much dividends if you're dropped into a 95th percentile classroom.
True. I think that's an argument for filtering, not against it though. With he right incentives I think we could get teachers to specialize in either niche-- we already have dedicated SPED teachers and teachers who apply to teach junior criminals for example.
I mean to a degree we do already do that (or atleast if you're really really passionate about doing battle in the junior criminal mines the world is your oyster you will be able to find a job somewhere shitty and spar to your heart's content)
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If school savings account are tax-advsntaged in your jurisdiction (as they are with American 529s) I would HIGHLY advise you to reconsider your decision to save money for your kids but not specifically for your college. I have two main arguments for why, both stemming from the anthropic principle.
Argument one is that in disproportionate number of the futures where you manage to survive AI, it's because AI capabilities hit the logistic end of the growth curve and human intelligence remains a necessary input that actually increases in value due to AI serving as a force multiplier. Without speculating on the actual likelyhood of this being the case, it's the same wisdom as always betting against the apocalype. If you die, you're not going to miss the money anyway. If a small number of supercorporations take over the world and relegate us all to toys for the elite, the same applies.
Argument two is that even in worlds where AI surpasses humans, if pre-singularity wealth still matters that means existing large organizations (including schools) will continue to have some sort of ability to affect your life. There will be an evolution, certainly, but educational instituted will still find a way to provide some sort of value. Money is fungible, but institutions are malleable: market forces will push universities to evolve towards providing services worth on an average at least one dollar per dollar... And looking at the services they are already capable of supplying (food, spaces for people to gather, living arrangements, sports facilities, prestige) they seem likely to evolve into a sort of living community for high-class adults in their early twenties, which seem like the sort of thing that remain perenially popular.
Ignore all of that if your savings wouldn't be tax-advantaged, but at least in the US 529s are pretty fantastic. Even just going "full time" to an online school qualifies you to be reimbursed for stuff like FOOD AND RENT! Wouldn't it be great if you could deduct those expenses from your capital gains taxes? Well with a 529 you absolutely can! They're like Roth IRAs you can give to your children and grandchildren.
...
Seperately: a comment on school effectiveness. I grew up in a public school district that bussed people out of their home high schools (including the private catholic school) to a special technical highschool for part of the day, where students could take advanced electives, accelerated highschool courses, and rare ap classes. Admission into this school was based on performance at the local school and on standardized tests. And this system worked honestly pretty well! I feel like I learned a lot there, and afterward frankly breezed through college. The homework was hard, and the tests could be outright brutal, but the only tutoring I got or needed was my dad occasionally helping me with my math homework. (His math skills were and are admittedly formidable.) Everyone in my classes was both intelligent and a hard worker, but none of them seemed to be "strivers." I was probably among the most maladjusted kids in the upper-level classes and even that I blame more on body image issues than academic pressure.
Based on that experience, I really do think the "academic track" approach really does work to create an environment where kids actually can be taught in a meaningful way. Not every school can be blessed with the fortune to take the best and brightest students of an entire city, but I know that's not a necessary component because we were only ever came in second place in state math competitions in the state. Our hated rivals were fortunate enough to be located in a notorious college town, but were otherwise structurally ordinary.
Hmmm... Do you happen to know if the IRS has given any guidance on whether you can use a 529 for property taxes, insurance, mortgage interest/principal payments if enrolled?
Probably not, sadly. I think there are specific categories of things that are reimbursable, and there's also a dollar-amount limit per year based on what your school determines to be your "Room and Board" allowance based on its cost of attendance.
...but you can make your children pay market-rate rent for living at your home, and then reimburse them out of the 529!
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Quote from Publication 970 chapter 7 (regarding "qualified tuition programs (QTPs)", also known as "529 plans"):
A state webpage says the same thing. So I think this actually doesn't work for online schools, which obviously will not include room and board in the cost of attendance.
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My trusted and properly-accredited accountant/financial planner (ChatGPT) tells me that the answer is no. We don't have those in the UK.
The closest you can get is something called a Junior-ISA, which is very different, and not education specific. It'll only be a reasonable option after I have kids, which looks to be 3-5 years away. ChatGPT even said:
"If your position is “I want to save for future children, but not lock it into the assumption that university/college will matter,” then a Junior ISA may be worse than just using your own ISA, unless you actively want the money to become theirs at 18."
If I send my kids to school, which I will, it'll be for reasons like:
I'll worry about college funds when the kids actually exist, or in about 10 years. It's not nearly as expensive as in the States.
Fair enough. If there's no tax advantage, there's no advantage, period, for arbitrarily marking some portion of savings for children's education.
In the US it's pretty fucking slick though. The 529 my parents + grandma made for me has more money in it than when I entered college because I got a full ride and therefore barely touched the principal. That fund will continue growing tax free for the next however many years it is until I have children and need to put them through college, whereupon it should be able to easily fund their lifestyles for quite a while. I don't know if the money will be enough to cover tuition too, but my guess is that tuition is going to drop significantly as schools go over the demographic cliff.
The 529 can be used to pay rent so it's quite incredible. Enroll in virtual classes half time, pay with tax advantaged savings.
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My honest take having had a compressed homeschool education is that the basics can be done in an hour or two a day (likely every other day) for most kids. Parents are better situated to know how a specific kid learns and what motivates them than are schoolteachers in general. If the point is to be able to read, do basic math and have some vague understanding of national history and basic science, as the very best of our high schools produce, then I don't really see the point of mandatory education at all. It's just day care.
I say give all kids mandatory IQ testing at age six or seven, and those who score in the top ten percent take a college placement test at 15 or 16. Let the requirements of their chosen degree field be their guide to education. And get rid of the whole edifice of bullshit make-work that is the "education system". Basic instruction is free on Youtube. Let children do other things than sit in a fucking classroom listening to the dumbest member of her community college's remedial math class ruin another generation's curiosity.
Does homeschool education work well, in your experience? I'm assuming you're a man, did decreased female contact make things harder when you decided to date or marry? I feel homeschool works out worse for boys unless they have a church or equivalent social area to mingle with. Moms can teach you how to be nice be not how to get into a woman's pants. Dads can only do it indirectly by example, through Mom.
The education itself was so much better than any formal schooling I'd argue a year of homeschool should count as five or six years of regular school. When I attended both public and private schools in high school, they tried to teach me things my mom covered in second grade. To my mind, there is no educational system as such in the US. I have six siblings and the retarded one reads English better than the average college student.
As to girls, homeschooling was the least of my issues. When I was homeschooled in the cult, there was plenty of socialization, and even a girl I sort of hung out with more than others. Then my family went overseas and I spent puberty in a foreign country. Then back to the states for the end of high school, so I wasn't exactly in a great place to pick up american girls. Had one gf in high school though, junior year. She transferred. I learned more in college, much more in the military, and a fair bit from forums and personal experimentation.
Ultimately, my biggest handicap with women is that I am supremely uninterested in anything 99% of them talk about. That 1% are the ones who like dude shit, and don't tend to be dating material. But it didn't stop me from having a respectable dating career and finding a wife at the appointed time.
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The peak homeschooling demographics do not think that their sons getting laid is very important. They may later be distressed at a lack of progress towards marriage, but it's kinda too late to change education strategies by then.
That's a very sensible explaination. I figure for those in religious communities, they figure they can help arrange an early marriage to a girl from a good family. If the parents can deliver on that then there's no problem for the boy.
I don't see how parents not tied to any religious or cultural association plan to have things work out for their boy though, if he's not naturally a tall handsome charmer. They may be copying the religious homeschoolers actions with only a part of the whole plan.
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I was also homeschooled. I think it depends very much on the child and the parents. I'm pretty smart and was capable of learning from just textbooks with no real input from my mom, as was my brother. All we needed was an adult to keep us from dicking around all day. My sister is also smart, but has dyslexia and I suspect a touch of autism, and she struggled hard even with my mom spending a lot of time trying to help her learn. It's hard to know if the public school would've helped her, as we lived in a small town which wouldn't have necessarily had tons of resources, but it's a distinct possibility. Other parents fail their kids by just checking out completely, and of course a child isn't going to care about learning on his own if the parents aren't making him. So I think that there's a minimum threshold of parent involvement, where you at least make sure the kids stay on task, and possibly take a more active hand in teaching if the kids aren't able to just absorb textbooks.
Socially, I think it's not as bad as people say but it's not a complete non issue either. I was pretty socially awkward until late high school, and even the start of college. But again, it's hard to know how much of that was due to my innate tendencies - I was in the local elementary school for first grade, and I was socially awkward and got picked on then too. I would say that it didn't give me any particular trouble when I was trying to date and marry, at least. I had issues in that regard but it was due more to being overweight (and self conscious about said same), so I had a real lack of confidence which is not an attractive quality. But I seriously doubt that I would've done any better had I been in the local high school. And, of course, it could've been worse - my wife has social anxiety that she has to fight to this day because she got bullied in school, so for some kids it's hard not to wonder if they wouldn't have done better outside the school system.
For a man, it's hard for him to develop confidence with taking the lead with women unless he gets to practice it in an environment with plentiful women. As a short, conventionally unattractive man, I had to work hard on improving my body and conversational skills to speak to women. This involved trying and failing many times. Women thought I was weird. I mean, I'm commenting here on the Motte so you know I'm already at least a bit autistic, and talking to women did not come naturally at all.
Homeschool would have been the social death of me I think, but I can't say that with certainty. If I was tall and/or more conventionally good looking, it wouldn't have mattered because I would have had more easy chances to socialize with women anyway. Women are easy to talk to with practice, but the opportunities to practice depend on your social environment (home schooled or not) and your physical looks (can be innate or self-improved).
So, my recommendation is that short, somewhat autistic boys should not be homeschooled unless you want them to have little chance for them to be seen as a suitable mate for women. If they are tall or good looking though, then homeschool is perfectly fine because the women will come naturally later.
It didn’t feel like school was very helpful for the short autistic guys I knew either though. Or for the tall autistic guys. High school is probably the worst environment to learn how to flirt (after your workplace), you’re stuck with the same people year after year, and any cringey attempt at practicing your ability to flirt risks becoming gossip that the whole school learns about.
My high school was relatively packed at 2500+ students, I never got the chance to know most of them. I had about 5 or 6 classes and different people each semester, so YMMV. For guys, there's always a fresh crop of freshman girls for the incoming class each year. There were at least 3 junior high schools feeding into my high school.
I agree high school isn't great, but the alternative is college with no practice or hard lessons learned before that. College for me was a "whew, this is a chance to start fresh" opportunity that I did much better in after applying the failures in high school. Sexual access for men is competitive, why hamstring ugly sons for no reason.
Maybe I’m a romantic but I find it a little sad if you don’t get the magical experience of a spark spontaneously forming between you and a classmate you’re sitting next to, doing what you can do group projects with them, and stumbling on a romance that way. Your first romantic experience should be one without practice, with butterflies in your stomach, awkwardly holding hands for the first time, leaning your head on their shoulder, both of you discovering everything for the first time together. You can’t get that with someone that’s just flirting practice, like you can’t pick the first person you fall in love with.
Early romances like you describe, which start out fiery but often end quickly are exactly the kind of experience you can't get while being homeschooled until college. It's practice in romance. Separately, flirting practice is important too.
There are also fiery romances in college, but the expected social knowledge about romance is higher as everyone is older and usually more experienced. Women can get away with being completely inexperienced, in fact many men prefer an innocent maiden. Inexperienced men are just seen as clumsy, like a partner leading a dance who keeps stepping on your foot and elbowing you in the face.
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I don't think homeschool would've been the death of you. It's not like you don't get to talk to girls. I saw plenty of young ladies my age when I was in high school, even if we weren't going to school together, after all. I do agree that it's a practice thing, the biggest problem in my experience was that in this arena, success begets success and failure begets failure. You need to go into that interaction with an easygoing self confidence, but at least for me that self confidence was destroyed by past rejections and it took me a long time to try to figure out how to build it up. I truly don't think anything would've been different for me in this regard if my school situation had been different.
You were in high school but also homeschooled? Wouldn't that make you not homeschooled?
I do agree that success begets success, assuming you were aware of the real reasons for success and not misattributing success to other reasons like "being a nice guy". But failure does not always beget failure. There is a type of crippling rejection failure that can be damaging, but it can also be viewed as a learning experience, like "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".
I would not say that "high school" means "went to a school campus and studied there", but rather it is a generic term for that level of education no matter where you get it. That is what I meant at any rate.
I did not fully flesh out my idea that success begets success etc, but what I meant was in terms of self confidence. When you succeed, you feel confident that you can do it again. Conversely, if you fail, you feel less confident that you will succeed in the future. And because people find confidence attractive, I believe that someone who gets off on a successful foot has a significant edge in terms of future success attracting mates, versus someone who gets off to a start with a couple of failures under his belt. I think that the guy who succeeds a time or two can more easily brush off future rejections, because he knows "I did it before so it's not impossible", whereas the guy who gets shot down a couple of times starts to believe "I guess I just can't do it", and that his lack of self confidence hinders his future prospects. In that way, it seems to me like romantic success and failure can be a vicious (or virtuous) cycle, where your past performance can influence your future performance. Obviously exceptions exist, but it seems like a decent general hypothesis to me.
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I think discontinuing homeschooling in late middle school or early high school is a strategy concocted in order to make getting into college easier.
t. was homeschooled through 7th grade
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IQ tests that early are not reliable, and there will be significant test-retest variability. You would, at the bare minimum, want to repeat the process several times. Adult IQ is much more stable.
IQ tests are only reliable when given that early, I don't know what you're on about. Testing adults only gives you a proxy score.
IQ at 6 is more stable than a pre-school test, but that is still not the ideal age for tracking. You're looking at r of 0.77 with a test done at 18, versus r of 0.89 if done at 12 and compared to 18.
https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%20-%20Knowns%20and%20Unknowns.pdf
My point is that 6 is likely too early to make drastic decisions about tracking, and you probably want to revisit things several years later anyway and before 16. "Not reliable" is stronger wording than I should have used, but if you're going to use "top 10%" scores at the age of six for that kind of high stakes decision making, you've lost me. A far more sensible approach would be to at least administer tests 2-3 times in between, with gaps long enough to reduce practice effects.
?
IQ tests are designed to predict academic potential, and as such have to be given before academics really begin, beyond the basics necessary for testing. You could do the testing at two or three, but prior to formal education at the very latest.
If you're worried about kids who somehow brick it, or who are hyper-conscientious and brute-force an education, let the top 25% take college placement at fifteen, but only take the top 10% regardless. Letting universities expand beyond that wide a field is a mistake. Ten percent is probably triple what we need as a society. Every college student beyond the competitive necessity of top-level IQs married to competent postgraduate education is a drag on society, mostly through their rent-seeking behavior.
This is all academic to me. Do you think I was kidding about not worrying about a college fund for my kids? Elite overproduction or over-expansion of higher education rank low on the list of things I care about.
The longitudinal validity of IQ testing for toddlers is not great. 6 is just about the very earliest where this makes a reasonable amount of sense. 2 or 3 is... why bother?
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For most smart kids. You probably weren't dumber than average.
I've been around homeschoolers a lot. Rad trads might have a slight IQ advantage over the general population, but it's not huge if it even is there to begin with, and getting away with a couple of hours every other day sounds about right.
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Nah. Smart kids are like ten minutes a day.
The tards might take two hours, the average kids an hour.
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Yes but you don't come from a country with an average IQ of 80 that wants to pretend to have an average of 100.
No, but I bet their schoolteachers are even dumber than ours.
What I mean is that for countries like Korea and India to produce engineers on par with Europeans, they require 200% more effort, because they have less natural intelligence.
Korea has a higher IQ than most of Europe. So does Japan.
Not at the same level of studying as white people. Their IQ in that case is much lower. Maybe 95.
95 is well within the European average, it's higher than the Iberian peninsula for example.
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The whole coaching system seems counterproductive to me. Excellence isn't produced by ruthless drill so much as internal all-consuming obsession. If there's some autist who loves maths, then let him do maths, give him more maths. If you train kids to be super good at passing tests, they'll learn and get very good at tests and maths but is that needed? The internal motivation to make cool things in the real world cannot be taught or trained, only internally developed. I guess if you just need more engineers then maxxing the number of good engineers makes sense... But is that what India or Asia really needs, more engineers?
Better more obsessives who make BYD or whatever, new products and companies. Jensen Huang is an obsessive.
Indeed coaching might be talent-destroying if it destroys internal motivation and enthusiasm needed to pursue new things, start new businesses, make innovations. I met a kid who'd been extensively coached to the point of PTSD, literally shaking at the thought of even simple equations, his whole ego had been eroded to nothing by competition and the mathematical certainty of disappointing due to the severity of competition.
And like you say who cares about education now? The best AIs are getting better faster than anyone can learn maths. We should be shutting down schools and universities.
Except we're not testing for excellence, we are testing for what metrics we can measure that lead to greater financial outcomes later in life. That's sort of why it's uncoupled; the fundamental problem is trying to convince parents, and by default, a society organized around financial benefit, that their child outperforming their peers on measurable metrics isn't important and fiscally viable.
"No, your child is low economic value, therefore we will not bother," will go over about as well as a lead balloon, even if it might be better for the child's mental health and societies where education is funded by the public purse.
If we just want to make money, why not send children straight to work? Give them amphetamines too for heightened performance... There's more to civilization than making money.
Society isn't really organized for financial benefit, some parts are but most is not. It doesn't make any financial sense to redistribute wealth from young to old via pensions and choke off productive investments. Much of university has no economic return. The origin of university was to train erudite clergy after all.
Excessive materialism is a real problem, especially in Asia. But in other places there's insufficient materialism or a misguided kind of piety that results in wasting resources unnecessarily. Abandoning phonics for instance, nobody was being paid to teach worse, nobody profited from it. The teachers just wanted to do things that way.
There needs to be a balance between 'money money money, I want more money by hook or by crook, let me spin up 50 AI agents thirst-trapping lonely dudes on Insta' and 'fuck the rich, tax the bastards, unrealized capital gains tax now so we can spend six figures on every homeless', far away from those cartoonish extremes and the more moderate but still harmful failure modes they point to.
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