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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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First, I’ve never heard of a school tilting admissions based on intended major at the undergraduate level (Ivy plus). Because it’s obvious extremely easy to just lie.

Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now. Most have higher female populations. Notre Dame is the only other topish school that has more males than females (guess conservatism or football draw). So the Ivies almost certainly moderately discriminate against females if anything. My guess is engineering backdoor program shifts it male.

Engineering rankings have major issues with the emphasis on research. Purdue is 8th. No one is choosing Purdue Engineering over Dartmouth engineering and most wouldn’t even choose University of Illinois over Dartmouth. Purdue engineers hit a career ceiling much earlier. The IQ gap between a Dartmouth engineer and a Purdue engineer is gigantic. And people want the credential signaling of Dartmouth (and signaling of 20+ IQ points) on their resume.

This reminds me of the Lantern episode Sunday night where the alien could recite Google on a topic but didn’t know things every American knows. lanterns No academically talented student is choosing Purdue over Dartmouth. OpenAI isn’t hiring from Purdue.

The lower end engineering schools are preferred for like basic engineering on old tech like building a road or keeping a foundry running. SV is going to take the candidate with demonstrated higher IQ everyday. And Dartmouth does that. It’s not just “prestige” it’s the filter of getting into Dartmouth as an indicator of ability.

First, I’ve never heard of a school tilting admissions based on intended major at the undergraduate level (Ivy plus). Because it’s obvious extremely easy to just lie.

Then you must have had your head in the sand this past decade, idk what to tell you. You strictly have not been paying attention. Lying is entirely the point. Ivy's are selecting for if you are willing and can play the game, signaling elite social understanding. Schools absolutely discriminate on demographics based on intended major.

Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now.

Again bad stats. You are stating the the general population should be used as the judge for a localized population. This is the pay-gap stats slight of hand all over again. Also she didn't go into CS now, she went in 2007-2011. Back in peak CS gender discrimination territory.

Purdue is 8th. No one is choosing Purdue Engineering over Dartmouth engineering

I did. And I went to another top 10 from that list as my master's program.

The IQ gap between a Dartmouth engineer and a Purdue engineer is gigantic

I have met and worked with many engineers, undergrads and PhDs, at FAANGs, Research companies, internships, etc. From prestigious schools (MIT, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, CMU) and good-state schools (Purdue, Georgia Tech, Texas AM, Urbana, Iowa, Wisconsin Madison, Michigan), and I can tell you that at no time was undergrad school education ever correlated with perceived IQ. Let alone 20+ IQ points, which is the difference between an average IQ and gifted. Last time I was seriously tested I think I got a 129(?) converted via a Raven's Progressive Matrices test.

OpenAI isn’t hiring from Purdue.

Any evidence of that? I have classmates that went into FAANG companies, Tesla, SpaceX, NASA, Palantir, and those are just the few I remember. Considering Murati's first job was Tesla, it looks like haughty Dartmouth is in the same hiring bucket as lowly baseborn Purdue lol. A quick scroll through OpenAI's LinkedIn, and about 40% of its workforce comes from public state schools. A ton come from Stanford, but that should be a shock to no one, given that Stanford is in the Bay where OpenAI is headquartered, locality matters is probably the overwhelming thing that I have learned. Companies hire from local schools more often than not.

The lower end engineering schools are preferred for like basic engineering

Lucky for you that I'm the one building all the Military AI weapons then, with your opinion, they obviously won't work very well and thus the world is safe.

SV is going to take the candidate with demonstrated higher IQ everyday

Yeah... have been in the bay, have been hired by companies in the bay, have left the bay. I don't think you know what you are talking about. This reads as a non-American or supremely closeted person with a poor understanding of America or really the world.

“ I did. And I went to another top 10 from that list as my master's program.”

You literally complained about not getting the opportunities of a Dartmouth grad. Like your whole posts was she’s just getting PM jobs early because of nepotism, but maybe it was the Dartmouth degree value?

And you do need data that lying about enrolling in engineering is an admissions hack to the Ivy League. If it was then 99% of applications would be engineering.

I’m more wall st focused but yes they want the high IQ schools for selection. But like I said your complaining that you weren’t fast tracked to PM and now claiming firms don’t care about the Dartmouth name….yet apparently they do.

You literally complained about not getting the opportunities of a Dartmouth grad. Like your whole posts was she’s just getting PM jobs early because of nepotism, but maybe it was the Dartmouth degree value?

Possible but how many of these other grads went on to be executives at major companies in their 30s? Doing an ablation that to show the value of a Dartmouth degree separate from the individual isn't really possible, but comparatively to other parts of its student population becoming a major CTO at 33 is extremely rare.

you weren’t fast tracked to PM

I've never wanted to be a PM, I've always wanted to be an ML researcher, which is what I am now... I'm cynically examining how she got to where she is, and comparing that against myself and people I've worked with, including Ivy grads and FAANG engineers and wondering how many of us have the same set of opportunities for that level of advancement.

My general question is: how did a no-name nobody, without any exceptionally displayed technical skills get onto an executive-acceleration track so early that, by age ~29, she was entering OpenAI at the VP level? I'm sure we'll never really know, but if you don't look at outliers without clear evidence of why and are skeptical. Then we operate on different levels of pattern recognition and sense making.

I don’t see her as an outlier. Dartmouth Engineering as I’ve repeatedly said is a perfectly fine high 2nd tier credentials to work from (MIT/Caltech/Harvard being tier 1). 29 isn’t that young. OpenAI wasn’t OpenAI when she joined. That’s like joining Jane St in 2005. Dartmouth engineering still puts you in the top .3% intellectual ability so sociability and lookism doesn’t seem to be crazy to get you a little jump to executive. She might not be Bill Gates smart but there aren’t really that many people at his level. She would only be jumping ahead of people marginally smarter. She’s well within the ability cohort and not in a nepo category.

Sure not many make the executive ranks anywhere. But if she has executive traits she’s also clearly smart enough to play at that level. There’s not that many people in the world a clear step function higher in intelligence than Dartmouth engineering.

Dartmouth engineering still puts you in the top .3% intellectual ability

And I think this is an absolutely balls to the wall insane claim, to the point that I struggle to think you even understand statistics or intelligence. A .3% puts you at 141 IQ, which is genius level. Dartmouth has what like 7k students, any of the ones who are admitted get to study their specialty without any further sorting. Dartmouth has a 6% admission rate, which is already 20x less than 0.3%. You are stating that every classroom in Dartmouth engineering is filled with geniuses. Where are all these geniuses? There should be ~300 of them every year according to current Dartmouth engineering numbers. Looking through Dartmouth Alumni lists, I'm seeing very little in the way of groundbreaking inventions that would accompany genius tier alumni.

If you are in finance, I get the weird IQ fixation and the inclination towards prestige as the metric of excellence. Everyone in your field seems to have it. But I've never seen evidence that it is justified on any metrics other than an attempt to be status-obsessed elitists.

I can tell you that in engineering circles, Purdue is considered significantly more prestigious than it's reputation among the general populous (which is to me evidence of your location) which tend to consider Ivies as the height of academic prestige.

Dartmouth has a 6% admission rate, which is already 20x less than 0.3%.

Would you say that Dartmouth applicants are a nationally representative sample? If not, why assume it?

The 25th-75th percentile SAT scores of Dartmouth students are 1500-1570. The 99.5th percentile among test takers is around 1560 and extrapolating to a nationally representative sample they estimate the 99.5th there at around 1520.

any of the ones who are admitted get to study their specialty without any further sorting

Self-selection is also a form of sorting. The latest ED table had prospective engineers' SAT scores averaging 1174, vs 1028 for all students

His claim may be wrong (the data is a little sparse) but there is nothing "balls to the wall insane" about it.

I'm seeing very little in the way of groundbreaking inventions that would accompany genius tier alumni.

.3% of the US is the top 900,000 Americans. Are you expecting groundbreaking inventions from most of them?

I struggle to think you even understand statistics or intelligence

Even if this had been justified it would have been against the rules here.

Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now. Most have higher female populations. Notre Dame is the only other topish school that has more males than females (guess conservatism or football draw). So the Ivies almost certainly moderately discriminate against females if anything.

You can't conclude that from that information. Perhaps it's an indication that it's worth investigating, but other elite schools having greater female proportion than Ivies doesn't indicate Ivies discriminating against females; it could be that a disproportionately high number and high quality of male students apply to Ivies compared to other elite schools.

It could also be that other elite schools discriminate in favor of females more than the Ivies do; this would at least support the notion that Ivies are relatively more discriminatory against females (by being less positively discriminatory in favor of them) compared to other elite schools. However, we would still need that applicant information to make such a conclusion.

First the engineering/military schools do have skewed male-female ratios so that naturally does make more to candidates at the other schools female if top candidates are 50-50.

But a bigger issue is some high IQ men struggle in high school and don’t have the gpas. If they only selected on SAT and not gpa then the talent pool would shift dramatically.

If a school is 53-47 female I think it’s reasonable to assume the school is either expressing no female-male preference or has a male preference. Most schools do want to get close to 50-50 because it’s viewed as improving student life. People want to date and flirt with fellow students. So if there is gender discrimination at Harvard it’s more likely they are gently stepping on the scale for the 47% male minority. Fairly certain Notre Dame does the reverse and mildly favors female applications.

The main reason the schools a step down from the Ivies have high female populations is because a second tier prestige school has significantly lower male interest and the second tier male population credentials significantly worsen again not on SATs but high school isn’t geared towards the male brain and thus lower gpas.