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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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“ 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.