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Zuckerberg, SBF, Chamath. Seems like a lot have done it. In Musks orbit it seems like he does it a lot even with non-attractive people. His Doge choices were young. Nikita Bier at Twitter.
PM roles aren’t pure engineering. Dartmouth outside of HYPS is as prestigious as anywhere and coming from Albania getting into a top school is hard (white and had fewer resources). Albania to Dartmouth Engineering is a strong indicator of ability and agency. Only MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are more prestigious of the engineering schools. If my goal coming from Albania was to get into US tech I would probably rank Dartmouth as my 9th choice after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, University of Chicago, and Colombia. Maybe CMU is better but Dartmouth opens up better trad finance jobs too. And probably about half a dozen schools at the same level. A poor white you would basically choose whichever lets you in and/or consider their aid. Seems a little weird to me to not consider Dartmouth engineering as prestigious enough not to get a foot in the door to perform.
Though she did backdoor Dartmouth thru a guaranteed transfer program, but again she’s essentially poor unconnected white so getting Ivy isn’t easy.
She's a white woman in engineering, emphasis woman. There is never enough women of any race in engineering, she meets the quota. Doubly so at some Ivy League where they explicitly discriminate for it. I doubt she paid a lot out of pocket or was sufficiently put out by it.
We have very different definitions of good engineering schools. You seem to be ranking them based on international prestige. The Ivies aren't great engineering schools. They aren't horrible, you'll get a great education, but they don't crack the top ten, though I guess this list includes Princeton. Ivies are schools for kids of the elite. Elites don't go become engineers.
Engineering School Rankings
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.
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.
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.
I did. And I went to another top 10 from that list as my master's program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To state the obvious why would you compare Dartmouth admit rate to % IQ score? Most people don’t both applying to Ivy schools because they have no chance at getting in.
Not sure how you can be quanty if you don’t see that immediately. A quick grok tells me 51% of high schoolers take the SAT…let’s use 50% for easy math. Dartmouths median SAT score is 1500-1570. I asked grok where does a 1530 SAT score fall within SAT score distributions? It told me top 99%. But only half of students take the SAT. Asked further and 1530 is the exact cut-off for 99%. So the median Dartmouth student is the top .5% of high school graduates based on SAT scores. It’s top 1% of SAT takers and half don’t take the test.
For her specifically we know she did a less competitive dual degree program with Dartmouth. So maybe didn’t get in or perhaps other reasons. We know she is white so no affirmative action. She’s also English as a second language which may have hurt her verbal SAT scores. She majored in Engineering which tends to have higher IQs. She was able to get into hard firms to get into which if anything should give a positive Bayesian assumption for her IQ.
If the median Dartmouth grad is in the top .5% of IQ then guessing she’s top .3% seems reasonable to me.
So Yes on IQ testing there is strong evidence she is in the top .3% of people. Potentially a little lower, but almost certainly top 1%. Top .3% people can generally learn almost anything when they are passionate about it. I wouldn’t call top .3% genius level as there is a clear gap between those people and Bill Gates/Terrence Tao.
I feel like you don’t realize that people in that grouping can learn as they go and get involved in things. And a top .3% IQ plus attractive and social would definitely get promoted quickly. This isn’t nepotism since there is strong evidence she is very high skilled.
But again you made a very basic math mistake of using admittance rate to measure competitiveness. It would be fun to be a Navy Seal, but I never applied because I know they would never take me.
Also I wouldn’t expect a true genius to end up at Dartmouth unless American higher ed is that broken. Those 50-100 people are hopefully still getting selected into Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech and University of Chicago. Unless the filters are really broken now.
For what it’s worth grok says a 1530 SAT correlates to a 130-143 IQ. So the median Dartmouth grad would be like 137 IQ. So I guess you would consider them basically geniuses.
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