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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31416 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I wrote a rather long post on my reflections in the wake of affirmative action, detailing why I'm mostly ambivalent about its end and what I see as the core problem with college admissions. One section is mirrored/excerpted below:

[...] hearing some prestige university arguments for affirmative action in non-technical positions, I find myself almost persuaded.

Almost. And then I see the chart that gives the game away, the chart that should be seared into the mind of every observer to the affirmative action debate: the Asian Discrimination Chart.

Why, if the goal was to ensure representation of vulnerable or historically discriminated against populations—why precisely did Harvard and other top universities use "holistic" factors to ensure Asian Americans had to climb a steeper objective hill not just than under-represented minority students, but than all others?

Well, just what sort of business do you think Harvard is in?

Harvard's Business

You don't get to be in the position Harvard is without understanding certain games on a deep institutional level, without playing them better than all others. Harvard is no mere technical school, seeking to train domain experts in rigorous ways. No. It's an Ivy League School, and more than that, it's Harvard. Its mission is not to find the best, but to define the best. And with all due respect to Yale and new upstart Stanford, it's been the best in that business since before the founding of the United States.

Harvard students, put simply, are better than you. This isn't me saying this, mind: it's the whole holistic edifice of university admissions and university rankings, the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress, really every prestige institution in the country. Ask McKinsey or Deloitte if you need convincing. Check where your professors went to school. Run up to a random passerby on the street and see what they think of a Harvard degree. Like it or not, it's a near-universal symbol of competence.

Some are better than you because of their heritage, some because of their wealth, some because of their connections. Some, in part, because of their race: you cannot maintain credible elite institutions with few black people sixty years after the civil rights movement. And, yes, some because of their academics, their intelligence and their work ethic. What sort of elite would it be, after all, if it did not pay lip service to the ideal of meritocracy that inspires so many of the hoi polloi, did not reassure them that academic skill, too, would be counted among its holistic ranking? Most, to be clear, have a combination of the above, a mix precisely in line with Harvard's dreams. Admit just the right set to render your institution legitimate as the elite.

I've met many Harvard students by now, and to be frank, it was almost always clear quite rapidly why they were attending Harvard while I was not. I'll give their admissions team this: they're good at their jobs. It's comforting to imagine some sort of cosmic balancing, where aptitude in one domain is balanced by struggle in another, but Nature is crueller than that. I won't claim every Harvard student is peerless. But they are, by and large, an extraordinarily impressive group of young people, by any measure. That's what happens when you spend several centuries building a reputation as the best of the best. It is a true signal of excellence, one that any individual, rational, ambitious actor should pursue.

For twelve years, every student in the country toils away in a system shouting egalitarianism at every turn. Look at policy priorities and school budgets and you'll see it: an earmark for the disadvantaged here, a special program there, an outpouring of funding for special education in this district, and of course classroom after classroom where teachers patiently work with the students who just need a bit of extra help.

Then comes admissions season, and with a wink and a nod, the system strips away the whole veneer and asks, "So, just how well did you play the game? ...you were aware you were playing the game, yes?"

Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst. Not just the most capable academics, mind: are you telling me you want a campus full of nerds? Please. Leave that to MIT and Caltech.

I don't want to be reduced to just a number, you say. Very well, Harvard responds, we will judge the whole of you and find you wanting. Is that better?

Let us return to the question, then: why does Harvard discriminate against Asians?

Set aside every bit of high-minded rhetoric, even understanding that most who give noble justifications have convinced themselves of those justifications. Set aside every bit of idealism, even understanding that most at every level of education are indeed idealists. Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough.

I try to be cautious in using the phrase "systemic racism"—I find it often abused past the breaking point. But as I've said in terser form before, if you want a pure example of the term, and a pure demonstration of just what game Harvard is playing, look no further than its treatment of Asian Americans. Elite values—the true values underlying an institution like Harvard—are never fully legible and never fully set. In easy cases, they align with the values trumpeted on the surface: we value intelligence, we value hard work, we want to give everyone an equal shot.

One problem: Asian Americans came along and took those values a bit too seriously. They started gaming the system by taking it earnestly at face value and working to align with explicit institutional values. But admit too many, and the delicate balance is upset, the beating heart of elite culture animating the whole project disrupted. Academics-focused students, after all, lack social development and, as Harvard infamously argued in the case, simply have bad personalities.

Harvard's been around long enough to have played this game a few times before. When a new group gets too good at understanding and pursuing the explicit values it uses to grant its project the veneer of legitimacy, it smiles, thanks them for their applications, and then changes its process.

As sociologist Jerome Karabel documents, this is in fact the original inspiration for holistic admissions. From The New Yorker:

The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” [...] Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.

As public values change, the conception of "elite" changes with them. Harvard and its co-luminaries do not quarrel with each change in turn. They simply adopt them, embrace them, and embody them. In the '50s and '60s, this meant (again per the above New Yorker article) Yale accepting a mediocre academic who seemed like "more of a guy" than his competitors, proudly noting the proportion of six-footers, and watching out for troubling homosexual tendencies. In the 1980s, it meant disapproving notes from Harvard admissions about "shyness," a student seeming "a tad frothy," and one poor soul who was "short with big ears."

In 2023, it means hyperfocusing on one particular, often self-contradictory, frame of Diversity, on preaching ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, and inclusivity quite at odds with its pedigree. And yes, it means that Asians have stellar academics and extracurriculars but, alas, inviting too many would wreck the vibe.

What galls about this all—and look, how could it not?—what galls is the hypocrisy. What galls is watching some of the most elitist and exclusive institutions in the country preach inclusiveness while closing their doors to all but a minute fraction of those who apply, preach egalitarianism while serving as the finishing schools of the most privileged.

If the leaders of Harvard and Yale truly believed in the values they espouse, they would tear their schools to the ground, stone by stone, brick by brick. If the administrators and student body truly, in their heart of hearts, believed in a philosophy of egalitarian inclusiveness rather than the image of themselves as the deserving elite, nothing would be left of either by tomorrow morning.

In the other sections, I focus on a comparison to the Navy Seals (flat admission standards & high-attrition pipeline vs opaque standards where admission itself is the prize and graduating is trivial), examine my personal experience with the whole thing, and cover why I'm skeptical the AA ban will change much in a practical sense.

I actually think I have a pretty good idea of how the discrimination against Asians worked in practice. I went to a public high school (not a magnet or charter, just a regular public high school) of about 1500 kids, which was around 50% Asian split pretty evenly between East and South Asians, which placed around 20 kids into Ivy League schools every year out of the ~400 person graduating classes, and many more into the next tier of schools. My 1500 SAT was like 80th percentile in my graduating class iirc. I’d say there were about 100 kids who were the stereotypical children of Tiger Mom’s. They were obviously very smart, but they weren’t geniuses- they studied really hard to get high scores on their APs and to do well in their classes. When they weren’t studying they were doing some sort of resume box-ticking like playing in the orchestra despite not seeming to be passionate about music, playing a sport they weren’t really trying to compete in like cross country, or joining one of the random schools clubs that didn’t really do much. Many of these kids really did seem to fit the exact stereotype of Asian kids with “bad personalities” that seemed to be joylessly going through the motions of trying to get into an elite school, and their résumés and test scores were certainly good enough for any of the ivies. These kids mostly seemed to end up on a large scholarship at local public school, or at one of non-Ivy elites. I’m sure most of them will be very successful in tech or engineering or whatever, but I doubt any of them will be remarkable. The kids who did make it to an Ivy League were the 10-20 who were either: 1. Extremely nerdy, but legitimate geniuses. The kids who took the AP calc exam in their freshman year, and were winning Olympiad competitions and such and 2. The Asian kids who fit all the Tiger Mom criteria, but were also social butterflies involved in student government, seriously competed in sports, etc. The type 1s I expect to be impressive academics in whichever field they study, and the type 2s will fit perfectly in the “elite fields” which require more soft skills like finance, law, consulting or whatever.

I don’t agree this is a fair system at all, but I will say in my experience it seems like the Ivies were quite good at spotting the “future elite” types out of the dozens of qualified Asian resumes they received every year from my school

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away there was beautiful and noble kingdom ruled by wise old king, kingdom where if you wanted to be anything then dirt grubbing peasant, if you wanted any qualified job, office or position you had to be a noble. No commoner filth allowed.

You are not born a noble? Fortunately, the king is good and kind, and will grant title of nobility to you if he likes you and thinks you could make a proper noble.

Ofc it is not for free, you do not get your patent of nobility without paying a fee.

You are broke loser? No worry, king's friends from Shark, Mosquito & Leech Banking House will lend you the necessary sum, at reasonable interest rate. Do not even think about welshing on the debt.

The system works well for everyone, as it should in fairy tale land, but there are some people who are still unhappy.

Some think that King when issuing the noble titles favors some provinces in his kingdom, and should distribute the patents of nobility more equitably.

Some think that the fee paid for patent is too high, and should be more affordable.

Some think that nobles who cannot repay their debt because there do not have any well paid office or position, should have their debts reduced or forgiven.

Some think that the King does not grant enough patents of nobility, and rejects many qualified applicants who can pay.

Some think that the King grants too many patents of nobility, and devalues nobility by admitting unworthy applicants.

Some think that the King grants patents of nobility just according to his whim and whims of his officials, and the process should be made more transparent.

Some think that corruption might be involved in the whole process of handing patents of nobility, and the King should crack hard on his officials demanding additional pay and favors for themselves.

But no one questions the principle of monarchy and nobility, and rightly so, because fairy tale kingdom without kings and nobles is not a fairy tale kingdom!

And some (like me) think that the King has poor taste, admitting mediocrities genuinely unsuited to the responsibilities of nobility who will therefore bend their mediocre talents toward scapegoating society for their mediocrity and attempting to undermine and erode it out of spite.

Choosing who you let join you at the top is, as the King knows, the greatest privilege of wealth and power. Anyone with these things relishes the opportunity to elevate individuals of their choice to ensure both loyalty and the correct balance of traits one seeks in one's companions.

As long as hierarchy of money and status exist, those at the top will enjoy devising or letting fall into place these complex systems of patronage.

I'm having a hard time telling if you're arguing against credentialism (which I mostly agree with) or against the concept of social status (the elimination of which is a pipe dream).

There are about 3.5 million high school graduates each year. The literal 1% is 35000 students. Without international students, Harvard admits about 1750 Americans each year, or 5% of the 1%. All these numbers are inexact, but the scale is obvious: Harvard's admission process isn't really about identifying the 1% among its huge pile of applicants, which is not actually that huge, only about 60000, and most of the 35000 are in it. If Harvard wanted to, it could simply pick the applicants at random, admit 3500 Americans instead of 1750, fail half of them after the first semester and achieve basically the same result: only the one-percenters would remain.

The dirty secret is that practically none of these 3500 students would fail their exams. The top 1% of high school alumni is Harvard-grade. But so is the next 1%, and the one after it and so on, I'd say the top 5% of high school graduates countrywide, or 175000 people could easily graduate from Harvard. What Harvard does instead is define what the actual elite should look like, and matches its applicants against this profile: sufficiently similar to the previous generations to not threaten the existing order of things, fashionably diverse but not exceedingly so, likely to support Harvard monetarily and to preserve its privileged position later. It doesn't admit many Asians because it doesn't like them. The number of generous, gregarious and charismatic individuals with a strong internal drive can truly be lower among non-legacy Asian applicants than among other races, but that doesn't make the selection criteria less racist.

The top 1% of high school graduates nationally, sure, are basically all smart enough for Harvard.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions. Lots of individual high schools have valedictorians who are not college material.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions.

This statement sounds weird to me? "There is no way to identify them, unless you use the extremely obvious and easy method to identify them."

The USA culturally puts more emphasis on grades as opposed to strictly standardized test scores(yes, these are different things in the US). Changing that would require getting rid of everyone overseeing college admissions and then putting new people in.

If you meet these kids, it is immediately obvious, in the first minute or so, whether the child has it or not. The difference between the top kids (say, the top 20% of the class at a top university) and the rest is palpable. The top 5% are different yet again, and the smartest ten kids in the grade are obvious to all the faculty who mee them, as well as all their peers.

The SAT does not work, especially know that all the heavily g loaded parts have been removed.

Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.

I’m quite confident that the typical public high school in Baltimore Maryland, Jackson Mississippi, Washington DC, and certain parts of Central Valley fits the bill. I would be shocked if chicago and LA and New York didn’t have at least a few apiece.

I in general expect low performing high schools to be much, much worse than it says on the tin because of fraud on the part of teachers and administrators.

There are 60 schools in Chicago where no student is proficient in math or reading.

These are not underfunded schools. The Douglass Academy High School gets $56k a student and has none that are proficient in reading.

And to note- the usual response to a high failure rate in schools is to lower standards, and admins and teachers are strongly incentivized to make rounding errors in a students favor. These are not unrealistically high standards; these are extremely doable standards even for a student body with an average IQ in the 80’s.

If I could design an elite college admissions system, here’s what I’d do:

I like the idea of an admissions essay. With two caveats:

  1. It must not involve any mention of the author, their life or their personal experiences. Every writer takes inspiration from their own stories, but thinly veiled personal narratives would be explicitly discouraged.

  2. Applicants are advised that essays about niche topics unfamiliar to admissions officers are strongly preferred.

The essays would be 950 words, with a 10 word margin, to encourage some discipline. Students would be encouraged to write about something officers hadn’t heard much (or anything) about, which would encourage original research. The essays would serve as strong indicators of verbal IQ, which is much more important for making it into the elite than spatial IQ.

Write an essay about a bizarre facet of local politics in a tiny village. Cover a weird crime nobody has ever written about. Tell me about a strange academic debate that occurred in a single third-rate Armenian university in the dying days of communism. This would drastically improve the jobs of admissions staff. It would also encourage genuine diversity of interests and even background to some extent.

The best essayists, who at Harvard, Yale and Stanford I would expect to rival the better staff writers at a Vanity Fair or equivalent, would be invited to interview.

The interview would involve three components.

  • The first would be a small talk stage where a handful of candidates would be put in a room with each other and some faculty. Their behavior would be observed. The ability to build rapport is critical. Some bias around attractiveness would creep in here, but this is a good thing, because the elite should be largely fit and beautiful.

  • The second would be a viva or panel where the interviewers would meticulously question the candidate about their essay, its inspiration and sources, the research and writing process, and the core nature of their point or argument. This element would test a student’s ability to defend themselves, to debate and to argue. It would also verify that their admissions essay was likely their own work, and that they are an intelligent and competent individual.

  • In the third component, a candidate would be handed another essay (by another candidate or pre-prepared by admissions, I’m undecided) that they had never read before. With five minutes of preparation, and before the same panel of academics and admissions staff, they would have to discuss the essay, defend any arguments therein, and rationalize any stylistic or other choices, plus defend (without evidence) the essay from criticism. This crucial stage would test a candidate’s ability to bullshit convincingly, the most important elite skill there is.

A score would be assigned based on the above three components, with each receiving equal weighting, and that score would determine admissions decisions.

What are your ideas for new college admissions systems (beyond the boring ‘just base it on the SAT’)?

This would never work for universities at large, but for certain select institutions like Harvard, I've pondered the idea of borrowing the West Point admissions process - let members of Congress nominate a certain number of students (say, 4 or 5 each every year) for admission to Harvard, after sorting through the applicants from their district/state. If diversity is the goal, this would ensure a wide range of racial, political and geographic diversity - how many Alaskans and Hawaiians get to go to Harvard otherwise?

This would heavily penalize the True Nerds, the sort who win math Olympiads, build particle accelerators in garages and hack the NSA at 15. By and large these nerds don't give a flying fuck about writing ability when they're that young (I know I certainly didn't), they don't even really try to play the game of maximizing admissions probability by volunteering or something, their life is entirely consumed by their passion and they just kind of hope that colleges will make a place for them. So under your system geniuses would no longer go to Harvard.

Isn't that a feature, not a bug? Would they even be happy at Harvard, as opposed to a couple miles down Mass Ave at the local technical school?

Those kids don’t go to Harvard anyways.

Fairness Harvard probably isn’t for them. The old University of Chicago (before they prestige whored and tried to become like everyone else), Cal Tech, the old Stanford, maybe MIT are the place for those kids.

The nice thing about "just base it on the SAT" is that the SAT is proctored. Even if you made everyone come write their 950 word essay in person, that would squelch the original-research component and yet it would still be gamed by students memorizing prepared essays in advance.

Actually ... maybe the proctored essay could work, if you gave assigned essay topics? Come up with ten thousand of them and choose 5 at random for each student to choose between when they arrive (so it doesn't matter if the list of topics leaks; they can still prep in general but not for specifics), even give students a web browser (ideally with library/Elsevier/LexisNexis/whatever subscriptions) they can research from (or copy from, but with a monitored browser that's just a filter to get rid of dumb cheaters).

As a shape rotator I still hate it, of course, but soon or later we'll be replacing the wordcels with matvecs (as well as ourselves, but grudges die hard); if we don't all die in the process it'll be nice for them to have an experience like this to look back on fondly.

In the old SAT, when it had a Writing section and was based out of 2400, had an essay. However, it was very game-able with a simple structure. You just had to do a simple 5 paragraph thing where you introduce the topic, give 2-3 examples, and clearly state a conclusion. Using some fancy SAT words helps. My friend group joked that you could always use Nazis to support your topic ("book burning is bad, when the nazis burned...")

In the old SAT

I guess this makes the pre-essay SAT I took "the ancient SAT"? And the pre-recentering version would be "the prehistoric SAT".

I never heard anything about the essay requirements that made me think much of it. My main problem with essays even when they're done right is that the grading is so much more subjective. IIRC there was some hubbub during my SAT year where a dispute about one of the Reading section questions led to a second of the multiple choice options being also accepted as correct, which I'm sure was embarrassing, but at least that's the sort of dispute you could take to the highest levels. I'm reading that each student's essay only had 2 scorers? Cross your fingers that you don't draw one of the short straws.

Of course, my real complaint about SAT changes was that they should never have removed analogies. These days the internet seems to be filled with people whose analysis of "dog : whale :: puppy : calf" is "You think dogs are the same as whales? You 'tarded, scrote?", and it's frightening to imagine that some of them might slip into college classes to ruin those too.

yes agreed. That's why you had to be formulaic. That's why to get the perfect 12 out of 12 score, you had to be obvious about what you did, so no essay grader could give you a lower score. Worst part was that you never got an explanation of why you got a 10 or 11 or 9 out of 12.

Yes analogies wouldve been nice, but it's too IQ-dependent and so obviously "racist"

Ugh. I feel old. That was the new SAT.

yeah I remember when I took it (out of 2400), it was supposed to be the "new" SAT (though it was around for a few years so we, the students, just thought of it as "the SAT")

The GRE (At least 14 years ago when I took it) had a proctored essay portion.

When I took it, the list of possible essay questions was public, but also very large. I remember I had at least read the prompt I had to answer before the exam. A quick search suggests ETS still publishes them.

… it would still be gamed by students memorizing prepared essays in advance…

If the cost of gaming your way through it is higher than the cost of doing the work outright, then it’s easier to just be an honest student and take your chances doing it the right way.

My ideal system: applicants strip naked, anoint themselves with oil, then are dropped together innawoods with nothing but a knife. The goal is to reach a pickup point a hundred miles away where 100 of them will be randomly selected to go on to stage 2. This will require them to work together while having a plan to betray their comrades, which is important for elite. Them being naked encourages looksism in their alliances, which is a good thing because the elite should be beautiful, solid, supple, tight, and golden skinned.

For stage 2 they are immediately driven over to the Mr Olympia stage and pose in front of 5000 people next to actual contestanfs. This will test their bullshitting and out-angling skills, which are the most important elite skills (have to look like the bigger guy in the hand shake photo ops).

For stage 2 they are immediately driven over to the Mr Olympia stage and pose in front of 5000 people next to actual contestanfs. This will test their bullshitting and out-angling skills, which are the most important elite skills (have to look like the bigger guy in the hand shake photo ops)

Only if they’re driven over naked, with the blood of the slain still caked on their skin.

They must ritually boil and extract the fat from the adipose tissue of the fallen, and then lather it over themselves.

That's showing that they can shine, above and beyond the process of victory against all odds.

And what better way to shine than be positively radiant; to bathe in the blubber of the fallen, then setting themselves alight? Enduring that surely shows strength of character.

This made me laugh out loud on the train, thanks. We could do with more humor here.

I'm doing my part!

Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?!

This ape does, but I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all first!

Lmao how'd I know? ;P

Applicants are advised that essays about niche topics unfamiliar to admissions officers are strongly preferred.

How could this ever be possible?

There’s no set cutoff, you can write about the Holocaust or the life of Abraham Lincoln or the Boston Tea Party if you want, but you’ll just be marked down on originality.

Idk if it's Jiro's objection, but what leaped to mind for me is, how are admissions officers supposed to evaluate the quality of essays about niche topics they don't know about? High-variance sampling to identify outliers doesn't work unless you can actually identify the outliers from the sampled data.

How do you evaluate the quality of Scott Alexander's posts on mental illness in primitive people or medicine? They're clearly still very well written.

Plus, OP said they wanted to encourage bullshitting. (not endorsing that)

I honestly can’t evaluate the quality of Scott’s primitive mental illness piece. If that were the only piece of writing I had ever seen from him, I would likely file it away in my brain with every other borderline crackpot blog post.

On the other hand, I have enough knowledge of biology and contact with the medical system to know when someone “gets it”. I can see that he is making points that are 1.) obviously correct, and 2.) that other people aren’t making. This is strong Bayesian evidence that Scott is indeed highly intelligent.

... but what leaped to mind for me is, how are admissions officers supposed to evaluate the quality of essays about niche topics they don't know about?...

As with anything, you never know. You have to rely on your best judgment and good taste to make that determination. My father used to tell me about old accounts of him and my uncle, trying to pioneer the idea of opening a restaurant when they were very young. My uncle would say, "it's easy, we'll just hire all the right people." To which my father's objection was, "how do you know they're the right people?" You don't. You simply evaluate them the best and only way you can.

Truth value of such an essay is hardly the point, right? If someone can make up a convincing yarn, more power to them.

No... you absolutely do not want people who make shit up to score points. Why on Earth would that be a good idea?

I suppose for power-seeking Machiavellian reasons, but if we're redesigning the college university system to not churn out bullshit indistinguishable from meaningful content, then we should start with not conditioning admissions on being able to churn out bullshit indistinguishable from meaningful content.

I have some bad news for you about major components of the college admissions system.

No... you absolutely do not want people who make shit up to score points. Why on Earth would that be a good idea?

Unfortunately for the school, this is exactly what it felt like I was doing every time I was tasked with an essay assignment. And the following assignments on to it only ever had it seem like they were asking me to come up with seven different ways to say exactly the same thing. That exercise in 'bullshit' was where the real mental work was. Not in a new thought space I was trying to blaze trails in.

Unironically, isn't that also what organizations like the NSA look for in new graduates? Odd as it may seem. A professional/good bullshitter in many ways is an ideal candidate. But it's a paradox. The NSA has a double mandate to uphold the security of the nation, while going after and pursuing its adversaries. They simultaneously want someone with an honest and clean background, who will lie for them and do all manner of Constitutionally underhanded things in favor of the institution's mandate and self-preservation.

On the other hand, you've got creative fiction writers.

Unironically, isn't that also what organizations like the NSA look for in new graduates?

Might depend on the position, but for the technical ones everyone associates with the NSA, no, they're looking for math nerds.

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Seeing as the proposed admissions system has a portion that explicitly "would test a candidate’s ability to bullshit convincingly, the most important elite skill there is" I assume that's what they were going for.

I think if most students were being honest at the point of their graduation ceremony, they would realize that bullshitting was probably the only 'real' thing they learned in school. By no means am I by default, sympathetic to the administration as 'educators' either.

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Absolutely abhor everything about this idea. Wastes everyones time and money when you could just hand the kids a verbal iq test and achieve the exact same outcome without all this prissy tea party cucumber sandwhich Model UN nonsense. Oh wait something something beautiful. Use their instagram profiles as a proxy too while you are at it. The more photos they have in Europe (while on vacation on daddys money) and the sexier they are the higher the score.

In my ideal world we wouldnt be in this signalling shitfest that we are in with college degrees. 4 precious years each across millions of people wont be wasted... on not working amd forgetting it all anyways. Yes, I am homo economicus.

In my ideal world, American colleges would be overrun with Asians. Because they deserve it. They are smarter and more hard working. It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering. Yes, I believe fairness and equality of opportunity is of much importance. Much more than equality of outcome or having sexy elites. You fuck with meritocracy at your peril.

In my ideal world Harvard wouldnt exist. Every university would be like Georgia Tech. Easy to get into, hard to stay in. Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.

In my ideal world people would prove their technical and verbal chops with their work. They wouldnt be able to rest on their Harvard laurels, they should have skin in the game. Oh yeah you are soo good at people skills? Okay go make that 2 million dollar deal, prove it.

https://www.themotte.org/post/565/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/117177?context=8#context

The angriest Americans are white women of a certain middling sort, elevated enough to feel superior to the egalitarian masses, but not quite high enough to escape them. To them, America is hell.

They are angry at America for that same reason you love it. They are angry that it is a place of chaos without social distinction, a place where you could lose a life of savings on the poker table, and where the markers of social position provide less insulation against the market.

In my ideal world, everything would be run by people who embody the ethos of the first kind of American described in the post above and the second kind (like you) would be banished to underworld.

Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.

STEM gave us:

  • Nuclear weapons

  • Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes

  • Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality

  • AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime

We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.

Fire gave us:

  • Arson, ruining our precious forests

  • Severe burns while cooking

  • Predators spotting our fires at night and coming to eat us

  • Toxic smoke, seriously damaging our eyes and lungs

We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of fire.

--

The criticism you're getting is that STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) is so core to modern civilization, the level of "uncritical worship" it gets is entirely reasonable. Unless you're in a log cabin in estonia, there are a hundred ten thousand distinct and identifiable products of "STEM" within a hundred feet of you. Plastic, paint, plywood, antibacterials/fungals embedded in that, light, glass, paper, all the parts in your phone/computer, clothing, processed food...

Also, criticism of the effects of one or another technology isn't exactly unheard of, everyone does it.

And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.

Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument. Especially not if you’re just going to slam them in there.

And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.

Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)

Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument.

My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".

If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.

It’s fine to be skeptical of the results of scientific research being used improperly. Most of which are policy issues anyway. Science can tell us how a disease spreads, but it cannot tell us to lock the population up in their homes and weld the doors shut. Science can tell us how to create nuclear fission, but not tell us to cram it into a bomb and drop in on a major city.

And to be honest, if anything we are actually much too skeptical of science and math. These tools of reason are the best methods available to understanding the universe. If we didn’t have the tools of science and mathematics, you’d be wearing a toga and writing this post on sheepskins as was tradition. You’d live in a world full of angels and demons and superstition where getting sick was punishment from God and the cure was bloodletting.

The problem is that we’ve done such a piss poor job of explaining what rigorous, scientific exploration of the universe has actually done for us that most people come away afraid of people they see as practical wizards reworking the world and conjuring new ideas from the ether. This was why COVID responses were so bad. It wasn’t science people were follow, it was lab-coated priests bringing down The Word from the mountain. Thus Saith the Experts is not remotely how real science works. Real science is about asking questions and looking for physical evidence of the answers.

Humanities could have been a good counterpoint and balance against excessive technophilia where everything you do with tech is good forever and we should never question it. But since it’s become unserious, ideologically corrupted, and lacks any sort of academic rigor, it’s mostly lost. A discipline that can regularly get obvious jokes printed in their academic journals isn’t going to save anyone. A discipline that argues mostly about words cannot save anyone.

Motte: STEM gave us , so we should “skeptically evaluate” it.

Bailey: STEM isn’t more valuable for mankind. Therefore, we shouldn’t favor STEM in universities.

I don’t mind your motte. I don’t think most people would mind it. Even @f3zinker’s original proposal allows it, because skepticism is not unique to the humanities.

It’s the bailey that gets me, because it hangs on this idea of (unfettered, “dogmatic”) STEM as a net negative. But where’d you do the work to justify that? You’ve just sort of thrown out all these boo lights. Even if I agreed with you on all of them, which I don’t, why fund the humanities instead of buying a cabin in Montana?

What is the value that you place on your heart? I mean your literal heart, the organ of flesh and blood.

In one sense, it is inestimably high. You can't live without your heart; you would sacrifice almost anything to keep it, if it was threatened. In another sense, it is essentially nothing, an afterthought, a pure zero. When was the last time you even thought about your heart? You will never compose panegyrics to it, or perform rituals in its honor; memories of it do not comfort you in times of want, thoughts of it will never enter your daydreams or fantasies. Living without it would make no difference to you, assuming such a thing were possible. How can such a thing be said to have any value?

We can say that something is necessary without thereby saying that it is valuable - and rightly so! The man who went out of his way to honor his own heart, who gave it a rank ordering of value higher than his own blood relations, would rightly be called perverse - even though, in the last analysis, he can live without his kin, but he cannot live without his heart.

When it comes to science - and for this one instant science is simply identified with technical vocational training, with "having a good head on one's shoulders", with the exertion of power over man by impersonal technological means - do we not risk making the same sort of error? Do we not risk confusing what is necessary with what is valuable? Do we not risk confusing the drudgery of life with life proper?

Of course there are many senses of the term "science" that we could disambiguate here. I do not paint my target equally over all of them. I have no quandary with theoretical science qua theoretical science, for example. There's nothing wrong with wanting to dedicate yourself to fundamental physics - it's a perfectly admirable pursuit. It is certainly not my aim here to adjudicate between, say, the aesthetics of the experience of reading early Latin poetry and the experience of studying string theory. There's room for both, there's no need to fight. I was once in training to become a mathematician, so I would like to believe that my taste in these domains is not entirely untutored.

Nor is it particularly my aim here to raise a question about the value of technological development. Of course, there are absolutely issues here too, certainly. But they are issues that can be partially bracketed. As a manifestation of the Faustian spirit, as the apotheosis of the Freudian death drive, there is something commendable even in technology that may lead to the annihilation of humanity, to the annihilation of all value. That's not my preferred course of action, naturally; but there is something commendable there nonetheless.

Far more contemptible than even the will to destruction is the will to mediocrity, the will to utility, the silent subjection to "what simply must be done". Homo economicus throws himself at "what must be done" with eyes wide open and a smile on his face; he eschews any identity of his own, he grinds himself down into something that is more machine than man, he becomes the willing accomplice of the protection racket that is modern science in its merger with capitalist economics. You can't stop doing science, you can never stop doing science, because the other guys have science too, and they're going to get us if we don't get out ahead of them. There's no time for a "humanist" education - we need more engineers, more researchers, more output, more growth, otherwise we're going to get crushed by someone else's output and someone else's growth. You must accept more surveillance, you must quantify more of your life, you must accept being connected to work 24/7, in the name of the efficiency that will serve this growth. And don't even think about not building the best damn AI you can, because dear god what if China gets AGI first? Such is the vicious circle that science has ensnared us in.

In some sense this is nothing more than a new layer of ornamentation over the same natural condition of man that has existed since time immemorial. The "state of nature" is certainly not any kinder. If you do not run you will die, if you do not fight you will die, if you do not eat you will die. But at least we once had a proper sense of the tragic about it! At least we once felt a sense of righteous indignation about this reality - we felt that it demanded redemption. But now, even the sense that there is a problem has been forgotten. Man's subjection to the technological order is viewed as not only necessary, but desirable.

Should we favor STEM in universities? Should you empty your bank account for the maniac who has a gun to your head? In one sense - yes, obviously! But you don't have to like it. The attitude behind an action can in fact tell us a great deal about whether the action is contemptible or praiseworthy. If you conduct yourself with dignity, should you not bristle at the imperiousness of science? Should you not chafe at the seemingly ineluctable demands it makes upon you?

There can be no change in conditions unless there is first a change in desire. Without desire, there is no hope. And if a change in man's condition is impossible, then I can at least make him loathe to accept that condition, and upset his happy conscience.

I believe that is as direct and honest a statement of my position as I can give.

The framing of science and technology as competitive just strikes me as silly. Yes, there is an element of competition but that's not all that science and technology does. It also is the reason we're not subsistence farming and instead able to have this high minded conversations in the first place.

But at least we once had a proper sense of the tragic about it! At least we once felt a sense of righteous indignation about this reality

You can mope in the tragedy and indignation, some of us aim to fix it.

I think having computers and jet engines and electric power plants is 'valuable', and thus sending many of our smartest people to institutions to learn science and engineering and create those things is worth doing. And that is much of why our institutions focus on STEM so much.

Also, the challenge and complexity of math/science/engineering is itself very interesting, for the same reason the challenge and complexity of MMA or having a written debate or making a good painting is interesting.

You can't stop doing science, you can never stop doing science, because the other guys have science too, and they're going to get us if we don't get out ahead of them

That is literally true, though. Groups of people who don't do science have been gotten over and over by those who do. Competition generally encourages improvement and growth, see evolution.

There's no time for a "humanist" education - we need more engineers, more researchers, more output, more growth, otherwise we're going to get crushed by someone else's output and someone else's growth.

Societies that didn't do humanist education also get gotten by those who did it, in the past.

Living without [your heart] would make no difference to you, assuming such a thing were possible. How can such a thing be said to have any value?

I don't need to use STEM to answer that; I can use the humanities, specifically referencing the laconic "if". Or perhaps the quip about counterfactuals attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Or I can use STEM, formal logic, and note that

Assume A

A -> B

B

B

is bad logic -- that is, that if you assume A (I can live without my heart) and prove B (my heart has no value) under that assumption, you cannot validly say you have proven B without that assumption.

We can say that something is necessary without thereby saying that it is valuable - and rightly so!

Seems unlikely, without some sort of sophistry you'd need formalisms to avoid.

The man who went out of his way to honor his own heart, who gave it a rank ordering of value higher than his own blood relations, would rightly be called perverse - even though, in the last analysis, he can live without his kin, but he cannot live without his heart.

This could mean at least two things. Either we expect a man to value his kin greater than his life -- in which case the fact that his heart is necessary to his life is not sufficient to make it more valuable than his kind. Or we somehow expect him to value his kin less than his life but more than his heart which is necessary to it.... which is incoherent, as Shakespeare might be able to tell you.

If you conduct yourself with dignity, should you not bristle at the imperiousness of science? Should you not chafe at the seemingly ineluctable demands it makes upon you?

Miguel de Cervantes might be able to tell you the results of such chafing. Or Rudyard Kipling.

This is a tortured form of thinking. And honestly, it might be passable in a high school "debate" class, but that's about it.

The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.

  • Nuclear weapons - STEM doesn't tell you anything about whether to use them or not.

  • Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes - Same, just don't pass policy implementing them.

  • Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality - Really? The trans movements' postmodern roots are the antithesis of science. Seriously ask those 78 gender folk how they feel about biology.

  • AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime - The takeaway from reading 1984 is not to stop producing tech that enables Big Brother, It's to not let him become all that big to begin with.

I get it, you made a cute consequentialist set of arguments. Rich being that the same thing you are making the argument against saved you from dying of polio at age 3 or allowed you to make this comment at all. Revisit what "science" is or maybe the difference between an "is" or an "ought". I am not smart enough for galaxy brained what if consequentialist shit.

The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.

Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.

This line of reasoning proves too much. The phrenology department has never produces anything of any value, so surely that should get even more funding than the humanities?

The actually producing research over real subjects parts of the humanities does, yes, but it would get misappropriated for the spinning bullshit parts.

Fixing and funding aren't synonyms, though. And it seems pretty clear that there's no viable mechanism by which extra funding for the humanities would lead to fixing it, not without some other methods far more significant than extra funding. When an oncologist sees a malignant tumor, his solution usually isn't to feed more into the organ from which that tumor is growing, in the theory that the organ, with more resources, will somehow be able to fight off the tumor; this would rarely lead to the desired results. It's usually to excise the tumor in some way that leaves the organ severely impeded and possibly non-functional, but still far far healthier than the tumor being present and now having some hope of making a recovery to functionality.

They did not fail because of lack of funding so adding more funding without addressing the actual problems will likely make things worse

STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting. It gave us rapidly increased spread of social epidemics (and real ones) as a side effect of better technology. And it gave us nukes and AIs (including ones put to evil use) and contact tracing. It also gave us damn near everything that separates us from the apes.

We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM.

We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful. The only one of those anyone outside such rarified atmospheres paid much attention to died in a prison cell recently.

STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting.

Quarantines did exist in the pre-modern world. But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology. I don't think Covid would have played out the way it did without the internet (for WFH and Zoom calls), phone apps, and social media.

We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful.

Well, maybe. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?

If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do, then I don't see why you should be dissuaded by contingent failures and defects of the university system. Sometimes things don't work out. That's the way it goes. But that doesn't mean you give up. That just means you try harder next time!

If you think it's impossible for the university to have any positive impact in this area at all, then that would be different. But I don't see why we should accept that. Do you think it's just impossible for the university to have any impact on culture or politics? A number of rightists claim that contemporary progressivism can trace its roots back to the "postmodern neo-Marxism" of the Frankfurt school - i.e. it's an ideology that started in universities and percolated outward. What do you think of those claims?

If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important, or if you think it's outright pernicious, then of course you would be in favor of just turning universities into trade schools. But then, that would just be grounded in your preexisting political commitments, not in any empirical facts about the university itself.

But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology.

Prisons and slave camps have existed for a very long time. You don't need modern tech for lockdowns.

We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful.

Well, maybe. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?

That generalized handwringing over science and technology is useless.

If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do

"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo (used to be religious, now usually is not explicitly so), navel-gazing, hand-wringing, self-flagellation, or something along those lines. Critique of neoliberal market ideology tends to converge on communism, which was the most destructive ideology to grace the 20th century. The arguments for these things tend to be nothing but sentiment, sophistry, lies, and misdirection.

If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important

Calling something "humanistic" is assuming the conclusion; the idea is that somehow STEM is in opposition to humans. (If you claim the original definition of humanism -- that is, as opposed to supernaturalism -- then STEM is a part of it. But usually "humanistic" in this sense is just the opposite, a woo term excluding STEM from proper human pursuits)

"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo

It's not a question of "alternatives," its a recognition that STEM disciplines are still full of people, with the same conflicts of interest, corruptions, status-games, cliquishness, and all the rest. STEM doesn't get you an "objective" view of society because the map is still not the territory, and to the degree that it gets you an objective view of the physical universe you still have to convince all the other non-STEM people that you're right or else they'll just coordinate meanness against you using the same old dark arts as always while you're demonstrating the perfection of your equations alone at a blackboard.

That doesn't make "Critique of STEM supremicism" better or more useful; that makes it (as would be expected) harmful (to STEM people).

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"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo

I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.

It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI. It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity. You may think these propositions are stupid or counterproductive, but they're not "woo".

I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.

When I said the alternatives were woo, etc, I meant those "other types of intellectual activity".

It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI.

No, that's hand-wringing. There are things man was not meant to know, just because we could doesn't mean we should, etc. Perhaps you could come up with solid reasons it's a bad idea to build advanced AI, but then you'd be back in the realm of STEM.

It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity.

It isn't, but for some reason this notion always ends up being advocacy of or defense of some sort of redistribution of the fruits of "raw economic productivity", which is why I said it converges on communism.

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The only one of those anyone outside such rarified atmospheres paid much attention to died in a prison cell recently.

You mean the archetypal ‘M’ who was just a bit angry at the ‘T’?

I have no idea what you're talking about, I mean the author of "Industrial Society and it's Future".

My point was that Ted, a math prodigy, was the ultimate STEMlord, he just didn't like the 'technology' part. He had no qualms with math.

See, StEMlords are even superior at critiquing STEM!

In my ideal world, American colleges would be overrun with Asians. Because they deserve it. They are smarter and more hard working. It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering. Yes, I believe fairness and equality of opportunity is of much importance. Much more than equality of outcome or having sexy elites. You fuck with meritocracy at your peril.

There’s a strange truth-in-irony about this. The way trends seem to be shaping up the next couple of decades, may suggest that the smartest students look at their future and think the cost won’t justify their education. And so they decide not to participate and go to college. The existing paradigm has been those that attend university and graduate earn considerably more during their lifetimes. There’s no really denying that. But that may not be the case in 10-20-30 years time.

I think the educational landscape is going to become a bigger political issue in the future. And technology is also changing the pace and is far ahead of the conversation than public policymakers are. If you look at a field like cybersecurity for instance, some statistics I saw awhile back indicated that the field had a 0% unemployment rate. Meaning it’s in incredibly high demand. I forget where I read that, so don’t ask for a source. But I know of a large pool of people who work in cybersecurity and didn’t go to college at all or have a degree. Granted, people have suggested places like GitHub are the best way to get your ‘resume’ of sorts out there and demonstrate your skills. But the field definitely hasn’t crystallized and cast itself in the traditional mould to obtaining a career in that field.

Who knows if it’ll capitulate to the same dynamic we have currently, or if it'll disrupt the path to an education and signal a sign of broader things to come.

In my ideal world Harvard wouldnt exist. Every university would be like Georgia Tech. Easy to get into, hard to stay in. Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.

Many European universities are like this (especially in Italy, Germany, France to some extent outside the Grandes Ecoles). I see no evidence it produces any particularly better talent than the American system.

They are angry at America for that same reason you love it. They are angry that it is a place of chaos without social distinction, a place where you could lose a life of savings on the poker table, and where the markers of social position provide less insulation against the market.

You can believe in this system, but then you can’t be mad when it imports a cavalcade of global elites to sustain itself and they walk right on over you.

Many European universities are like this (especially in Italy, Germany, France to some extent outside the Grandes Ecoles). I see no evidence it produces any particularly better talent than the American system.

Something to keep in mind is that part of the American system's "production" of talent is brain-draining the rest of the world...

I would wager America is only "producing" talent in Computer Science. Rest of the sciences ~70% (guesstimate) of the faculty/researchers in US Universities are foreign.

Ironically enough selection into CS programs is relatively much more meritocratic.

That’s around the right percentage for grad students.

Foreign-born workers are about 50% of PhD engineers and computer scientists, and the fractions are lower for other sectors or with less education. They’re around 18% of the broader category of technical workers. Of course, some of these people are foreign born but naturalized. So I can’t give an exact number, but 50% is an upper bound.

I’ll also note that foreigners are concentrated in engineering/compsci relative to other fields. Including medicine. So we are quite probably producing significant fractions of skilled doctors, lawyers, and other prestige careers.

You can believe in this system, but then you can’t be mad when it imports a cavalcade of global elites to sustain itself and they walk right on over you.

I live in a place that has this 10x more than America.

I see no evidence it produces any particularly better talent than the American system.

Does it produce a better elite class in society? Maybe on STEM, it doesn’t produce anything noticeably better than we do. But I also don’t see any clear indication that it produces anything worse than we do either.

It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering.

Are their livelihoods actually negatively affected by being denied admission to Ivy League schools? My impression is that by future income and most other material measures of success there isn't any effect. In the same way, when Jews were kept out of Harvard all their Nobel Prize-winning scientists went to CUNY instead, and didn't seem any worse off for it.

I don't think going to a local community college and then transferring to a school that hasn't rejected an application since the 80's has a huge effect on private sector prospects, but it does have a pretty big effect on prospects for joining academia, which is important for shaping societal consensus.

It hurts you in certain careers, notably law. How many Supreme Court justices hail from the American Samoa Correspondence Law School?

Hell, look how similar all of their career trajectories are. Barret's not having been on the DC circuit was somehow a mark against her.

But are we to believe the life of the AA admit is made worse off by going to another lesser school? That is, school only matters if you aren’t brilliant?

Going to prestigious schools is important, not because of income, but because of connections. The connections available to you socializing while at MIT or Harvard are vastly stronger and more likely to land a person in the top 0.01%, than if you go to OSU.

The key to getting into the ground floor of facebook or netflix or paypal wasn't technical skill, it was who they knew.

Going to prestigious schools is important, not because of income, but because of connections. The connections available to you socializing while at MIT or Harvard are vastly stronger and more likely to land a person in the top 0.01%, than if you go to OSU.

This. This is what parents paying up the nose for "elite education" are paying for, but people do have to pretend politely that secret of Harvard is some superior knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere, some superior teaching skills that cannot be replicated.

As a corollary, if Junior is autistic who cannot make friends or schizoid who doesn't want to, if Junior actually spends his time in prestigious university studying instead of boozing, all your money spent on elite education is wasted.

The key to getting into the ground floor of facebook or netflix or paypal wasn't technical skill, it was who they knew.

For the tech ground floor, I suspect a Harvard degree would mean quite a bit less than it usually does, though. Aren’t the big (and notoriously hard) schools still MIT, Stanford, and CMU closely followed by Berkeley?

Which leads me to think — it’s true that Harvard is universally regarded as elite by Everyone, but when we take into account specific disciplines, different schools start to jump up; and the more specialized you go, the more true this is, to the extent that some people going for a PhD in the hard sciences will forgo Ivy League invitations in favour of offers by schools with that one specific professor.

Which fits into the original point by the OP — this sort of skill and display of intelligence is nerd stuff, only distantly related to class signaling.

They’re not talking about getting in at interview stage, they’re talking about the fact that the earliest Facebook guys were literally Zuck’s fellow Harvard students.

Ah, I see. That makes more sense then.

It was both. And that also means the dude who got rejected lost that “key.” So there was measurable harm.

Point is, if you want to be a regular tradesperson, make up to 200k+, maybe climb the corporate ladder, you can do that with any other kind of technical degree, or even just skill alone if you're good enough.

But to graduate from NPC-hood and become an actual ascending elite, making marks on society, for that, connections with those who have gobs of money to fund your ventures, matter much more.

This is true, although to be honest even 95% of Harvard graduates aren’t “true” elites by this definition, they’re just median private equity guys and consultants and corporate lawyers and staff writers for ‘The New Republic’ or Vox or whatever.

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But then the point is that those who are unfairly rejected from the elite university is actually harmed.

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If you’re an elite aspirant it might. If you’re an average Joe looking to make his way in the world, probably not. But if you’re the latter, you’re probably not attending an Ivy League school in the first place. Most people go to those institutions for the prestige and networking. A dense and rigid education is incidental and secondary to that aim.

Disbarring perfectly competent Asian people because they "harsh the vibe" is one thing, and then going onto admitting a qualitatively lower crop of blacks (at least the ADOS, I'm sure the Nigerians are doing better) who act as the DIE equivalent of fake succulents on a shelf is another.

I despise the former, but the two combined makes me see red. I never had any aspirations of going to Harvard, even if I guarantee that I could write a sob story of an essay and make even a few of the more cynical marms grading them mist up, something akin to this one, albeit I had no such intentions at the time of writing it.

I come from a country that still takes meritocracy seriously, tarnished as it is by our degenerate brand of AA. My father went from being a penniless refugee fleeing a genocide to a famous doctor held in high regard amongst his peers, and as such I have no choice but to fight for the system that helped put me where I am today, even if I represent a regression to the mean in some important ways (maths talent for one, his teachers used to call him up to solve problems for the older students when they couldn't, he'd have taken up maths if he didn't have a starving family to feed).

We've fucked a lot of it through AA and explicit quotas, quotas that are long past their legal expiry dates or relevance. Even then, our local wokescolds still pay nominal homage to egalitarian and meritocratic ideals, they simply claim against all evidence that the people they forcibly try to uplift are just as good and talented as the broader sample they replace. Our system is legible, and its sins don't hide in the dark.

I'd like to see it burned down on principle, but with $50 billion in their endowments, they couldn't care less what I think.

at least the ADOS, I'm sure the Nigerians are doing better

Minor nitpick, but Harvard admits very few ADOS, especially when you exclude white people with an octaroon great grandmother.

Disbarring perfectly competent Asian people because they "harsh the vibe" is one thing, and then going onto admitting a qualitatively lower crop of blacks (at least the ADOS, I'm sure the Nigerians are doing better) who act as the DIE equivalent of fake succulents on a shelf is another.

It has been speculated that there are actually very few (possibly zero) students at Harvard who have four grandparents who are descended from slaves.

How many Americans fit that category at all?

Which category? Most blacks in America are descendants of slaves. There has been relatively little migration from Africa since then

Hmm, I guess so. I haven’t seen direct stats, but Wikipedia says only 3% have “recently immigrated” ancestors.

you're indian, you've never really interacted with black people. they're undeniably much cooler than asians - see their overrepresentation in sports and entertainment, where they absolutely mog asians without any sort of AA boost.

in fact, given that the real filter is vibe cultivation (something that only shaperotatorcels deny the importance of), the ~25% of boring asians with interchangeable personalities that harvard admits are actually beneficiaries of a different sort of AA

Call me crazy if you like, but I for one see absolutely no reason for sports and entertainment to count for anything in the context of a college, both for the purposes of getting in or staying in it.

In the vast majority of the world, India included, the very idea that a college should have a semi-professional sports team is met with sheer disbelief. You're letting athletes in? Why on Earth would you do that? What does the ability to dunk a ball through a hoop have to do with academics?

It's one of the most utterly bizarre things in the US, for all that it's so normalized that you guys take it for granted.

Call me old-fashioned or the very opposite, but I think an ideal college is filled with smart and hard working students studying diligently, with enough free time to have fun and fuck around with their interests. It shouldn't have any reason to be a sports club.

I'm aware that it's a money making opportunity, but a college shouldn't be involved with every single possible thing that is a net income.

I have interacted with black people in the UK, and I like them more than their American counterparts. Most of them were hard working and quiet people who came to a new country solely to improve their lot in life, and they share my jaundiced assessment of many of their second or third gen British counterparts, or god forbid, African Americans who aren't straight off the boat.

Edit: The closest equivalent in India is national or state scholarships for extremely talented athletes. It's meant for of a way to soften the opportunity costs of going all-in on athletics, and they're in it to study as well, since they need to have a career after their body fails them. Even then, they're few and far between. The college gets nothing but some of the scholarship money, and doesn't get to pimp them out.

Sports as team building exercise are invaluable. I suspect this kernel of usefulness, having school sports teams that are taken serious by the students, grew naturally into recruiting for them in particular for prestige with students that no longer directly participate in them. I 100% endorse colleges have intermural leagues for their students and taking them somewhat seriously. I also support being a good team member/leader as a qualification worth mentioning and rewarding on college applications. But these things have definitely mutated paste their use.

I have no issue with amateur sports, or students who have been admitted for other reasons then being encouraged to engage in whatever sports they enjoy or are talented at.

Since your proposition is strictly superior to current norms, while I don't entirely agree with it, I won't grumble too hard.

I have no issue with amateur sports

They were always supposed to be amateur, which was the basis for them not being paid. But with serious competition comes pride, with pride comes spectators and people putting your school higher on their list because of the team and with spectators(money) and an edge on recruitment you quickly get what we see today. That and they're just fun, it would be better if they were more amateur but people enjoy the rivalries and school spirit.

u missed the point. everyone admitted to hypsm meets some min bar of intel. what im saying is that they don’t have what the zoomers call ‘the rizz’

also, it’s very typical of ghee drinkers to downplay the importance of physical fitness. but it’s important u know

I can't tell if you're being intentionally redditor or just lazy, but along with the crack about "ghee drinkers," this just looks like low effort antagonism. Don't post like this.

I could hardly understand what he meant in the first place, leaving aside the mild insult about ghee. After all, Indians do tend to value physical fitness less than Westerners, even if I wouldn't phrase it that way.

Call me crazy if you like, but I for one see absolutely no reason for sports and entertainment to count for anything in the context of a college, both for the purposes of getting in or staying in it.

To quote Heinlein:

"The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance."

In the vast majority of the world, India included, the very idea that a college should have a semi-professional sports team is met with sheer disbelief. You're letting athletes in? Why on Earth would you do that? What does the ability to dunk a ball through a hoop have to do with academics?

Trust me. There are similar reactions I've seen with students in the US. Not in athletics. But I've seen it quite a bit with computer science undergraduates, needing to take 'Anthropology' over something like studying for the A+ certification.

It's one of the most utterly bizarre things in the US, for all that it's so normalized that you guys take it for granted.

I think it probably owes more to incidental, historical path dependencies rather than a dedicated decision someone made, to see it intentionally end up that way. I could be wrong though.

It shouldn't have any reason to be a sports club.

Your sports club shouldn't come at the 'expense' of your college education. But it's ironic to see people say on the one hand that school didn't leave them prepared for what laid ahead after graduating, while treating the extracurriculars as unimportant. The latter is what I think is intended to supplement that more practical function that's needed. I personally hate extracurriculars as a program 'requirement'. That's putting the cart before the horse. But I can see a rationale for why it's there.

Funny that the younger generations are increasingly watching Asian cartoons then. I hear anime is cool now? Was it K-pop that white girls in the states moon over?

And sports? Really?

notice that the asians that are cool are not the rubik’s cubecels

jimmy chin isnt applying to harvard. the techlead phenotype is

But aren't Asians also good at vibe-cultivation? Some of those very same successful black entertainers are also really into anime and video games, even if, as RandomRanger notes below, they may tend to be less-represented in nerdier media where there are less barriers to entry. Now, granted, Asian-Americans haven't been quite as successful at injecting contributions to the global-culture-public-consciousness as Asian-Asians, but still.

Asians can make good content, but their lack of personal charisma puts them at a distinct disadvantage in an American setting. This seems to be what Harvard's "personality scores" were trying to get at and what people mean when they complain about Asians being a bunch of boring interchangeable nerds. In my experience this is mostly a product of cultural differences and will start to disappear as the proportion of recent immigrants in the Asian-American population goes down.

I think they've just made different contributions. Bruce Lee was the introduction of martial arts into mainstream western society. Even Dana White and other big figures in the UFC have paid homage to him as the 'father' of their sport. But today his legacy remains niche and his long-term contributions have bled away into obscurity to the people who don't follow that stuff closely. I think their contributions are slowly making inroads over time, with anime for instance, as indicated above. It hasn't received broad, widespread acceptance yet, but undoubtedly has more popular and common cultural market share than it did say 20 years ago.

I think anime has long since been made mainstream. Most people have at least heard of anime, and could probably name at least a couple of franchises in the genre. Their merch is pretty mainstream and available everywhere down to Target and Walmart. Korean and Chinese dramas are much more niche, as most people haven’t ever heard of them and couldn’t name a single show.

Entertainment? So they're integral to directing and writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels, making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers are black?

The places blacks do well are in highly centralized domains like music, acting or sports, not making any kind of sophisticated content.

writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels

wordcelry. who’s actually on screen?

making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers

vidya

i get that this board is a bit of a ‘tism bubble. try and think of what mainstream americans think of as culture

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/531479-video-game-industry-bigger-than-sports-movies-combined-report/

https://www.myboosting.gg/blog/esports-news/the-video-games-industry-is-bigger-than-hollywood

I'd rather be autistic than obviously wrong. Get out of your bubble, look at the real world.

...But vidya is mainstream. Mario is/was more recognizable than Mickey Mouse.

This isn’t just Harvard. It is every American university except the ones that admit anyone with a pulse (and wouldn’t turn down the living dead if someone paid their tuition), and perhaps a smattering of religious schools. Even Caltech debased their admissions not too long ago.

except the ones that admit anyone with a pulse

This is actually most schools. Most colleges in the U.S. have an acceptance rate of over 2/3rds.

I know, but I'd rather lightning strike the tallest peak first.

Burn them all down and replace them with IQ and aptitude tests if I'm allowed to day dream.

Burn them all down and replace them with IQ and aptitude tests if I'm allowed to day dream.

You know why that'll never happen though. Society can't want equality and a meritocracy at the same time, despite espousing the virtue of both. Americans can't forever pretend that different subcultures in the US don't value things like education differently than others do. Because most people inherently know that merit has a tendency to cluster in homogenous pockets if given the green light and left unchecked. You won't get the goals of modern 21st century liberal and progressive sensibilities, so trying to achieve those objectives will always be a paradox at odds with itself.

I thought the OP was being too elitist. I can't speak to the institutional structure of Harvard, but I've had more than my fair share of interactions with Stanford University students. And at least from my interactions, there's a lot of high profile students, or rather, students with high profile backgrounds, that were not a result of their hard work and intellectual achievements. Meeting the daughter of a well to do small business owner certainly doesn't hurt, as far as getting your foot in the door goes; as no interaction I ever had with her left me with the impression she was exceptional by academic standards. She was certainly exceptional as far as the open doors and opportunities went.

Major universities have always sold themselves on their prestige, and to a large measure it was probably earned, historically speaking. But a hard and pure academic evaluation I think leaves something to be desired, when a person wants to come along and tell me you'll get a better 'education' at Harvard than you will at this second or third tier university. The only university that immediately comes to mind when a person wants to sell me on academic ability and intellectual talent is MIT. Background and extracurricular activities should not play as substantial a role in the selection process to strict educational requirements.

You won't find me disagreeing with anything you said, quite the opposite in fact! I'm well aware why the things I suggested are well outside the Overton Window (I did say I was day dreaming).

At any rate, while I haven't had the 'good fortune' to meet many Ivy league students, I've already had my fair share of awe inspiring encounters with people who are both tack-sharp and hard-working in other contexts, and I don't think Harvard has a monopoly on them. I'm no slouch in the brains department myself, but I'm intimately familiar with knowing that some people are still way out of my league. I just think normal means like "fuck hard exams that exert massive selection pressure" are more than sufficient to tease them out, no essays or similar nonsense needed.

Isn’t this the whole debate re equality of outcome v opportunity?

It got pitched in those terms back in the 80’s and 90’s in policy circles and shows like Free to Choose. It’s difficult to think the spectrum of that dialogue hasn’t shifted to a much more extreme form these days.

So, presumably, if we, the non-leaders of Harvard and Yale believe in not being racist, we should be the ones to tear the schools to the ground, and disclaim their elite leanings as self-serving sophistry.

Also, can you elaborate on the superiority of Harvard students that you experienced? It sounds like that if you instead sampled top-academic Jews in the last century, and Asians in this century, you'd find better academics; if they weren't better than the Harvard crop, then the Harvard crop wouldn't need to change the rules.

My personal instinct is that it may be that the Harvard brand is about baffling people with bullshit over actually producing quality scholarship; I can point to the fact that they are doing bald-faced lying about the affirmative action as evidence in favor of bullshit and against good scholarship. Is there a way that you can confirm your impression? How do you know that you have not been baffled with bullshit yourself and that the amazing Harvard scholars are actually as amazing as you think?

… My personal instinct is that it may be that the Harvard brand is about baffling people with bullshit over actually producing quality scholarship…

I would insist that the broad appeal Harvard has is mostly a ‘branding’ issue from the get-go. As a brand, it has far more resources to mobilize for research purposes and educational value it ‘could’ add, if it wanted to. But I have a hard time believing a person who’s there solely for learning the technical skills of his career of interest, is going to experience a substantially greater education than if he went to a university with little to no brand at all.

In a way it’s hardly any different from the restaurant industry. If you’re hungry and don’t want to starve, McDonalds or Eleven Madison Park will do. The former will accomplish just as much as the latter will. But people pay a premium for the latter, because you get to rub shoulders with the elites of society. Nepotism has an enormous appeal if you can manage your way into a place like Harvard.

When I did work in Stanford University, if you walked into the FedEx office that they had on campus, or the print centers, on certain days, students would ‘fill’ the place to the brim, with USB sticks to get these large poster prints made, that were diagrams of original research they had to do, for homework assignments. And that’s been one ‘major’ complaint of the whole American university system. That these places are research factories where students get exploited out of their insights and value for the benefit of the institution. They are not primarily teaching facilities.

I wouldn't call them all amazing scholars. As I mention in the post, Harvard hasn't selected primarily on intelligence for a long while. I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done. Not better than anyone else in the world, but noticeably highly selected in those domains.

This is a generalization, of course, not a rule, and reality is always less shiny than generalizations of this sort allow for, but I've been sincerely impressed by the Harvard (and Yale, and similar-school) graduates in my life.

The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost. They understand how to do a set task, so long as it is phrased like a problem they would be posed in school, but beyond this, they find independent work very challenging. They tend not to be comfortable having opinions of their own. When asked to do analytical work, they tend to write in a polemical style. They will present all the information that supports a thesis, but do not understand the importance of covering the facts and evidence that points the other way.

A lot of this may be due to the practices of college admissions. Kids who get into top schools tend to have gotten straight As, perfect recs from their high school teachers, and have learned to lie about (or at the very least, wildly exaggerate) their extracurriculars. This requires diligence, always agreeing with authority, never displaying independent thought - as high school teachers hate that. Developing a passion for a subject requires time to think and space to explore. How housed kids do not get this, and thus arrive in college with no opinions that they have developed for themselves. They sit through classes where they don't interact with the professors, as they have learned that channeling their teachers is a bad idea. They write banal essays so as not to offend.

Much of modern high school is about learning to deny the obvious. English is perhaps the most obvious example of this, where literary classics, that are obviously great, and intermixed with books that any smart high schooler can see are pulp trash. Getting good grades requires pretending that Beloved, which does not have literary merit, is just as good as Shakespeare. This lying about the obvious teaches very bad analytical skills, where students learn to support pre-given conclusions, rather than follow where the evidence leads.

History is just as as bad, as AP History explicitly has themes that give the answer to each question. The historical facts are secondary to large-scale themes that the curriculum has identified. As an example, one of the themes is the West colonizing the rest of the world in a search for raw resources. The correct answer to why Cook traveled to the Pacific is thus that he was looking for resources for England, not scientific exploration, despite the transit of Venus being the stated reason for the trip.

I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done.

They are smarter than they average person, but they are a lot worse than they used to be.

I, and probably most other upvoters, would love to see more details or mini-stories about the things you've described here, or other things you've noticed from the inside.

And questions like - Has student quality decline been pronounced in some subgroups (race or not) while not in others, or is it universal? I've also noticed the growth of cheating, any ideas on the causes?

This would explain my high school GPA.

Good to know I'm not the only one.

Honestly I’ve often been in favor of a more classical approach to education where students are expected to learn logically and to read whole books and write essays about topics. Modern education doesn’t do that. Every question or problem has a set answer and requires nothing outside of the lesson in question to solve.

I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail? Or in mathematics you can have students try to use Fermi’s method to come to a guess about how many people in Ireland have green eyes or something silly. The point would be to teach people to think and reason to a conclusion that they then must justify logically.

I'm undecided about this. It would be difficult to know how this would play out long-term in a large, complex and technologically advanced modern society.

I don't 'necessarily' have a problem with aspects of the Prussian educational system. In 2023, you 'have' established canons of knowledge across disciplines which need to be inculcated in people. The last thing you want to do to a child, is take simple concepts like 2+2=4 and confuse the hell out of them by asking them to get philosophically creative and ask if 2+2 'really' equals 4; and get tripped up on basic terminology, like two friends high on peyote around a campfire, staring at the stars. In fact that 'creative' aspect is essentially why I struggled so much in school. I'm 'very' much an individual that reasons backwards, from the answer/conclusion to the logic that got you there. The 'creative', 'explore around' method of education left me confused as hell and at odds with my intuitive and focused tendency to think about things. I understood things easiest in chronological sequence, from A to B to C to D.

If you look at Singapore for instance, it's lack of natural resources and geography lend it's very survival to making itself economically relevant to the outside world. They don't have room for a classical education. The consequences are much more severe for departing from the State driven mandate and focus on STEM. They have to make themselves technically and technologically relevant to the rest of the world, simply to survive. A classical education won't work there IMO. And it has increasingly diminished returns in modern society. I say this as a huge lover of the humanities, unfortunately.

The problem I have with the Prussian model is that it’s pretty much a failure at teaching people how to approach problems and solve them without having to be hand held. If anything, I think it actually teaches people not to think.

In a typical Prussian school, the students sit at desks while the teacher lectures on some subject. They’re then given worksheets on the specific material to drill the exact thing the lecture covered. These worksheets have no problems that reference anything outside the lesson given, and only very rarely ask for application of the material or anything going above and beyond, or requiring the students to reason from facts given to a logical conclusion.

Science and math classes are taught much the same way. The students have “lab” classes, but even up to senior in high school (or possibly non-majors science courses in college) nothing done could be called an experiment— they’re at best demonstrations of something already covered in class and of course you have to get the right results. So students graduate with really weird ideas of how science works — mistakenly believing that science is a set of knowledge something like psychics belief in Akashic Records. The science exists and people in lab coats know The Science and so on. Except that science is a process of trying to figure things out, it’s discovered by seeing something and trying to prove yourself wrong on that front. Mathematics is a system for describing the universe and a tool for figuring things out. Most people don’t understand that because the Prussian system isn’t interested in having kids do experiments.

What classical education does, is teach, in every subject is how to think. How to take apart a text and understand it, how to think and argue logically, how to ask questions and find answers to them. They learn how to seek truth rather than simply waiting for the authorities to hand it to them. And I think, especially with AGI teed up within the next 20 years, the future belongs to people who can think, invent, and lead, and those who only learn to repeat the same things their teacher told them are correct answers will be lost in a world where the only jobs humans are doing are original creative thinking jobs. They haven’t been taught to do that, and learning later is very difficult.

I think the exact subject matter should be brought up to date for the twenty first century, but the method works and has produced the greatest thinkers of the last several centuries.

In related news, Florida is now accepting an alternative to the SAT designed to favor students with a classical education background, I believe.

See also: most of the AP curricula.

Probably not technically true for the harder sciences, since there’s not many ways to set up a free-body problem. But the history essay rubrics look like more formal versions of what you’re describing.

Overall, the problem is that school is serving as a daycare and indoctrination. So the mandatory parts can’t be too comprehensive. It’s fulfilling far too many purposes.

I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail?

This isn't a history exercise, it's a creative fiction exercise and treating it like a history exercise does nothing but instill false confidence in students about their ability to reason about situations with far too many unknowns

Of course it’s a history exercise; building a credible case for a counterfactual relies on deep knowledge of pre-existing context and trends. You cannot explain how Rome would differ without understanding how Rome was and how Rome did change.

A counterfactual without utilizing the factual would be shoddy work.

There is no such thing as a credible case for the questions you posed. There are cases that superficially sound credible but actually make too many assumptions. In my opinion such a case is actually worse than just saying "I don't know".

The best political analysts of our time struggle to predict the economic impacts of a single peice of legislation a few years out with any decent accuracy. So when you ask a mere student to predict something orders of magnitude more difficult like the impacts of a grand change on a distant civilization that spanned centuries, you are only testing their ability to tell a story, not to get at the truth.

The only thing an avowed rationalist would say to such a question is "I don't know and neither do you"

This is exactly the goal of the exercise. And it wouldn’t be an everyday thing either. Most of the subjects would be taught in order to get those deeper understandings, studying the culture and history and personalities, learning the dates and geography and so on.

Although, it’s always been my contention that having the facts, theories, and procedures memorized is a big part of proper reasoning. If you know the names of great figures, their peers and rivals, what they did, and what the issues of the day were, understanding why things ended up as they did and how else things could have gone.

The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.

I think this coincides with the neoliberal push in education, but the cracks in the foundation were already there much earlier. I think captivating a child's attention in grade school was always going to be an issue. They're much more interested in exploring and imagining than being forced into a chair ala the Prussia model of education. As a person who paid his way through college, cheating looks like an attractive option if you're falling behind; considering the financial investment you put into your classes. Someone's 'always' had to pay for it at the end of the day, but I think the financialization of the university system continues to contribute a crucial piece of the problem.

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost.

This was me, also. Maybe I took for granted so much the fact that I could coherently speak English, that I could turn around after graduation and say it felt like I didn't learn anything. But I didn't feel like I was prepared for life in any way. When I asked myself "what next?," I had no idea how to answer it or where to go. I think a 'practical' education solves this problem where an 'academic' education barely makes any attempt to address it. Maybe that's part of the reason for higher education's insistence on extracurriculars and their interest in your time spent outside of the classroom. I did do pretty well (though not exceptional) in the former but not the latter. It's still difficult for me to tell if I'm a successful product of the contemporary American educational system or not. I'm not exactly where I would like to be in life, but I'm not really complaining either. I think the lack of social and economic mobility in the job market and other socioeconomic ladders are to blame, from a policy standpoint more than my education was.

As someone attuned to the system, what’s the solution, then?

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost. They understand how to do a set task, so long as it is phrased like a problem they would be posed in school, but beyond this, they find independent work very challenging. They tend not to be comfortable having opinions of their own. When asked to do analytical work, they tend to write in a polemical style. They will present all the information that supports a thesis, but do not understand the importance of covering the facts and evidence that points the other way.

William Deresiewicz does some pretty good observations on this in Excellent Sheep.

Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.

No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.

Say Harvard switched to a meritocratic racial spoils system in which every year they accepted the top x% of black people on the SAT, the top x% of whites, the top x% of asians and so on. Is that preferable to the current system?

I would prefer it because it's more honest

It also obviates the need for racial trauma essays or remaking oneself as a victim.

Yes. I like discriminatory preferences to be as legible as possible. If Harvard is going to have a racial quota system (which they obvious do), I'd rather they just say so flatly.

If you want Harvard to be honest you have to start by making racial quotas legal, which seems like a terrible choice if the only benefit is a bit less hypocrisy.

I don't think the only benefit to free association is less hypocrisy.

It's not the only benefit to freedom of association. It is the only benefit to making a racial quota system legal (a prerequisite to Harvard admitting it uses a racial quota system).

People say that a lot here, but honestly illegible systems are better for having to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally wrong. Children who grow up in the system will naturally see it's immorality. Once you commit to the idea that discrimination is good, then you end up like India with riots every year over whether such and such caste or tribe deserves reservation benefits. People in India view the whole thing not as a matter of morality, but just a crass materialist way to get more for you and yours.

Forcing Progressives to say the quiet part loud on affirmative action is a victory in it's own right.

I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.

This chart

Your link is broken since Twitter blocked non-logged-in users, so I can't use Nitter to view it. I did try to use a Twitter login I had lying around and the page wouldn't actually load.

It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.

I'm able to see it fine and I don't have a twitter account; not sure what's going on

The chart demonstrates (to me anyway) that they're just plain lying about the personality dimension in order to use it as a proxy for preferred races, giving them the thinnest veneer of a defense rather than absolutely none. What, I'm supposed to believe that the black Harvard applications are actually just incredibly excellent personalities? KBJ's incessant babbling suffices to convince me that's not the case. Or that their Asian applicants are just lacking a certain je ne sais quois? That certainly doesn't match my experience with smart Asian-Americans, who seem to be basically just like other smart Americans. No, I think it's pretty obvious that they just plugged in personality values that lined up with the races they wanted to give bonus points to.

Well to be fair on the criteria shown in the above link it does reference overcoming obstacles &c., and it seems straightforwardly true that Black applicants are more likely to have faced more important obstacles given the average lower socio-economic standing of black families. Vice versa for Asian Americans.

In my mind, in support of this claim: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yjbefg/oc_how_harvard_admissions_rates_asian_american/

When looking at alumni interviews, which actually meet the applicant, Asian applicants do better overall and pretty much identical on "likability, courage, kindness." Asians only do worse when ranked by the committee that doesn't meet the applicant.

Oh, of course they're lying. To my eye, it's mostly kayfabe: they pretend to believe those things and other informed observers pretend to trust them. That's part of what makes holistic admissions so insidious to me, though: for uninformed observers, the kayfabe becomes real, and people start to accept that there must be sound, justifiable reasons for highly capable applicants to be rejected in favor of candidates with lower objective scores across the board.

The whole thing could be solved by Harvard just not sucking at the federal teat. Their admissions process is only subject to strict scrutiny because they accept federal subsidies, which might lead you to wonder why the hell Harvard needs federal largesse deposited in its various accounts. Of course, research is substantially grant-funded and this ties into its own prestige system, but it seems pretty straightforward to me that if an organization wants to suck in billions of tax dollars, they must abide by the prescribed elimination of racial discrimination. I would have great admiration for Harvard if they simply said that they're so committed to discriminating against Asian-Americans and middle-American whites that they're willing to behave like an actual private institution to do that, but I suspect that this possibility will not even be briefly considered.

The situation with UNC and other flagship state universities seems much more clear - these really are supposed to be egalitarian schools, accessible to the hard-working, upwardly mobile kids of the state. That's the mission of land grant universities and I think they've done an absolutely amazing job of it. The role of these universities in creating the American knowledge economy really cannot be oversold. They do have some legitimate interest in uplift of all demographics and communities within their state, which it seems to me can be accomplished based on admitting the top X% of students from each district without respect to race. This likely results in positive discrimination for poor black and Hispanic kids, but it also provides positive discrimination for rural white kids, and has a sufficiently egalitarian and facially neutral aesthetic that it should survive all but the most vigorous pursuit of disparate impact doctrine.

Thanks I enjoyed reading this but I think that you miss the real significance of the ruling: I agree that that elite institutions are not being egalitarian enough (I think this is what you are arguing by comparing harvards graduation rate to the seals?) and that this is resulting in too many incompetents running the countries institutions. They are also hard to change because they are mostly privately run an have huge endowments along with influential alumni networks. The ruling alone doesn’t rectify this (as trace points out university admins will try to circumvent it), but gives a future republican president enormous leverage to massively change elite universities simply by enforcing the law.

Congress could pass a law enforcing the SAT as the sole criterion for entry into colleges that receive any government funding, I suppose, but otherwise what leverage does a "future Republican president have"? He can direct the Department of Education to do whatever he wants, but Harvard can challenge all of that and drag things out for a very long time. Trump's DoE accomplished little itself and was, unlike much of his administration, led by an assured culture warrior.

This would be silly, because the College Board is part of the problem. They are already changing the SAT to try an make BIPOC do better. If you did that we'd end up in a full bore Goodhart's law situation.

The College Board is desperately trying to keep itself relevant in an age where increasing numbers of colleges want to stop using the SAT. They’re not the ones who started this.

I still can’t believe that UC has actually dropped sat/act requirements, I don’t see how this can possibly be sustainable for them.

I'm not sure those that would be in favor of using the SAT would really be comfortable enshrining the College Board with sole authority in ranking college admissions. Witness Florida battling over AP course curricula.

I don't have a deep-felt opinion on whether Harvard should be egalitarian. I prefer egalitarian entry criteria for elite institutions both for self-interested reasons and because I prioritize academic excellence over things like wealth, but there's something honest about an unabashedly elitist finishing school for the rich and powerful that I have to respect. I do think it's trying to awkwardly staple a facade of egalitarianism over a core of elitism, though, and that leaves it in a precarious and self-contradictory position.

You could be right about the amount of leverage it gives, but I think the way the ruling explicitly set California schools as a good example gives a lot of reason to be skeptical that the leverage will amount to a great deal in practice. I'll be watching with interest, and I expect mountains of litigation to come out of the ruling, but I have trouble anticipating serious changes as a result.

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