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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31449 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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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.

I presume that number one requirement NSA is looking for is complete political reliability, not even trace of any expressed doubt of current party line (and any previous party lines during applicant's lifetimes), plus no compromised or suspect persons among their family, friends and acquitances. One Snowden was enough.

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.

I have a math degree. This doesn't resonate with me at all. I think the CS, physics and chemistry majors would agree. The people who only learn how to bullshit are the people who major in bullshit things like "business administration" or "literary criticism" maybe these degrees just shouldn't exist.

Well.

The only way I can see someone bullshitting their way through a math degree, is essentially by successfully plagiarizing the work of other people. And if you bullshit your way through math in high school, you're copying someone else's answers and stealing their work. You're not going to bullshit the work itself, the hard sciences don't allow for it. You'll have to do it. And the former is probably difficult enough that makes choosing the latter easier.

If I look back at my high school experience in retrospect, the 'education' I got from it alone, should've left me back in school and I shouldn't have been allowed to graduate. What allowed me to succeed was the fact that I was an autodidact, who caught up with everything elsewhere, at a pace I enjoyed in a context that I was more passionate about. I hardly learned shit in school. And it wasn't because I was unintelligent or lazy. In fact, I was one of the better students. I just couldn't succeed in that environment.

You're not going to bullshit the work itself, the hard sciences don't allow for it.

That's exactly my point. The fact that the subject matter can't be bullshitted is exactly what gives these subjects merit. It means they have real truth content.

You're not going to see any disagreement from me there. That's not really what I was getting at. When I was in school, I didn't bullshit math. I bullshit the math 'class'. At the time I graduated high school, I was not proficient enough in mathematics such that I should've been allowed to graduate. But I did. And eventually I caught everything up very quickly through my own personal development and interest directed education. I certainly didn't get it from school.

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