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Notes -
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
I went to a normal but good public high school like @BahRamYou (please don't ram me), and understood from the get-go that an elite college was out of reach. I thought it was incredibly silly that anyone even countenanced elite college from this background, though some did, and the wokest ones got in. I don't resent it, because I understood that the elite colleges are for the upper class and people the upper class has pity on. I'm middle class, have always been middle class, and I followed the middle class path.
A "good school" to my class is a state school, a "bad school" is a private school, because the only private schools any of my peers were likely to get into would just be tens of thousands more a semester for no extra signaling benefit. Nobody in my class had a stone's chance in hell of getting into any school the upper-middle class would consider "good" unless they were some kind of minority. Getting in-state tuition at a flagship state school was the goal.
My peers are, generally, doing okay. Lots of people working in IT, office jobs, computer programming, nursing, teaching, medical tech, even a couple doctors if I recall correctly. Lots of people having cute babies and building lives together. Some aren't doing well, but that's true for any population of people. Not going to an elite college didn't destroy everyone's ability to live a good and happy life. It destroyed their chance of becoming elite, but they didn't have that expectation anyway. I'm going to teach my children that there's no way on earth they're going to be President or have an elite role, but there's every chance in the world they're going to have a meaningful, fulfilling life if they focus on living according to their values and focusing on the content of their friends' and partners' character instead of their status.
I don't understand the obsession with it, either. Not everyone in society is going to be elite. Some people are going to be normies. The struggle is to identify areas of economic need and study those. Blue collar work is in demand, and we desperately need conscientious people with integrity in these roles that are undervalued for status reasons. White collar jobs still exist.
When people describe all these expectations, all these extracurriculars, all this stress about test scores and good schools and networking and "don't you dare make a mistake"... it sounds so unbelievably suffocating that it's yet another non-miracle to me that so many preppy professional people have concluded our society is deeply oppressive. Because for them, it is.
It is totally fascinating to me that the upper-middle class folks typically hold an ideology that talks a lot about human equality, and says people don't choose their life outcomes, and we need to be respectful of people's different lifestyles, and yada yada yada, but also thinks mediocrity is a terrible life outcome, and you better go to an elite school and have an elite job! The intense pressure I see some people describe is totally alien to me. Sometimes I have to do a double-take, because it sounds like people are describing China and not America.
Isn't that going too far? The reality is that there is a small but real chance that your children actually are going to attain elite status in society. I don't see the benefit of trying to train them to not have outrageous-level ambition.
I think it makes sense to teach children not to put all their hopes in life on becoming NBA players, famous actors, or elite politicians. But I wouldn't want to train them to think that they have literally no chance of becoming elite.
I think federal office is more or less closed to non-elites. I can’t remember the last time someone from a normie background achieved such a thing. Maybe Carter, but even in his era, he’s an outlier, you’d probably need to go back the the 19th century to find a significant swath of congress being from relatively normal-people backgrounds.
As to what to teach kids, I mean I think it’s cruel to over promise on their futures. We’re in the third generation of people raised to dream big. And I think for the 99% who won’t get those things, their lives were hampered by these outrageously high aspirations that any adult could have told them were wildly unreasonable. The result is a generation saddled with a lifetime of debt for a degree that is quite literally worthless. It’s young adults feeling like failures because their wildly inflated expectations of success in fields where there are maybe ten thousand new graduates hoping for a single job. We graduate more psychology majors every year then there are psychologists in the USA. We graduated millions of aspiring artists with no real job skills despite the fact that even those who manage to sell their art almost certainly won’t make a living off their art. Publishing houses get mountains and mountains of letters from people who want to be writers. Now they can’t pay off their loans, can’t get a real job, and have been taught that the jobs they’re actually qualified for are beneath them. I’m sorry, but for the vast majority, the fine arts and liberal arts majors qualify the students for retail and restaurant jobs. Psychology is in a similar position. Had they been told at 18 that they were likely to get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, they’d very likely have chosen a major of actual career value and not be making TikTok’s of themselves crying in the car because they got a worthless degree loads of debt and can only get jobs at call centers, retail and restaurants.
I think all of the above is a way to say that essentially people need to think more about what the failure state is. Over encouraging your kids to dream big rarely results in huge success and more likely results in heartache and financial difficulties.
Doesn’t Ron Desantis disprove your rule that non-elites can’t achieve high office or even Joe Biden?
Desantis has like 400k networth now. Yes he has has the elite degrees. This just says the filter for entering the elites may be earlier. He no doubt got great SAT scores early then got into elite schools. Paid for it looks like from ROTC money.
The thing with the filter being earlier it could mean one of two things.
Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have money or elite academics early.
But that's the point there; you can say "DeSantis and Biden came from ordinary backgrounds" but when you look at them, yeah ordinary backgrounds but DeSantis was smart enough to get into the good university etc.
Biden, looking him up on Wikipedia, has a law degree. He's not an ex-coal miner like Keir Hardie. Indeed, he even was an adjunct professor, and even if we presume this was an easy gig, again it's not "and Joe is blue-collar salt of the earth background" as per the potted bio notion of his life:
And seemingly the family background was affluent, but then became what would be called elsewhere "distressed gentlefolk" until his father later got back on his feet:
He got into local politics, got elected to the Senate, and carved out a career as a good reliable old-style party hack with a solid reputation as the guy who didn't step out of line and knew how to wheel and deal. That was his major selling point both as Obama's VP and as President: "he's not gonna rock the boat".
I've seen the same thing in the Irish, and British, Labour Parties: the guys from the working-class, trade union background were slowly eased out or replaced by the middle-class striver types, who went to university and have affluent middle to upper-middle class family backgrounds and family members.
The last genuine working-class Labour leader for Ireland was Frank Cluskey from 1977-81. The current leaderette (I don't like her and never have) is Ivana Bacik. My personal fave of this trend is Ruairi Quinn, our first openly atheist minister, party leader from 1997-2002, so fierily socialist as a student radical that his nickname was Ho Chi Quinn, and... his brother and cousin are (or were) prominent businessmen, so none of the proletariat tendency there.
If coal miners became politicians today it would mean our entire meritocracy and educational system has failed.
I think it’s reasonable to say the leaders of our complex society should be IQ 130 and probably around a 1500 SAT score. The entire filter for our system would be failing if that kid isn’t getting selected into a top 25 university today.
It’s also been said of unions that the leaders no longer come from the workers but from outside of it. Back in the day poor immigrant kids who were smart might not have been caught up into our systems filters for leadership and would have taken the mill job. Their intelligence would have led them to leadership. But now they are filtered out earlier.
It just feels like going backwards and a thing for poor countries to not identify their most talented individuals early. Do we want 1500 SAT kids working at Wal-Mart for 20 years so they can be good working class people?
Take the transitive closure of the inference steps you are doing here, and you basically arrive at "groups that are definitionally unsuited for governing roles should not self-govern". This may sound attractive to you as long as you can model the qualification as a one-dimensional parameter like IQ, but what if society develops sufficient complexity that a caste emerges which is (genetically, socially) optimised for politics in particular, rather than general intelligence? Would you then also consider it a failure of the system if any group is represented and governed by people who are not members of the caste of Superior Politicians, and thus either a born Superior Politician's potential was wasted, or administration is suboptimal? In that case, you've basically reinvented one standard argument for a medieval aristocracy.
It’s not a gotcha to me.
In that case society would be better governed by the Superior Politicians provided you mean by that they make decisions that mostly benefit all of society on net.
I also have no problem saying S Africa would be better off for everyone if only whites could vote versus everyone. I also believe that is being proven true.
And in the case of S Africa that with the whites not even giving a shit about the blacks. Your super politicians are implying that they actually would have a feel for how to benefit everyone versus being only incentivized to benefit themselves.
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The public should be educated such that members of the public who are capable of understanding self-governing are taught it.
You could ask "what if society is so complex that it's not even possible to teach people?" but I'm skeptical that this can be a thing if the elite is capable of understanding it. And "the populace can't be taught" is a magnet for motivated reasoning (or lying thinly covered by motivated reasoning) and probably won't result in an accurate assessment of whether the populace can be taught.
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