Making small talk is a skill, just like any other. You don't need to skip college to figure out how to small talk.
but the rest of the article is pretty interesting: the sense of entitlement, the one dimensional view of intelligence, and the SAT and prep track required to get to it all.
Somehow, this article reminded me of Catch in the Rye - especially the main character and his experiences in a prep school for college.
It’s not just a skill. If you’ve been mostly around people of the upper class, and in such schools as well – as the article says – you might be able to hold small talk with people from other countries, but not with people from your own country’s lower class.
There’s an entirely different way of life there, entirely different life experiences, which lead to entirely different priorities, things you think about, and so on.
I’ve been in both circles due to family, people from the very bottom, and people from the very top, and you can’t just say "making small talk is just a skill".
And the other things you mention are also artifacts of this education: You only see this one perspective of life, which is so very different from what many other people experience, that you never even consider what their life might look like.
Smalltalk, like any communication, requires that you have a mental model of the person you talk with, but if you share none of their experiences, you can’t build such a mental model.
Although I wouldn’t recommend skipping college, I definitely recommend people to at least try to find a way with which they can experience the life through the eyes of a person of another social class at least once.
This article is utter rubbish. Anyone who possesses an elite education will never suffer in their life. They're in the upper-echelon of society. I have no pity for them and they are not at a disadvantage.
Go ahead an ask anyone accepted into Yale if they'd trade it off for the same major at po-dunk State U.
I think you're confusing "these are the cons of going to an elite university" with "there are more cons than pros of going to an elite university."
It's quite possible to be mostly satisfied with something and still have good reasons to be dissatisfied, and it's perfectly reasonable to write about those reasons. I doubt Deresiewicz would say that "po-dunk State U" is better.
When I was on the Harvard tour, the guide was an Ivy League groupie -- she had applied and failed to get into Harvard, went to a good "backup school", (I think Case Western) and finally transferred into Harvard in her sophomore year -- without transferring any credits.
It made an impression on me. I checked out the 2nd tier of school and found a bunch of white bread people from Jersey looking forward to a career in ibanking or medicine.
I ended up in a good state school with real people and no debt. I lost the opportunity to work at McKinsey or whatever, but I consider that a plus.
Not at all. At that time in my life, I would have been attracted to that kind of gig, and having been a customer working with those kinds of firms, I wouldn't have liked it.
Fundamentally, the best thing hat I learned about in college was myself. Surrounding myself with type-As on some track would have stifled that. Honestly, I'm really happy with how life has turned out this far!
Anyone who never suffers in their life and is not aware of the total randomness of their own birth, is damaged in a way I would NOT want to swap with. One would have to have none to not realize how much infinitely more worth the personality one can become potentially is than even full control of all of the Earth's resources and command over all people could be. It's like the difference between making someone orgasm, and screaming at them, why can't they see how sexy one is and why aren't they aroused, especially since it was so expensive to get a room at this hotel.
Mind you, I think personal greatness is completely unrelated to social class. I'm not saying "elite education means you have issues", I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all. But having grown up in a town teeming with millionaires, I have to laugh at the idea that many rich aren't positively hunted by their own defects. Yes, they can buy an island, but they can't sit still on it, they cannot be with themselves, they cannot reflect on themselves. They are captured, driven, mad, and get hysterical when they are recognized and pitied. So they have to keep company that has the same fears, like an unspoken pact. It's like drug addicts hanging out with drug addicts instead of the people who would ask them wtf they are doing with their life.
They can't read many great minds and even get half of what they say; sure, neither do many poor people, but that's more because they don't have the time or the language is too bloated for them, not because there is some inherent vampire/garlic type incompatibility. If you discuss the exact same subjects with a "normal" person in normal words, they in my experience are less likely to throw up all sorts of deflections, while other people realize this stuff is fit to dissolve the lies their lives are and get scared.
Fear is not strength, and powerful people have many options, but when those options don't include letting go of power they are basically slaves as well. The highest echelons of power are impersonal and systematic, only entropy and madness gain from them, no human person; and it takes personal strength to sail in such an environment and not end up as a bundle of sticks held together by delusions. It takes fierce motherfuckers, which is the opposite of people who can't answer a straight question, as many people in the "upper echelons" demonstrate. Pester me not with their pocket calculator stuff :P
>Yes, they can buy an island, but they can't sit still on it
I would LOVE to have that problem. That's a manufactured 1st-world, bourgeois nuisance. Boo friggin' hoo. Millions of struggling working class families would give anything to have that kind of problem, and frankly it's a little bit insulting to their plight.
People seem to exaggerate the difference between Elite schools and State schools. The key difference between elite schools and other schools is entrenchment. Basically, how "sold" are students into society? At Yale, students hold a conformist, yet liberal attitude. They tend to take things much more seriously: grades, exams, clubs, events, etc. You'll find more expression at Yale than you will at a State school, but that expression tends to be low dimensional. Most people are worried about the same stuff -- it's just that they are all worried. That's what Yale is like. It's not that those students are smarter, it's just that they are more invested into the system, and they have been for longer.
That's pretty much 90% of the difference I notice between Yalies and State school students.
"Anyone who possesses an elite education will never suffer in their life"
This is not fair to say. Many, if not most ivy leagues go onto have relatively normal lives.
I have a friend in Vermont who went to Yale. She is a 'marketing manager'. I don't even think she could pay for her education unless her (doctor) father did.
I took a tour of Stanford, the girl went to Dartmouth. I don't think the people giving recruiting tours of Stanford earn all that much.
Surely, it opens a lot of doors, and there are probably industries in which it can give one a cosy path, but it's not the 'guarantee' of anything.
> I love when the elite romanticize the lives of the prole. It's super easy to think "Yeah, $750 apartment, a bit for food, go out for a beer once in awhile, work 9-5, great!" Until you realize that unless you play a perfect hand with every dime, the slightest expense can cripple you at a moments notice.
"Not to be rich" doesn't necessarily mean "precariously afloat."
I choose to interpret that line charitably, and take it to mean that many high impact roles in society (especially various roles in education) do not pay richly, so having the luxury to deprioritize income should mean that today's young Americans might be better equipped to focus on social impact first.
Edit: I saw that you edited your post and removed what you originally said. That's too bad. I would much prefer that we try to have a productive discussion than to just drop a curtain on the conversation.
> How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York?
You face them with your head held high. You chose a career that you find fulfilling. You're improving the lives of children, passing your hard-earned knowledge on to another generation.
>> Until you realize that unless you play a perfect hand with every dime, the slightest expense can cripple you at a moments notice.
From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get.
You're literally just reiterating the arguments the article makes except with a clearly visible chip on your shoulder.
Edit: Perhaps you should make your statement in one post instead of editing over and over again. You seem far too emotional to make a rational argument here.
The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity, so I began to read the article. It's been a long ..year...and I am super tired, so I am not going to manage to actually read the whole thing.
But, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I turned down a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities of my home state. I think I made the right call and I think I understand the impetus behind the writing of this article.
In a nutshell, if education is empowering, but pursuing that education actually narrows your life choices, then perhaps there is some flaw somewhere. For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder and this may come at great personal cost.
I was in my late 40s before I really understood how incredibly upper class my mother's values are. We didn't have much money when I was a kid -- or so I thought, though it turns out that is not as accurate as I believed at the time -- and I never thought of myself as upper class.
It took me a lot of years of intentionally walking away from this deeply rooted expectation in order to really reclaim my life for myself in a way that allows me to get what I want, not for me to become what society expects me to be.
So while I get that most people are not going to understand that there is a genuine cost involved and will simply sneer at the idea that there is any down side, as someone who recognized that downside at a young age and walked away, I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people and it does harm them and it does definitely harm their ability to be good leaders for the common man.
This is a stupid reply that has nothing to do with the topic: I had the NMS myself, and I'm assuming some college was going to give you an extra kicker since it's portable. Do you mind sharing which colleges? I'm weirdly curious because while I didn't go to an known elite school, I turned down a full ride to an out-of-state state school (for NMS winners) to go to a private school. So like, kind of the opposite of you. But I also probably didn't fully understand the options.
As far as I know, my scholarship was not portable. It was specifically for one university and when I failed to attend, no, I did not get to keep my scholarship.
No one gave me an extra kicker. I turned my scholarship down for personal reasons, not because I was bought out by some competing school.
At the time when I was in the NMS pipeline, if you listed a school that you wanted to attend when you took the PSAT/NMSQT, that school would give you the scholarship if you became a finalist. The best idea was to say "undecided" and to maintain the ability to designate any school once committed.
My older brother learned this the hard way—he listed a school (October of junior year) that he decided (April of senior year) not to attend. He lost the $8k in scholarship money that he could have gotten from the school he attended—which he could have gotten had he responded "undecided".
Yeah, my experience is now 20 years old, but it looks like (to your sibling comments' point) the NMS amount has only gone up a little in that time—to $10k. Meanwhile, tuition+fees (at least at my alma mater) has gone up by over 75% during that time.
IIRC (circa 2009/2010) only certain schools are sponsors, where you are guaranteed the award. Some portion of finalists are awarded the scholarship from the National Merit program itself that can be used anywhere.
"the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice"
Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.
Thats why an elite education is an advantage.
The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ...
"you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
Well said... sometimes choosing to be poor brings more wealth: the world-class, millionaire skateboarder comes to mind. I would have preferred the "narrowing" of an elite Stanford education myself. Still trying to escape my State Schoolitis.
The author isn't saying that an elite education offers no advantage. He's saying that it has downsides as well. It's not 100% advantageous, and yet we tend to think of it as so.
> They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
It certainly does a better job than isolating yourself within a very narrow band of culture. In my experience, that's just how cultural experience works.
If you spend all your time hanging out with rich, smart, successful people, it's only going to make it harder for you to identify with people who aren't. If you spend all of your time hanging out with white people, you're more likely to feel awkward when you go to the black part of town. Etc. And the opposites are also true.
Any school will have a culture. Those that pride themselves on diversity tend to have one narrow kind of variety, and extreme monoculture on other axes - or else have a bunch of subcultural groups that don't really talk to each other. There's a kind of fundamental conservation: for people to be able to communicate and work together requires a certain level of cultural commonality.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
One criticism the article makes is that people with elite educations are expected to be leaders of the entire country (or community or other group), yet they often do not understand the common man at all. I think this is both valid and note worthy. It goes a long way towards explaining the discontent of "the 99 percent."
Rules made by elite are often rules made for the benefit of the elite as well. They often completely overlook the needs of the rest of the people and these rules may benefit the elite at the expense of the masses.
It is one of the reasons I walked away from my scholarship. I am unwilling to exercise power in that manner.
I think the idea that there's this homogenous "common man" is bogus. If you pick your leaders from 1% of the population then they won't represent everyone - but that's true whichever 1% of the population you pick, and leaders by definition are a minority of the populace. If you picked, say, the employees of a particular steelworks to be leaders, rather than Yale graduates, you wouldn't end up with a group that was any more representative.
My concern is for how power gets exercised in a harmful manner such that it actively victimizes the most vulnerable members of society. As a mother, this is the opposite of what I understood my role to be.
I don't care about diversity in leadership. I care about leadership that doesn't flush the whole system down the toilet so thoroughly as to cut even their own throats in the process.
Your last paragraph is most crucial to being sympathetic towards this article, as most of the comments here have fallen into "damn the man" raving.
If you're in the position of having elite status thrust upon you, it's generally in everyone's interest that you actually be good at that, and not just told that you're good at it because you followed the rules.
We must assume that most people, most of the time, regardless of their apparent status or agency, are not strong-willed philosophers, but prisoners to scripted expectations and obligations. We will all try to avoid struggle and have it easy, and in doing so condemn ourselves to the life of the living dead by staying in an ever-diminishing comfort zone. And for someone who is in this state to step into a role with great power and then coast along without vision or direction - well, that sure does describe a lot of people!
The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity
The other day I read a comment observing that commenters here have an almost Pavlovian response that compels them to disagree with the article. That seems right to me. A while ago I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300542, which touches on similar themes.
If you didn't know you were 'upper class' then you were definitely not, although I grasp what you are saying.
'Upper class' means generational wealth and status, your grandfather was wealthy, a diplomat, and admiral, head of a large multinational, and you can trace your lineage back at least 8 generations, and likely back to before you were even Americans ... your family has had status for that long.
But yes - some people have 'high standards of behaviour', are genteel, polite, articulate, conscientious, well mannered etc. but don't have a lot of money. Many upper-middle class, even middle class types were like this just a generation and a half ago. I suggest fewer people are exactly that now, as the mores of society have shifted quite a lot in many ways.
Um ... my family has been tracked back to John "Tuscarora Jack" Barnwell (came to the colonies in 1701---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnwell_(colonist)) but I'm not "upper class" my any means. I'm not sure what you meant by that.
The ability to not be rich strikes me as the position of someone who is very privileged to start with. Po' folk don't have to opportunity to choose to not be rich, they just have to do the best they can with the hand they are dealt.
That is not the same thing at all. There's a vast chasm between not possible because you don't have the money and not phychologically available because you can't imagine lowering your standards. For one, the argument that rich people can't bring themselves to do it might be true, but is a broad generalization that is speculating about the mental state of other people. The argument that when you don't have the money, you don't get to choose to not have the money, that is a tautology, it's 100% guaranteed.
It's not physically possible either. It's a pretty common affectation of trust fund kids that they can just pretend to be normal, but it's just play-acting or maybe economic tourism. The song "Common People" describes how it turns out: "But still you'll never get it right / 'cos when you're laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall / If you call your Dad he could stop it all."
I studied engineering at Cornell. We had a diverse student body, and this article is just one person's experience. For me, I had a great conversation with my plumber. Clever trick: he stores the snaker in an old tire so he can just roll it around.
For my business, the advantage is initial credibility to customers, but there's so much work beyond that. The software has to be useful, the sales process has to be navigated, and the customer has to be trained and supported.
I've realized life is what I make of it. If I want to converse with my plumber, then we will have a great conversation. If I find building a business fulfilling, then I will build a business. Cornell didn't teach me to do these things; Cornell also didn't teach me not to do these things. We had a diverse student body: this is how I think, and it's different from the author.
I've had several friends study at Cornell, undergrad and grad level. They all have seemed to be pretty open and approachable. Based on personal anecdotes it'd seem Cornell is one of the better Ivy Leagues for not completely falling into the mentality mentioned in the article. Good to hear there are more sensible Ivy League engineering folks, much less just engineering folks, who can have a conversation with a non-tech person.
Engineering is much more of a blue collar profession than say, private equity. Many of my classmates, like myself, came from the midwest, and we studied engineering because we love what we do, not for the money.
It seems like the real problem is:
For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder
The key to me, is that they have a choice then and have choices later in life... you can learn to be not_rich=middle_class at a lot of different times in your life. Many of them will make you unhappy.
Perhaps it's a bit worse going to an Ivy League where everyone else is the same, but you could say that about staying in the same state, or joining the military (which has many different people, but an enforced culture).
These aren't the disadvantages of an elite education, it's the disadvantages of not having sufficient breadth of experiences with people from a sufficient breadth of social-economic backgrounds.
Get your kids to do extracurriculars where they'll meet kids from lower-income households. It'll make them able to relate to them and understand them better.
You are missing: in order to gain access to these institutions, many people apparently have to forgoe those extracurriculars and focus only on their studies.
No, to gain access to these institutions you are basically required to have half a dozen extracurriculars on your resume. They receive applications from so many white straight-A/4.0 students that extracurriculars are the only differentiating factor. Few high schools (in California, at least) would even let you graduate without 50-100 hours of community service.
Whether these extracurriculars would expose you to different ethnicities and world views is dependant on demographics.
It's also based on access, I remember feeling initially impressed when a fellow applicant on College Confidential that applied to the same top school as myself did community service abroad in South America, when I then realized that it was very costly to do so, and that I couldn't have done anything so "impressive" only because my parents couldn't have covered the cost.
"Few high schools (in California, at least) would even let you graduate without 50-100 hours of community service."
I have never heard of community service as a requirement to graduate high school. (No school in my district had this requirement.)
Granted, I understand your overall point. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be accepted by "elite" colleges. In fact, I had applied to nearly 12 colleges that were highly respected in Computer Science and was rejected from all of them.
None of the top ten schools on that list seem to have a community service requirement [0].
There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule regarding which schools do or don't have a community service requirement. Mission San Jose does, but Lynbrook does not.
[0] As determined by a quick google search for each to locate "$SCHOOL_NAME graduation requirements", followed by a quick scan for anything outside of required course credits.
I was mistaken, I thought it was a California state wide thing but I guess not.
Either way, your statement about the top 10 CA high schools is false. I attended Granada Hills Charter and San Marino high school (#1 and #7 respectively) and both do absolutely require community service. San Marino requires 40 hours over four years [1] and GHCHS requires 20 hours per semester [2]. A friend at Miramonte High School didn't have to do any community service but I recognize many of the schools on this list and can confirm they require community service. Searching for "graduation requirements" just gives you a list of credits you need but doesn't include community service or disciplinary rules for graduation.
I will cede to your first source, but your second source is specifically for CSF membership at Granada Hills, which doesn't look like it's mandatory for graduation.
But sure, it looks like my naive search approach is inadequate, as it for the most part brought up credits (as you mentioned).
Looks like Saratoga High also has a community service requirement. Other than that, I can't find any others on that top ten sublist (e.g. Canyon Crest explicitly states it doesn't have a community service requirement [0], Lynbrook states that community service isn't a district requirement).
And to be fair, I don't think charter schools should be lumped in with the rest of the public schools, but that's probably just my opinion.
Yup. I go to an ivy and many of my best friends are construction workers or service workers who will likely never attend college. It's because I wasn't sheltered (nor particularly wealthy as a kid).
And when you're there, talk to people. Not just ones who will help you climb the social ladder in whatever elite clubs and orgs you want to join. People of all stripes. It's a much more diverse group in every way than the author describes.
Honestly it sounds like the author was elitist and sheltered as a kid. And now they've realised this, but have decided to blame it on their university rather than deal with the fact that it was their own personal fault.
As with many things I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.
On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing that" when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.
I agree. These aren't disadvantages and shouldn't be characterized that way. This is in no way to imply that rich/elite people don't have problems. Instead of not having access to quality education or food or etc., kids of the rich/elite have massive expectations thrust on them.
But everything in life is a choice and if the author is so self aware of this "disadvantage", they have simple paths to fix it. Instead of people making more home food delivery start-ups, create one to help underprivileged get access to education or healthcare, etc.
The key take away for me is that if you decide to live your life based on someone else's terms, you'll never be truly happy. Create your own path on your journey.
Brits also are much more okay with embracing the idea that there are separate classes. Americans like to think we are better than that and (like to imagine that we) treat all people in some idealized egalitarian fashion. In practice, it is a lot, lot harder to treat everyone equally well and try to ignore class divides than to have protocols in place for bridging the gap between people explicitly of different classes.
It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes. Some years back a blogger tried to cook up a taxonomy of our class system. Since we don't have words to describe them he adopted archaic Indian terms instead. Brahmins are the NY/CA elite, Vaisyas are the Trump voting worker caste, etc.
I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.
It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.
The fear of recognizing a caste system is that once you use words to describe something, the words themselves become a tool to reinforce and then codify that system.
I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.
Is it? The caste system is mostly defunct. In my experience (admittedly, as an outsider who lives in mostly elite circles) there is actually a more significant caste-like system, but much like in the states there are no real words to describe it.
The best explanation I've seen of it is Chetan Bhaget's novel Half Girlfriend: http://amzn.to/2im0Cxq It's a masala romance novel, blah, but it's the only real discussion of the issue that I've seen.
Very few people can even discuss these subtle, un-named caste systems, let alone argue against them. I can't stand Chetan Bhaget, yet I link to him anyway simply because he's really one of the very few who actually discuss it. Consider how difficult it is to even discuss Trump's victory in these terms as well.
I think that the best protection the caste system has is that we refuse to even give it a word.
On the contrary, without the words to describe such structures, they remain hidden from discourse and direct criticism. This protects the implicit structures by rendering them unassailable by democratic processes.
I am half remembering an issue with feminism and hierarchies; groups would naturally form hierarchies anyway, but without any formalism or recognition of them, the effects were made far more insidious
"It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes."
America does have 'classes' but they are completely different from the type of class system you'll find in the 'old world'.
Many self-made Americans would consider themselves 'upper class', by virtue of wealth, status and behaviour. But classically, you really can't 'move' into class, you pretty much have to be born into it. Or possibly marry into it.
European class system is a hack around wealth in a society not always being distributed to the "right" people. Modern American class system simply assumes it has been distributed correctly and works around that.
That depends on where you live. For me, it's fine, because we have lots of interesting and/or annoying weather. For others, it's the same boring sunny day every day.
The weather is truly the #1 icebreaker here in the UK. However, if you've spoken to someone at least twice before and still only keep talking about the weather then you start to look dim.
Amongst the upper and upper-middle classes, the concept and practice of politeness ensures conversation. Children are taught at a young age to take an interest (or at least feign an interest) in the other person and think of a line of conversation that may be appropriate.
If you chat to a Brit and get beyond the weather, you'll notice that you will be asked a lot of questions. It's part conversation and part fact-finding. Some people would rather fall off the end of the Earth than ask where the other person went to school (i.e. it's rude to pry), but with 20 little questions we can work all that out and carry a conversation at the same time.
The new plutocracy will be balanced by iron fisted CEOs, algorithmically advised and steered boards, and a chosen few human elites that bear each other due to a wealth standoff. The rest of us die hungry, cold, and broke as shit, while the elites mine galaxies and excavate the stars by the trillions.
Unfortunately, this is the wrong conclusion -- the jobs of the elite are precisely those that don't get replaced by technology. Automation only affects those jobs are systematic and repeatable.
The elite typically hold jobs in consulting, finance, management, government, etc. that require a lot of word-smithing and people skills.
The big blind spot for technologists is thinking that technology is central to everything. It is not. If you look at how society is organized, it's the folks with the people skills who are on top. People who are good with technology work for them.
I would say that the upper class of each country has a distinct subculture. And now those subcultures have somehow converged into a global subculture of the rich.
A golf club membership for example can cost $100,000. Some people will probably never save up that much, and if they did, they would never spend it in a golf club membership. But for some it's completely normal and part of their everyday lives.
Same with schools, same with restaurants, etc... by being strictly exclusive you set yourself apart from the rest and miss out on a lot of things.
Summer 2008, and widely criticized from then to now. I wonder if a professor of English can ever have the same perspective as a professor of biology or a professor of mathematics. I don't think he has made the case that higher education that can properly be called "elite" is actually disadvantageous.
I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy and linguistics from an elite university. My parents owned and auto parts store in a small town, which was next door to my grandparents' bakery. Based on my experience, it seems this guys' problem is a boring backstory; no university can or should make up for the fact that you don't regularly mix with non-university types.
I think the key mistake this piece made is assuming that having an elite education stops you from being culturally and socially aware beyond your class. Sure, many top colleges don't teach this, but as someone who grew up in a family with under $20K income who goes to a pretty good private school, I've seen a very distinct difference in some of my classmates. The education isn't the problem, the bubble is.
I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.
Since the education talked about is quite far out of my experience[1], I am a bit concerned that any education could so influence a person that they cannot make small talk with someone else. This actually sounds like an isolation problem or a total need not to be embarrassed. I know some folks are shy and suffer real problems, but this isn't it. It just sounds like someone who has lived with a sect of some sort for a long time. I just have a tough time believing the education did it.
1) sent in the applications with the fees that I couldn't really afford and never even got a letter back. I figured it was a sign.
Before this gets flagged to oblivion, I have one criticism and two defenses of the article.
As a criticism, this article doesn't address the sciences. The availability of research money is a major reason to go to an elite science institution. If you want to do science, the best thing is to do it, and that usually means email a lab and asking to work there. More labs with more money probably means better opportunities.[0]
In the first defense, consider whether there's anything in this article that might also apply outside of elite colleges.
For instance:
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.
This resonates so much with what Daniel Ellsberg wrote to a young Henry Kissinger regarding levels of top-secret access:
Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input ... you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools. ... it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. [1]
Finally, this article absolutely nails many of the patterns I have observed while at elite universities. For instance:
(If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) reminds me of when an acquaintence mentioned he was going to law school 'In Palo Alto'.
Or, one night at a party when I overheard a friend (future Rhodes scholar) say 'You know you're at <institution> when you use the term statistical variance at a theatre party!' Never mind that they'd used it incorrectly, it was emblematic to say the least.
I don't mean that people at elite institutions are mostly shitty, or even those who've said these things are shitty - I have great friends from my time in school. I hope I did not paint a picture of snobbish assholes who do nothing but sit around and talk about how great they were. I didn't want to be defensive and write a whole paragraph about how much I value the friends and discussions I had in school. I miss my college all the time, and I think there was something special there. It really was an extraordinary place, in large part because of those around me.
However, I did still see these patterns, in others, and in myself.
Yeah, I often say "in Massachusetts" when people ask where I go to school, when I'm back home. Everyone seems to think this is a mark of how snooty Harvardians are.
But often when I did just say "Harvard", it became a big deal. Not always, but often.
It can make social situations weird. I socialise with a lot of people who are in the trades. I've had more than a few conversations killed when the person I'm talking with finds out I go to Harvard. Suddenly (again sometimes, not always) the person feels embarrassed because they aren't an intellectual, or unrefined, or something, and the conversation gets awkward fast.
It can also make some people just overestimate or overcare for you. I used to volunteer for a political party. The local organiser was nice and treated me well, like he treated everybody, but once he found out I went to Harvard he decided to give me double the attention, plus the cushy assignments, I guess in hopes of retaining me-- when really I just wanted to do the door knocking and phone calling like everyone else.
I wish that the name of the place I go to school didn't have cultural cachet far beyond its worth and that I could always just say it. But it does, especially where I'm from, where not many people have been anywhere near an Ivy. So sometimes I decide to not risk triggering this weird overblown cultural image, because I just want to be myself and not "that guy who goes to HARVARD". Many of my friends feel similarly. I don't know how this desire counts as noblesse oblige.
The issue I have with the sciences is that most of those best-in-field professors are really best-in-field at research, not instruction, so if you want to get the best science instruction you don't necessarily go to their schools. I know that, for example, my wife received a better, more personalized education at her small women's liberal arts school than I received at my largish, elite-ish university where most of my courses were taught by TAs as I sat next to hundreds of clones of myself. My wife regularly had classes with 10-20 people (sometimes fewer), and professors who were there because they loved teaching.
Totally different type of education, but the ultimate outcomes were roughly equivalent. We both went on to grad school (at top state universities) and both have done very well in our careers -- me in tech, her in pharma.
Poor sap. Really, I think you can do both, but you have to supplement the education with actual experience (like travel, volunteering, and normal jobs) and not buy into the hocus-pocus businesstalk mumbo-jumbo. At least, if you want to be normal. If you want to be in business, by all means, concede yourself to the Ivy monolith.
Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education than not.
It's just that understanding of others is relatively rare in the first place among all humans. It's just way more annoying from elites because they tend to think they're very open minded, even when they are not.
> Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education than not.
In my experience, it is independent of education. I've dealt with the social service people early in my career and encountered people with true empathy (along with folks who had no business giving directions much less life advice). You find these folks in many careers and at many educational levels. If anything the focus required for intensive education might push people away from the understanding of others.
I always have to laugh when I see that phrase used by people who clearly don't know the derogatory connotations that it has carried since Halberstam's book of the same title.
1. denies you the opportunity to empathize with anyone beyond a narrow spectrum of socioeconomics and culture
2. anoints you with a sense of self-worth and entitlement that is, if earned at all, only founded on a narrow set of skills: analytic ability and hard work
3. admits you into the class of seductive "entitled mediocrity", which allows you to fail spectacularly with essentially no real repercussions
4. constraints you, via social pressure, to a narrow set of "prestigious" career paths, among which you might not find the one that is truly right for you
5. shelters you from failure and encourages the idea that it is unacceptable, leaving you less likely to take on risk which might be necessary for growth and fulfillment
6. "is profoundly anti-intellectual", because students are encouraged more to acquire power and all that is necessary for it than cultivation of one's intellect, which requires such slothful indulgences as sitting in solitude, journaling, or even making time to have a relationship with a close friend
TL;DR for the TL;DR: elite schools' "real purpose is to reproduce the class system", instead of to grow their students' minds.
I'll add that when I read Deresiewicz's article in the New Republic and then went to his talk on my undergrad institution's campus, his tone was markedly more bitter than it is here in 2008. I suppose the situation has not improved in his eyes.
I went to Stanford, and I disagree. Sure, there are exceptions, but most fellow alumni I know are very boring.
For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:
- have an "interesting" hobby
- work out at the gym
- hang out with friends at the bar or club
- work on their career
- start a "start-up"
- travel
- ... other very self-serving pursuits
Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:
I've always wondered what it'd be like to go to Stanford and then just end up at Facebook or Google, alongside many state-school graduates. Would it be a massive let down? Sure, you might have learned more at Stanford than at your peers' state schools, but you are only using as much of your education as your peers are using.
How is it not "just" ending up at Facebook or Google when you could've BS'd your way through high school, gone to a mediocre state school, and landed a new-grad position at one of those companies? Stanford or X State University, suddenly all of those years mean nothing and new graduates of both schools come to the same starting blocks, only this time at a massive software company where tens of thousands of others follow suit.
Arguably it doesn't matter whether you went to Stanford or your state university, the institution where you graduated matters little in the professional world once you have that first gig.
> It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
> Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
A good proxy is market demand. If Apple releases an iPhone and 1bn people buy it they served the needs of at least 1bn people.
Of course, a whole lot of poor people (probably the other 5/6 bn) won't be affected immediately but some years later they also start benefitting and today it's almost a (used) 100$ laptop per child equivalent (except for the poorest).
You can argue the same way about mpesa, bitcoin and other innovations/products.
"Market demand" does not optimize globally by default. Effects can be positive or (extremely) negative.
Example: Global warming is a result of the "market", an unexpected consequence from decades of growth. It can only be countered by coordinated action.
To get back to the topic at hand: The "elites" should be the ones who lead such a transformation instead of, say, just looking to advance their carreers.
The "elites" are the ones currently in charge (e.g., climate change, terrorism, monetary policy, ...) and I don't see them optimizing.
Just a few related questions:
Who is going to define who are the elites? If you say the people, then we end up in a democracy just like we have already and yet, I cannot see any optimization.
What if climate change can be evaluated not only as a single metric but as a tradeoff? E.g., nuclear energy vs CO2? Or cost of each marginal ton of CO2 saved vs. the things you can do with the same money (e.g. a few cancer therapies).
Are there even appropriate "elites" who are experts in all of the above areas?
There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
I think you are stereotyping Stanford grads, particularly older ones. There are plenty of Stanford grads outside the US as well as on East Coast, etc. There are also plenty of Stanford grads in medical and science careers.
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.
Humans also have a bad habit of double counting contributions. Facebook is "connecting the world" but how many of those connections would've happened over the phone or in person without them? I'm not saying Facebook is net negative, just that a lot of those $100 contributions you are adding up are just shifted from another business that went under.
I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity helpful over the long-term.
> I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100.
The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.
What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.
Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.
So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function).
The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.
Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.
At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.
Re: "It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function)."
You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.
Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."
I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.
Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."
I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.
There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.
But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.
Here is another possibility for something to work on. We are deploying IoT at scale without much concern for security. Effectively, we are building a massive weapon for our enemies to use against us -- one that is distributed, fault-tolerant, and built into our infrastructure. We would not be able to escape the consequences of such a weapon.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
Frankly, I'd be disappointed if mob justice prevailed in the case that you highlight above. Stanford hired a (presumably) competent lawyer to investigate the case and found the accused's case to be more compelling.
Nothing I have seen in the case indicates anything beyond a large amount of awkwardness and lack of comfort. Most of the evidence that she was actually discriminated against with regards to tenure is entirely circumstantial.
Having been intimately involved with these systems while at Stanford I have seen how cunningly many intelligent people at these institutions co-opt and leverage the prevalently liberal political attitudes towards race and gender issues for personal motivations, interests and grievances.
In fact I served as a residence assistant and witnessed someone who is now a very prominent politician wrongly accuse one of our students of racial discrimination. Having known the accused student ... I knew for a fact that no discrimination was involved. The student that made the accusation instantly leveraged the incident on several public forums to build political and social capital. His entire persona was based around "fighting racial oppression" -- even when said oppression was constructed purely for personal gain.
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.
If these people's personal statements reflected their true intentions for what they want to do with their Stanford education after they graduated, they wouldn't have gotten in regardless of how good their grades, test scores, and extracurriculars were. Stanford isn't for these people. They could just have gone to some other university, still achieved their personal goals, and made room for people who really mean it when they say they want to make a mark on the world.
I find this list (and the article in general) hilarious. Prefacing this with the disclaimer that the entire premise depends on how you define "elite", there are plenty of well-grounded, socially competent, altruistic young people attending elite universities, who go on to perform all sorts of contributive work. I find it odd that such an accomplished person would think it's ok to author a public piece about what seem to obviously be their own shortcomings.
Yes, perhaps some groups within some universities do contain individuals with certain proclivities that lead to cause certain behaviors that lead to certain outcomes, but not all!
I would think that it goes without saying that higher education is not the 'be all end all' in overall 'life' education.
While I don't believe the author is directly incorrect in his claims of of university behavior/culture, I feel like most of the 'disadvantages' he lists are of his own decisions, whereas for a lot of people they are forced.
'Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me?'
There's nothing preventing the author from being a teach aside from his own mental barriers that he can overcome himself - I'm sure if he applied, most school boards would leap at the chance of having him. For others though, that simply isn't the case, and they have real, hard, economic/environmental barriers.
If it weren't for the 1% (smartest not wealthiest) we'd still be living in caves, we'd have no cure for disease, we'd have no internet (or Hacker News!). I, for one, am extremely thankful for elite/ivy educations and for what these institutions and their graduates have made possible for the rest of humanity. If the only price we pay is that they don't know how to talk to dumb people, that's a price I feel is worth paying.
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[ 0.91 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadbut the rest of the article is pretty interesting: the sense of entitlement, the one dimensional view of intelligence, and the SAT and prep track required to get to it all.
Somehow, this article reminded me of Catch in the Rye - especially the main character and his experiences in a prep school for college.
There’s an entirely different way of life there, entirely different life experiences, which lead to entirely different priorities, things you think about, and so on.
I’ve been in both circles due to family, people from the very bottom, and people from the very top, and you can’t just say "making small talk is just a skill".
And the other things you mention are also artifacts of this education: You only see this one perspective of life, which is so very different from what many other people experience, that you never even consider what their life might look like.
Smalltalk, like any communication, requires that you have a mental model of the person you talk with, but if you share none of their experiences, you can’t build such a mental model.
Although I wouldn’t recommend skipping college, I definitely recommend people to at least try to find a way with which they can experience the life through the eyes of a person of another social class at least once.
Go ahead an ask anyone accepted into Yale if they'd trade it off for the same major at po-dunk State U.
What do you think their response will be?
Don't be daft. This is trash.
It's quite possible to be mostly satisfied with something and still have good reasons to be dissatisfied, and it's perfectly reasonable to write about those reasons. I doubt Deresiewicz would say that "po-dunk State U" is better.
It made an impression on me. I checked out the 2nd tier of school and found a bunch of white bread people from Jersey looking forward to a career in ibanking or medicine.
I ended up in a good state school with real people and no debt. I lost the opportunity to work at McKinsey or whatever, but I consider that a plus.
Fundamentally, the best thing hat I learned about in college was myself. Surrounding myself with type-As on some track would have stifled that. Honestly, I'm really happy with how life has turned out this far!
Mind you, I think personal greatness is completely unrelated to social class. I'm not saying "elite education means you have issues", I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all. But having grown up in a town teeming with millionaires, I have to laugh at the idea that many rich aren't positively hunted by their own defects. Yes, they can buy an island, but they can't sit still on it, they cannot be with themselves, they cannot reflect on themselves. They are captured, driven, mad, and get hysterical when they are recognized and pitied. So they have to keep company that has the same fears, like an unspoken pact. It's like drug addicts hanging out with drug addicts instead of the people who would ask them wtf they are doing with their life.
They can't read many great minds and even get half of what they say; sure, neither do many poor people, but that's more because they don't have the time or the language is too bloated for them, not because there is some inherent vampire/garlic type incompatibility. If you discuss the exact same subjects with a "normal" person in normal words, they in my experience are less likely to throw up all sorts of deflections, while other people realize this stuff is fit to dissolve the lies their lives are and get scared.
Fear is not strength, and powerful people have many options, but when those options don't include letting go of power they are basically slaves as well. The highest echelons of power are impersonal and systematic, only entropy and madness gain from them, no human person; and it takes personal strength to sail in such an environment and not end up as a bundle of sticks held together by delusions. It takes fierce motherfuckers, which is the opposite of people who can't answer a straight question, as many people in the "upper echelons" demonstrate. Pester me not with their pocket calculator stuff :P
I would LOVE to have that problem. That's a manufactured 1st-world, bourgeois nuisance. Boo friggin' hoo. Millions of struggling working class families would give anything to have that kind of problem, and frankly it's a little bit insulting to their plight.
But that's just my opinion.
That's pretty much 90% of the difference I notice between Yalies and State school students.
This is not fair to say. Many, if not most ivy leagues go onto have relatively normal lives.
I have a friend in Vermont who went to Yale. She is a 'marketing manager'. I don't even think she could pay for her education unless her (doctor) father did.
I took a tour of Stanford, the girl went to Dartmouth. I don't think the people giving recruiting tours of Stanford earn all that much.
Surely, it opens a lot of doors, and there are probably industries in which it can give one a cosy path, but it's not the 'guarantee' of anything.
"Not to be rich" doesn't necessarily mean "precariously afloat."
I choose to interpret that line charitably, and take it to mean that many high impact roles in society (especially various roles in education) do not pay richly, so having the luxury to deprioritize income should mean that today's young Americans might be better equipped to focus on social impact first.
Edit: I saw that you edited your post and removed what you originally said. That's too bad. I would much prefer that we try to have a productive discussion than to just drop a curtain on the conversation.
> How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York?
You face them with your head held high. You chose a career that you find fulfilling. You're improving the lives of children, passing your hard-earned knowledge on to another generation.
From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get.
You're literally just reiterating the arguments the article makes except with a clearly visible chip on your shoulder.
Edit: Perhaps you should make your statement in one post instead of editing over and over again. You seem far too emotional to make a rational argument here.
But, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I turned down a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities of my home state. I think I made the right call and I think I understand the impetus behind the writing of this article.
In a nutshell, if education is empowering, but pursuing that education actually narrows your life choices, then perhaps there is some flaw somewhere. For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder and this may come at great personal cost.
I was in my late 40s before I really understood how incredibly upper class my mother's values are. We didn't have much money when I was a kid -- or so I thought, though it turns out that is not as accurate as I believed at the time -- and I never thought of myself as upper class.
It took me a lot of years of intentionally walking away from this deeply rooted expectation in order to really reclaim my life for myself in a way that allows me to get what I want, not for me to become what society expects me to be.
So while I get that most people are not going to understand that there is a genuine cost involved and will simply sneer at the idea that there is any down side, as someone who recognized that downside at a young age and walked away, I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people and it does harm them and it does definitely harm their ability to be good leaders for the common man.
No one gave me an extra kicker. I turned my scholarship down for personal reasons, not because I was bought out by some competing school.
My older brother learned this the hard way—he listed a school (October of junior year) that he decided (April of senior year) not to attend. He lost the $8k in scholarship money that he could have gotten from the school he attended—which he could have gotten had he responded "undecided".
Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.
Thats why an elite education is an advantage.
The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ... "you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
I feel like you missed his argument by about 3 words.
The author isn't saying that an elite education offers no advantage. He's saying that it has downsides as well. It's not 100% advantageous, and yet we tend to think of it as so.
> They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
It certainly does a better job than isolating yourself within a very narrow band of culture. In my experience, that's just how cultural experience works.
If you spend all your time hanging out with rich, smart, successful people, it's only going to make it harder for you to identify with people who aren't. If you spend all of your time hanging out with white people, you're more likely to feel awkward when you go to the black part of town. Etc. And the opposites are also true.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
Rules made by elite are often rules made for the benefit of the elite as well. They often completely overlook the needs of the rest of the people and these rules may benefit the elite at the expense of the masses.
It is one of the reasons I walked away from my scholarship. I am unwilling to exercise power in that manner.
I don't care about diversity in leadership. I care about leadership that doesn't flush the whole system down the toilet so thoroughly as to cut even their own throats in the process.
If you're in the position of having elite status thrust upon you, it's generally in everyone's interest that you actually be good at that, and not just told that you're good at it because you followed the rules.
We must assume that most people, most of the time, regardless of their apparent status or agency, are not strong-willed philosophers, but prisoners to scripted expectations and obligations. We will all try to avoid struggle and have it easy, and in doing so condemn ourselves to the life of the living dead by staying in an ever-diminishing comfort zone. And for someone who is in this state to step into a role with great power and then coast along without vision or direction - well, that sure does describe a lot of people!
The other day I read a comment observing that commenters here have an almost Pavlovian response that compels them to disagree with the article. That seems right to me. A while ago I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300542, which touches on similar themes.
People bounce off a word choice or something in the first paragraph then either stop reading or skim.... then post about it.
'Upper class' means generational wealth and status, your grandfather was wealthy, a diplomat, and admiral, head of a large multinational, and you can trace your lineage back at least 8 generations, and likely back to before you were even Americans ... your family has had status for that long.
But yes - some people have 'high standards of behaviour', are genteel, polite, articulate, conscientious, well mannered etc. but don't have a lot of money. Many upper-middle class, even middle class types were like this just a generation and a half ago. I suggest fewer people are exactly that now, as the mores of society have shifted quite a lot in many ways.
Everybody in the upper class definitely knows they are in the upper class. It's not a 'revelation' you get when you are an adult.
Likely quite a few people think they are in the upper class and really are not.
I'm going by classical definition here, not the 'new world' American version of upper class, which is usually just economic.
That's not the definition used by the person you're replying to, so I'm not sure what your point is.
There is only one classical definition of upper class, the other is the very generic 'economic' version.
The commenter is clearly not referring to 'economic' upper classes as he referred to 'behaviours' 'social standing' 'expectations' etc..
He indicated his family once had a noble title but sold it - this is definitely the classical version of 'upper class'.
You want a 'pop culture' reference for actual 'upper class' (though it's 100 years ago) -> Downton Abbey.
> I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people
(emphasis mine)
For my business, the advantage is initial credibility to customers, but there's so much work beyond that. The software has to be useful, the sales process has to be navigated, and the customer has to be trained and supported.
I've realized life is what I make of it. If I want to converse with my plumber, then we will have a great conversation. If I find building a business fulfilling, then I will build a business. Cornell didn't teach me to do these things; Cornell also didn't teach me not to do these things. We had a diverse student body: this is how I think, and it's different from the author.
The key to me, is that they have a choice then and have choices later in life... you can learn to be not_rich=middle_class at a lot of different times in your life. Many of them will make you unhappy.
Perhaps it's a bit worse going to an Ivy League where everyone else is the same, but you could say that about staying in the same state, or joining the military (which has many different people, but an enforced culture).
The speech that the blog was paying homage to when it picked a name.
* The American Scholar || http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm
Get your kids to do extracurriculars where they'll meet kids from lower-income households. It'll make them able to relate to them and understand them better.
Whether these extracurriculars would expose you to different ethnicities and world views is dependant on demographics.
I have never heard of community service as a requirement to graduate high school. (No school in my district had this requirement.)
Granted, I understand your overall point. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be accepted by "elite" colleges. In fact, I had applied to nearly 12 colleges that were highly respected in Computer Science and was rejected from all of them.
http://patch.com/california/redlands/2016-top-100-public-hig...
None of the top ten schools on that list seem to have a community service requirement [0].
There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule regarding which schools do or don't have a community service requirement. Mission San Jose does, but Lynbrook does not.
[0] As determined by a quick google search for each to locate "$SCHOOL_NAME graduation requirements", followed by a quick scan for anything outside of required course credits.
Either way, your statement about the top 10 CA high schools is false. I attended Granada Hills Charter and San Marino high school (#1 and #7 respectively) and both do absolutely require community service. San Marino requires 40 hours over four years [1] and GHCHS requires 20 hours per semester [2]. A friend at Miramonte High School didn't have to do any community service but I recognize many of the schools on this list and can confirm they require community service. Searching for "graduation requirements" just gives you a list of credits you need but doesn't include community service or disciplinary rules for graduation.
[1] http://www.sanmarinohs.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=2241...
[2] http://www.ghchs.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_20226865/File/...
But sure, it looks like my naive search approach is inadequate, as it for the most part brought up credits (as you mentioned).
And to be fair, I don't think charter schools should be lumped in with the rest of the public schools, but that's probably just my opinion.
[0] http://cc.sduhsd.net/Counseling/Community-Service/ [1] http://www.lhs.fuhsd.org/resume
It's a general state-wide requirement in Maryland, for example. See http://coursebulletin.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/Home/Introduct... for reference.
And that's been the case for at least 20 years now.
And when you're there, talk to people. Not just ones who will help you climb the social ladder in whatever elite clubs and orgs you want to join. People of all stripes. It's a much more diverse group in every way than the author describes.
Honestly it sounds like the author was elitist and sheltered as a kid. And now they've realised this, but have decided to blame it on their university rather than deal with the fact that it was their own personal fault.
I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.
On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing that" when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.
But everything in life is a choice and if the author is so self aware of this "disadvantage", they have simple paths to fix it. Instead of people making more home food delivery start-ups, create one to help underprivileged get access to education or healthcare, etc.
The key take away for me is that if you decide to live your life based on someone else's terms, you'll never be truly happy. Create your own path on your journey.
https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes...
Other writers have recognized and described it too: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html
Even our very own Michael O. Church: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/mess...
I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.
It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.
I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.
The best explanation I've seen of it is Chetan Bhaget's novel Half Girlfriend: http://amzn.to/2im0Cxq It's a masala romance novel, blah, but it's the only real discussion of the issue that I've seen.
He's also written a few newspaper columns on it: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi... http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi...
Very few people can even discuss these subtle, un-named caste systems, let alone argue against them. I can't stand Chetan Bhaget, yet I link to him anyway simply because he's really one of the very few who actually discuss it. Consider how difficult it is to even discuss Trump's victory in these terms as well.
I think that the best protection the caste system has is that we refuse to even give it a word.
Viva the difficult American social non system.
America does have 'classes' but they are completely different from the type of class system you'll find in the 'old world'.
Many self-made Americans would consider themselves 'upper class', by virtue of wealth, status and behaviour. But classically, you really can't 'move' into class, you pretty much have to be born into it. Or possibly marry into it.
Amongst the upper and upper-middle classes, the concept and practice of politeness ensures conversation. Children are taught at a young age to take an interest (or at least feign an interest) in the other person and think of a line of conversation that may be appropriate.
If you chat to a Brit and get beyond the weather, you'll notice that you will be asked a lot of questions. It's part conversation and part fact-finding. Some people would rather fall off the end of the Earth than ask where the other person went to school (i.e. it's rude to pry), but with 20 little questions we can work all that out and carry a conversation at the same time.
Anyone notice that some the most "elite" schools are total no-shows in AI research?
The new plutocracy will be balanced by iron fisted CEOs, algorithmically advised and steered boards, and a chosen few human elites that bear each other due to a wealth standoff. The rest of us die hungry, cold, and broke as shit, while the elites mine galaxies and excavate the stars by the trillions.
The end
The elite typically hold jobs in consulting, finance, management, government, etc. that require a lot of word-smithing and people skills.
The big blind spot for technologists is thinking that technology is central to everything. It is not. If you look at how society is organized, it's the folks with the people skills who are on top. People who are good with technology work for them.
Banks haves acres of class A office space filled with people preparing powerpoints to show each other. Those jobs will go away.
And those are the people who hire management consultants.
A golf club membership for example can cost $100,000. Some people will probably never save up that much, and if they did, they would never spend it in a golf club membership. But for some it's completely normal and part of their everyday lives.
Same with schools, same with restaurants, etc... by being strictly exclusive you set yourself apart from the rest and miss out on a lot of things.
https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s-ne...
I do agree that a science professor would likely have an entirely different perspective.
I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.
1) sent in the applications with the fees that I couldn't really afford and never even got a letter back. I figured it was a sign.
As a criticism, this article doesn't address the sciences. The availability of research money is a major reason to go to an elite science institution. If you want to do science, the best thing is to do it, and that usually means email a lab and asking to work there. More labs with more money probably means better opportunities.[0]
In the first defense, consider whether there's anything in this article that might also apply outside of elite colleges.
For instance:
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.
This resonates so much with what Daniel Ellsberg wrote to a young Henry Kissinger regarding levels of top-secret access:
Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input ... you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools. ... it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. [1]
Finally, this article absolutely nails many of the patterns I have observed while at elite universities. For instance:
(If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) reminds me of when an acquaintence mentioned he was going to law school 'In Palo Alto'.
Or, one night at a party when I overheard a friend (future Rhodes scholar) say 'You know you're at <institution> when you use the term statistical variance at a theatre party!' Never mind that they'd used it incorrectly, it was emblematic to say the least.
[0](Please don't take this comment the wrong way - there are best-in-field professors at less-than-elite universities, but not as consistently). [1]http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber...
However, I did still see these patterns, in others, and in myself.
But often when I did just say "Harvard", it became a big deal. Not always, but often.
It can make social situations weird. I socialise with a lot of people who are in the trades. I've had more than a few conversations killed when the person I'm talking with finds out I go to Harvard. Suddenly (again sometimes, not always) the person feels embarrassed because they aren't an intellectual, or unrefined, or something, and the conversation gets awkward fast.
It can also make some people just overestimate or overcare for you. I used to volunteer for a political party. The local organiser was nice and treated me well, like he treated everybody, but once he found out I went to Harvard he decided to give me double the attention, plus the cushy assignments, I guess in hopes of retaining me-- when really I just wanted to do the door knocking and phone calling like everyone else.
I wish that the name of the place I go to school didn't have cultural cachet far beyond its worth and that I could always just say it. But it does, especially where I'm from, where not many people have been anywhere near an Ivy. So sometimes I decide to not risk triggering this weird overblown cultural image, because I just want to be myself and not "that guy who goes to HARVARD". Many of my friends feel similarly. I don't know how this desire counts as noblesse oblige.
Totally different type of education, but the ultimate outcomes were roughly equivalent. We both went on to grad school (at top state universities) and both have done very well in our careers -- me in tech, her in pharma.
It's just that understanding of others is relatively rare in the first place among all humans. It's just way more annoying from elites because they tend to think they're very open minded, even when they are not.
In my experience, it is independent of education. I've dealt with the social service people early in my career and encountered people with true empathy (along with folks who had no business giving directions much less life advice). You find these folks in many careers and at many educational levels. If anything the focus required for intensive education might push people away from the understanding of others.
I always have to laugh when I see that phrase used by people who clearly don't know the derogatory connotations that it has carried since Halberstam's book of the same title.
Going to an elite school
1. denies you the opportunity to empathize with anyone beyond a narrow spectrum of socioeconomics and culture
2. anoints you with a sense of self-worth and entitlement that is, if earned at all, only founded on a narrow set of skills: analytic ability and hard work
3. admits you into the class of seductive "entitled mediocrity", which allows you to fail spectacularly with essentially no real repercussions
4. constraints you, via social pressure, to a narrow set of "prestigious" career paths, among which you might not find the one that is truly right for you
5. shelters you from failure and encourages the idea that it is unacceptable, leaving you less likely to take on risk which might be necessary for growth and fulfillment
6. "is profoundly anti-intellectual", because students are encouraged more to acquire power and all that is necessary for it than cultivation of one's intellect, which requires such slothful indulgences as sitting in solitude, journaling, or even making time to have a relationship with a close friend
TL;DR for the TL;DR: elite schools' "real purpose is to reproduce the class system", instead of to grow their students' minds.
I'll add that when I read Deresiewicz's article in the New Republic and then went to his talk on my undergrad institution's campus, his tone was markedly more bitter than it is here in 2008. I suppose the situation has not improved in his eyes.
For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:
- have an "interesting" hobby - work out at the gym - hang out with friends at the bar or club - work on their career - start a "start-up" - travel - ... other very self-serving pursuits
Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford-...
And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something about this. Enough is enough.
Sounds like a let down to me.
I want to know, how does it feel to have gone to a place like Stanford, only to end up in the same position as someone who went to a state university?
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
Of course, a whole lot of poor people (probably the other 5/6 bn) won't be affected immediately but some years later they also start benefitting and today it's almost a (used) 100$ laptop per child equivalent (except for the poorest).
You can argue the same way about mpesa, bitcoin and other innovations/products.
Do charities have a similarly fantastic metric?
Example: Global warming is a result of the "market", an unexpected consequence from decades of growth. It can only be countered by coordinated action.
To get back to the topic at hand: The "elites" should be the ones who lead such a transformation instead of, say, just looking to advance their carreers.
Just a few related questions: Who is going to define who are the elites? If you say the people, then we end up in a democracy just like we have already and yet, I cannot see any optimization.
What if climate change can be evaluated not only as a single metric but as a tradeoff? E.g., nuclear energy vs CO2? Or cost of each marginal ton of CO2 saved vs. the things you can do with the same money (e.g. a few cancer therapies). Are there even appropriate "elites" who are experts in all of the above areas?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.
What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.
Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.
So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function).
The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.
Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.
At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.
You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.
Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."
I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.
Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."
I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.
There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.
But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
Nothing I have seen in the case indicates anything beyond a large amount of awkwardness and lack of comfort. Most of the evidence that she was actually discriminated against with regards to tenure is entirely circumstantial.
Having been intimately involved with these systems while at Stanford I have seen how cunningly many intelligent people at these institutions co-opt and leverage the prevalently liberal political attitudes towards race and gender issues for personal motivations, interests and grievances.
In fact I served as a residence assistant and witnessed someone who is now a very prominent politician wrongly accuse one of our students of racial discrimination. Having known the accused student ... I knew for a fact that no discrimination was involved. The student that made the accusation instantly leveraged the incident on several public forums to build political and social capital. His entire persona was based around "fighting racial oppression" -- even when said oppression was constructed purely for personal gain.
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.
Yes, perhaps some groups within some universities do contain individuals with certain proclivities that lead to cause certain behaviors that lead to certain outcomes, but not all!
While I don't believe the author is directly incorrect in his claims of of university behavior/culture, I feel like most of the 'disadvantages' he lists are of his own decisions, whereas for a lot of people they are forced.
'Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me?'
There's nothing preventing the author from being a teach aside from his own mental barriers that he can overcome himself - I'm sure if he applied, most school boards would leap at the chance of having him. For others though, that simply isn't the case, and they have real, hard, economic/environmental barriers.