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I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.
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 t…
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?
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 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...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 diffe…
The solution is near. The "elite" will be a lot less smug when their jobs also get replaced by technology. No need for melodramatic navel-gazing. Anyone notice that some the most "elite" schools are total no-shows in AI research?
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.
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. What do you think their response will be? Don't be daft. This is trash.
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
Brits figured this shit out a long time ago: you talk about the weather.
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…