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Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was the last time you read something longer than a tweet?
Length has literally nothing to do with it. It's a matter of give and take, and politeness. If there's thirty minutes of content I'm happy to commit my thirty minutes of reading. If you have five minutes of content in thirty minutes of text you're just being rude.
One thing that struck me from the piece (what I could read, before switching to skimming) was the implicit acceptance of the outsized power of Yale people. It sounded like the concern was that they acknowledge and wield this power well. I didn't see a question of whether they should have this power.
We should ask if they should have this power and the people should seize it back if necessary.
One thing that struck me from the piece (what I could read, before switching to skimming) was the implicit acceptance of the outsized power of Yale people. It sounded like the concern was that they acknowledge and wield this power well. I didn't see a question of whether they should have this power.
I agree. We should ask if they should have this power and the people should seize it back if necessary.
Many of them even if they suffered full fledged "flee a homicidal government and start with nothing" would have immaterial assets like education and experience running large organizations to gain wealth and rise up again.
He struck me as a pretty nice guy.
The articles contends the rich kids at Yale pretend to be poor to shirk the elite responsibilities, which then leads to deterioration of the elites. I find it doubtful that the kids have thought it through that far. A couple of more likely explanations come to mind: - Rebellious teenagers always want to establish independence from their parents. Giving up part of the money takes you part of the way there. - It's hard…
The author seems pretty confused about rich kids. Having rich parents doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot of cash in college. (Sensible parents are going to give their college kids enough money to get by, not enough to go on a spending spree.) Thus, it's totally reasonable that college kids are commonly broke. It's not some role-playing to escape their responsibilities as members of the elite. In other words…
Good grief, get to the point!
I think these paragraphs from the "Abandoning The Ship of State" section summarize it fairly well. There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored…
...and of the Right: "rooting into a comfortable position to deflect, avoid, blame, deny the responsibility to solve structural issues, in order to capitalize on existing power."
Until we can remove the power incentives and 'take money out of politics', it'll be an extremely uphill problem to address large systematic changes on either sides. More than ever, people should stop treating people in government as celebrities, but as they are, important civil servants of the people to do the tasks that their job demands. Until then, it's a dog and pony show.
Even trying to remove the corrupt to "drain the swamp" will be as futile as draining grains of sand at the beach, if you do not first address your terrain (the structure).
The articles contends the rich kids at Yale pretend to be poor to shirk the elite responsibilities, which then leads to deterioration of the elites. I find it doubtful that the kids have thought it through that far. A couple of more likely explanations come to mind: - Rebellious teenagers always want to establish independence from their parents. Giving up part of the money takes you part of the way there. - It's hard…
> The result is an institution increasingly unable to carry out its own mission, as tuition rises to pay for more administrators, and ideological drama makes it harder and harder to actually teach. And now we are back at the original question. What was the point of Yale? What was the point of going to Yale? What is the point of elite institutions?
I don't think it's just the lack of a mission that's the problem though.
I think that these kids have been disrupted.
A sort-of-smart rich kid who went to a good school used to be valuable. They could be like a LinkedIn for a new business with their social network. They could be a StackOverflow, because smart people would want to curry favour and answer their questions. They were a Venture Capitalist for people who had no idea what that meant, let alone where you'd find one. They were a Quora with a rough idea of what management at various levels and in various areas was like.
OK, they are still valuable. But they're no longer quite so important - there's plenty of half-decent substitutes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author seems pretty confused about rich kids. Having rich parents doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot of cash in college. (Sensible parents are going to give their college kids enough money to get by, not enough to go on a spending spree.) Thus, it's totally reasonable that college kids are commonly broke. It's not some role-playing to escape their responsibilities as members of the elite. In other words…
Even if the rich parents aren't injecting a huge cash flow, that student still has the safety net to fall back on.
A rich kid might be able to ask their parents for more cash, but the embarassment and scolding that might come with that is likely enough to get a lot of rich kids to avoid the situation by choosing to live within the artificially imposed bounds of their allotted budget.