Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005) • Hacker News Board

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#61

Post by djrobstep » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

djrobstep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more: "Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?" Because once we acknowledge that n…

> once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective. Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence…

Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts.

They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder.

It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#62

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

donw wrote: post #41

hombre_fatal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even understand), unis aren't just vocational schools. One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgi…

That's great. You should be able to take those classes if you want to. Near-as-makes-no-difference half of the classes I was required to take in university -- my upper- and lower-division "general education" -- were an absolute waste of time for which I was forced to pay. Even if I was forced to spend that money, I would have been better served by pretty much any other experience that carried an equivalent cost -- li…

Sure, and I have plenty of grievances myself. My expensive university calculus and physics courses were so bad (a rushed professor and TAs we couldn't understand) that we would meet up after the course to watch Youtube videos to learn the subject and do the homework. We'd joke after class, "yeah, that was definitely worth $X,XXX" with a tear in our eye.

Ended up taking a $120 summer course at a community college and mastered the subjects.

I spent a lot of time in uni wishing I was spending that time backpacking around Asia. But I also experienced the woes of standardized tests in high school and I'm reluctant to see them as a solution to anything.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#63

Post by Robin_Message » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

lhnz wrote: post #34

Robin_Message wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know meritocracy† was coined as term to satirise the problem of promoting "greatness", which is hard to measure and results in promoting conformity and class, as opposed to finding the creative minority who bring real progress? † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

Nowadays, the term is widely used in a positive way to describe 'creative minorities who bring real progress'. It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'. Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try…

The point of the satire, and the point of TFA, is that measuring 'merit' is difficult, if not impossible, and a focus on 'meritocracy' will lead to promoting those that perform best at the measurable proxies to merit, not actual merit.

It seemed worth pointing out that people are using a word conceived satirically to advocate for the very system that satire warned against. And it's an interesting bit of history.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#64

Post by AstralStorm » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:21 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #29

kokooo wrote: post #3

College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn…

You're assuming that standardized testing procedures, high school grading, and college admissions officers have the precision necessary to correctly distinguish between the 99.9997% perfect candidate and the 99.9998% perfect candidate. All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less…

Single sample estimation is never that good.

Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families.

Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development. Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#65

Post by gridlockd » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:24 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #58

hliyan wrote: post #23

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…

Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself? Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’v…

Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with.

For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.

Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#66

Post by derbOac » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:25 AM UTC

kepler1 wrote: post #35

I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it into practice . First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better sh…

I think the issue is that I want a doctor who is competent, not just one who can get the best score on exams. More to the point, I want good effective fairly priced healthcare, not necessarily a doctor at all.

The current system is meritocracy with regards to a set of metrics very loosely associated with merit. It's insanity how much we read into meaningless differences in indicators of merit. We take an indicator that is very very loosely correlated with ability over the entire distribution, for typical applications, and assume that small differences at one end always matter. It's like reading tea leaves with regards to actual outcomes.

The problem with current inequity in society is that it's disproportionate and arbitrary. We frame these discussions as if it's meritocratic capitalism vs blind communism or something when what we have isn't actually meritocratic at all. If it were, we'd see much more diversity in society than we do, and many more options as consumers.

I'm not sure I agree with the proposal but at least it's honest. I'd rather have my child dealing with that than the current lie society tells itself. Then she wouldn't fall into a cycle of despair over a cruel fairy tale, and everyone would have a more accurate appraisal of what different outcomes mean.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#67

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:25 AM UTC

djrobstep wrote: post #61

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective. Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence…

Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts. They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder. It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.

> Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts

These debates tend to get diluted absent a specific meritocratic measure.

With respect to college, I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating. We are able, to some degree, to predict this.

Given such a measure, it doesn’t make sense to give a seat to someone who has a 5% chance of graduating over someone with a 90% chance.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#68

Post by Retric » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:25 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #46

hliyan wrote: post #23

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…

> When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. > "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the ex…

Beating an index fund while also spending some of the money is vastly more difficult than just beating the index. The real question is do they beat inflation. And in that context you see:

Churn on that list is largely an illusion.

The wealth required to maintain a spot on Forbes list is growing significantly faster than inflation. Wealth that would have put you in first place in 1992 ($6.3 Billion) or 12.49 Billion in 2020 money, is less than 1/2 what it takes make the top 20 today. Don’t worry Bill Gated may have lost the #1 spot, but hey he’s got 7x as much money despite giving away billions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2020/04/07/the...

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#69

Post by Robin_Message » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:28 AM UTC

sunseb wrote: post #28

Robin_Message wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know meritocracy† was coined as term to satirise the problem of promoting "greatness", which is hard to measure and results in promoting conformity and class, as opposed to finding the creative minority who bring real progress? † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

[flagged]

Wow, I don't think I've ever been accused of Marxist propaganda before. Certainly not before lunchtime.

Okay, I'm going to try and be charitable. I agree that high IQ people create "real progress" and they come from the majority. A good example I expect we would agree on would be Steve Jobs: very smart, responsible for lots of progress.

The problem I see with meritocracy as it exists in the real world, for example, college admissions is that it doesn't reward Steve Jobs. It rewards the smart but boring, the clever but not too clever, the academically bright and socially conservative. When I quoted "minority", I didn't mean that there is some special cadre of people who are better; the quote refers to the fact that only a few people are responsible for human progress. There are plenty of high IQ people, but few Einsteins or Gates or Jobs.

And returning to TFA, it seems obvious that selecting an ever-smaller fraction based on quantifiable measurements doesn't measure merit. I'd argue "merit" is simply not accurately measurable, certainly not on a large enough scale for college admissions.

So the idea of selecting randomly from a fraction of "good enough" is likely to give as good a result, whilst also improving problems of social mobility and possible finding those diamonds in the rough who might have greater "merit" but not be good at standardised testing for whatever reason.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#70

Post by AstralStorm » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 10:29 AM UTC

34679 wrote: post #59

Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer - driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.

Getting enough teaching staff and laboratory space is expensive and exponentially harder to manage. Plus you will need support such as cheap mass housing. Then on top of that, big mass transport.

It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem.

The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit? How do you handle people who have to quit for personal or family reasons, who suddenly now are concentrated on one place near the university?