What Oxford taught me about posh people • Hacker News Board

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#311

Post by emmelaich » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #258

agent008t wrote: post #191

I expected Oxford undergraduates to be the best from all over the world, intensely passionate about their subjects. What I found were kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying. There seemed to be some weird hierarchy about who sits where in the dining hall that was completely bizarre. 'Default' social activities organized by the various committees all involved brain-dead clubbing an…

(MA Cantab matriculated 1997) > kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all. I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :) > you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it do…

My reading of Feynman says he was thinking of physics all the time .. even when pranking, womanising and bongo playing.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#312

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 12:59 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #192

mulvya wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them. The US nationalized many industries during WWII. From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1] "In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In…

> continent-wide natural resources The USSR and China also had this access, and it didn't seem to do the trick for them. The US supplied the USSR. Airplanes, tanks, food, etc. were not nationalized.

I should point out that the industrial bit of the USSR was the bit the Germans invaded first. The Soviets had to move their entire industrial heartland a thousand or so miles east out of harm's way and rebuild it before they could start producing stuff.

When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#313

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:00 PM UTC

teachingassist wrote: post #294

ceejayoz wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider. Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli... > A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000…

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor. Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie .

Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.

Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#314

Post by pnutjam » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #168

pnutjam wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, Texas is a real outlier here. Most states have some last resort college you can attend, but it's usually a community college, or AS degree institution. UT Austin is a really good school from what I hear.

UT-Austin has an enrollment of 40K in a state with almost 350,000 high school grads in 2021. It is in no way a 'last resort' college and is in fact at the top of the UT system in terms of exclusivity and admission requirements. There are a variety of other UT campuses around the state with lower admission requirements and a similarly lower academic ranking. You are correct that Texas is an outlier though, it has one…

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Contrast that with Indiana who guarantees all high school graduate admission to Ivy Tech.

Texas is offering a way better deal and driving opportunity for a diverse group of students.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#315

Post by triceratops » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #235

anoncake wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.

The Seattle school district decided to get rid of their gifted programs because it was unfair and increased inequality.

Seems like they reversed course though.[1]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/gifted-programs-worse...

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Post by emmelaich » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

mulvya wrote: post #162

WalterBright wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when faci…

> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them. The US nationalized many industries during WWII. From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1] "In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In…

Seizing and nationalising only work very well when you have something worth seizing and nationalising. And then only temporarily.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#317

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #281

onion2k wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to…

Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.

One of the reasons Mexico is poor is because it had a disproportionately strong elite class dedicated to maintaining huge disparities in wealth through monopolies and more or less obvious slave labour.

When the industrial revolution rolled through town Mexico couldn't take advantage of it. Back then the US used to welcome anyone from anywhere with ambition and an interesting idea.

The contemporary US might want to take note.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#318

Post by makomk » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #283

makomk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.) Suppose we take that…

> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with n…

The problem with that argument is that $42 million is a lot, lot less than $200 billion dollars, especially when divided across even just the population of the USA. Not even enough for a dollar per person - in fact, when you consider that's over something like a decade, it's probably more like a cent per person per year.

By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#319

Post by Jhsto » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

erwan577 wrote: post #252

So if you are a self motivated CS type of person considering what kind of education is available to you and that "socializing" is not your panacea, is there any alternative to the traditional college? Would Bill Gates still drop out of Harvard these days?

There are still many ways to complete a college education. At best, college can teach you about rigour and timely topics that are both worthwhile and necessary for independent study. Some shortcuts to these could be, e.g., to work as an undergraduate research assistant.

Another option is VC type of funding. If you already have the chops to be convincing and work on relevant topic, places like Thiel Fellowship or YC might give you alternative approaches to learning.

As for Gates I do not know. In general, I would assume that the value of a university degree has only declined since then.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#320

Post by jseban » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #267

jseban wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end. In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98…

> Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much In reality this doesn't happen.

This is what has happened to all of the failed communist countries.