321–330 of 379 posts
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I'm absolutely not a "there is no truth truther". More noticing the prevalence of confidently certain people for every opinion.
All serious research I have seen says that the SAT correlates to wealth, and not to college success. Indeed GPA is a much better predictor of college success.
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Pretty obvious when you think about it. My Father was an engineer, although a different one than I am. As a child you pick things up when you grow. The fact that I had a computer at home back 3 decades ago, automatically meant I already had an upper hand and a better understanding of how computers work than most of my classmates who only got to see a computer almost a decade later for an hour every week in school. Al…
I still resent my parents for not keeping any books in the house apart from the dictionary. I can't remember how many times I flipped through the dictionary out of boredom growing up. Whenever I'd go to my grandmother's place, I loved to take random books off the book shelf and read through them. I honestly feel like a great way to educate kids is not to teach them anything directly at all, but to instead leave lots…
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You raise a very important point and one that is difficult to discuss. I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to lever…
A lot of words to explain away your racism.
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College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet school in Virginia, often ranked the top high school in the US. Admissions is (or was) based mostly on an admissions test, with a smaller portion based on middle school grades. In recent years, the student body was 70% Asian, 20% White, and the rest other minorities. Despite literally decades of trying to increase percentages of Black and Hispanic st…
And there were programs that successfully increased representation of black and hispanic students at TJ several decades ago - but these programs were halted.
We'll see how it plays out.
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> It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way. It amazes me when people think the current socioeconomic structures are fair. You do realise that most people here, including perhaps you are, economically speaking, closer to being poor than being part of the 1% rich, right? The economic gap between those you might consider poor and yourself is a rounding error mag…
More fair =/= perfectly fair. I don’t care that someone has well over 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than I have. It doesn’t materially negatively affect my life in the least and, on the contrary, their inventions make my daily life better by wildly more than any negative impacts their houses, yachts, airplanes, or rockets could possibly have. I’m here to spend my life energy and time pursuing the things that are…
Just because it no longer affects you doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That the whole damn point of the original article.
Anyways cheers yeah mate, current socioeconomic structures are fair. /s
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From the NYT: Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7…
So, looks like contacts and internal knowledge are much more important for a PHD than it is for most professions, but the situation is still much better than for politicians. I'd say that means the PHD job market has a large problem. When politicians are the ones you can compare yourself to look good, it's because things are not good at all.
> One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy League. It is a bastion of privilege and power, and yet full of left-leaning professors who one might imagine would favor the redistribution of wealth. Re-imagining social norms -- not a conservative predisposition -- has nothing to do with redistributing wealth. It is precisely the requirement for a shared mindset, or a demonstration of willin…
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On that note, the liberal cry of student loan forgiveness will overwhelmingly favor people who went to expensive private colleges. Taxing big endowments seems pretty senseless and doesn't create any positive incentives either. More support and less stigma against state schools would probably do the most good.
> the liberal cry of student loan forgiveness What if we dropped the inflammatory political attack and just talked about loan forgiveness? Can an idea or anything else be depoliticized. And it does have some benefits, in addition to that drawback. I'm not sure about the extent or nature of it - many leading colleges reduce their prices to get the students in the door - has anyone studied it?
Something usually amiss with the current talk of universities is that they are an immigration racket. Universities make most of its tuition money from foreign students, but foreign students go to american universities to get visas they can use to get into the labor market. The F1 visa is unlimited, contrary to the H1B one, and allows for a transition out of university. Also for the H1B and multiple categories, one ke…
The US should staple a green card to the PhD degree of any foreigner who comes here to complete their doctorate. It increased US competitive potential by shifting the best & brightest away from their home countries and toward here. Likewise, I’d expect all foreign nations to follow similar policies.
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> It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works. Right, right, my mistake, this is nothing like the Varana system.
It’s only varnana if you think of yourself as a victim. Those that choose to not think of themselves as victims can succeed unfettered if they focus their efforts in the right direction.