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http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/advantages-of-name-brand-s...
Saying X has advantages over Y is not the same as saying Y is crap.
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No, that's actually what he said "oftentimes i don't tell people where i went to school because i don't want to automatically be viewed as a snob on first impressions."
Not wanting to be viewed as a snob is different than wanting to avoid high expectations. I tried to illustrate that point with my example with BJJ.
A better example, using BJJ, is: "What martial art do you study?"
"It's Brazilian."
"Oh Capoeira?"
"Something like that."
"I heard it's not very good in a fight."
"Well it's not Capoeira, it's more practical."
"Vale Tudo?"
"Yeah, kinda like that."
"No really, what is it?"
"BJJ."
"Oh, then you must be a really good fighter! I heard BJJ wins like all the UFCs."
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Ugh, finally managed to read most of the article at the link. I would have preferred putting my hand in my garbage disposal. It's an absolutely accurate portrayal of what's wrong in the world with respect to the reputation that top-tier schools have and the practices of top-tier corporations. Mr. Guo, in a few areas of self-reflection attempts to strike a reasonable tone in the parts that don't sound like a brochure…
thanks for the comments ... you have a good point regarding some of the passages, i'll take them down soon or try to re-work them. i'm glad that you understood the main purpose of that article, which is to highlight what i've observed about top-tier schools and the hiring practices of certain big corporations. however, i really don't mean to sound like i'm an advertising brochure for those schools, because i'm defini…
It's the academic and professional version of the kind of trash talk you might hear at an inner city pick-up basketball game or an 8-mile rap battle. It's starts with why the elite are the best, and what being the best means, and ends with why the non-elites can't be part of this group and what they should do about it. You just had fewer insults about my mother, but the content was the same.
It's a challenge, not much different than the challenges presented by elites to non-elites in every capacity of life.
I suspect that much of what you see in the other article is merely the frustrated result of having to work just as hard as the elite guy for schooling, but then also having to beat, kick and claw their way through even minor interactions because they are being treated like a child just like in the example you provided in the original version of this article. It's a vicious cycle that creates a bad environment for everyone.
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Saying X has advantages over Y is not the same as saying Y is crap.
I don't believe you read the article. He's edited it now, but the ending was basically advice that "if you didn't go to X, don't try to compete, you'll only be met with disappointment". That's (was before the edit) calling Y crap pretty much.
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wow, that is quite a stretch from what i said or implied in my article! Here is my central thesis: "Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status." i'm sorry that i didn't make…
Glad the author is here, so this doesn't stay one-sided! Some people here apparently think I'm trolling, but I'm simply cutting to the chase and hoping for a spirited and informed debate. Mr. Guo, your article stands in opposition to itself. On the one hand, you try to state that "given comparable levels of intelligence or skill" and on the other "only the smartest have the highest grades". Your only example is one t…
But it does not diminish from the original points of the essay. People who lack visible status indicators will tend to make a lot of noice about how good they. This may be justified, or not depending on the person. It may be necessary, or not depending on the circumstances. But the tendency to do it is definitely there.
There is also a tendency, in some of these people making a lot of noise, to do it in the form of diminishing others.
A person who makes a lot of noice about how good they comes accross as at least slightly arrogant, someone who does this in the form of trying to lower others can come across as elitist.
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Glad the author is here, so this doesn't stay one-sided! Some people here apparently think I'm trolling, but I'm simply cutting to the chase and hoping for a spirited and informed debate. Mr. Guo, your article stands in opposition to itself. On the one hand, you try to state that "given comparable levels of intelligence or skill" and on the other "only the smartest have the highest grades". Your only example is one t…
This time around you have some very interesting and well reasoned points. But it does not diminish from the original points of the essay. People who lack visible status indicators will tend to make a lot of noice about how good they. This may be justified, or not depending on the person. It may be necessary, or not depending on the circumstances. But the tendency to do it is definitely there. There is also a tendency…
I also agree with the claim that more disadvantaged people will make more noise to get noticed. That's because they have to.
The alternative is to simply accept the fallacy that people from elite backgrounds are simply better than you.
> There is also a tendency, in some of these people making a lot of noise, to do it in the form of diminishing others. So likewise, what many non-elite persons perceive is that, through various overt and subtle messages, that elites broadcast that they are better than non-elites. Perhaps through acts like social exclusion or hiring discrimination. I don't think that instances of a person saying "~~~I~~~ went to Harvard, and ~~~you~~~~ didn't so nyah" are all that common (but they do happen).
I think the author gets this and does in fact rail against this practice as a form of bullying.
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Wow I've been looking for a library like HAMPI for a long time. Serendipity at its finest.
sorry it's off-topic, but you can download it from here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/akiezun/hampi/
It's going to be some time before I can get to using it but like I said this pretty much is exactly what a currently-stalled project has been looking for.
If I make a real use of this library I'll pass along a proper description so you can see what use it's getting.
As it'll be awhile I'll give you a minimal summary now (in as much detail as I can, which isn't that much sorry).
The overall point is to take input (sequence of words), and then generate further input that is "related" but not identical (think: clearly a variation on the theme, but not rote repetition). The mechanism is that there's a set of grammars specifying overlapping formal languages; input is broken into words and each word is parsed in each grammar that contains that word; some inference and calculation is done to generate a sort-of style profile and then that profile is used together with the underlying grammars to drive generation of new output.
The quality of the output has been underwhelming, mainly b/c doing exact parsing seems to leave a nasty trade-off between the "interestingness" of the grammars in the set and nontriviality of the "style profile":
- having "interesting" grammars means the style profile is too constrained (so the generated output too closely resembles the input)
- having "larger" grammars means the style profile is richer but the output is weak (doesn't adequately resemble the input to a human observer)
Where a library like hampi fits into this is (hopefully) the ability to efficiently loosen-up the parsing in a nicely-constrained way; using some metadata attached to the grammars it ought to be possible to intelligently knock-out part of a word and ask hampi to find a replacement string that makes the word parse within a particular language.
Essentially intentional misunderstanding of input => novel synthesis.
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You guessed that he avoids mentioning his school by name to avoid the high expectations along with it. To operate that this guess has to be true is, at best, disingenuous.
This is not a guess. This is factual evidence as publicly admitted by many people like Conan O'Brien. And I should add that I also went to a top school, so its not like I am making this stuff up.
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And for being duped into believing this little lie, Mr. Guo has singularly proven that Stanford folks are not as smart as their reputation makes them out to be.
Downvoted obviously from a Stanford grad.
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This is not a guess. This is factual evidence as publicly admitted by many people like Conan O'Brien. And I should add that I also went to a top school, so its not like I am making this stuff up.
That's anecdotal evidence , and you're assuming it also applies to this person.
This is not about Philip himself. I'm not sure why you brought him up specifically in the first place.