Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

I feel like "examples in humans" was strongly implied.

> selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.

That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road.

That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.

> You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function

If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.

What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?

Is that what the data shows, though? I've read summaries of papers describing the exact opposite and linked them here before.

Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 , summarized as:

> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.

The gentrification argument has always felt a little off to me. Like it's missing the point somehow. It's less about billionaires moving in next door, and more about billionaires buying up thousands of "investment properties" that they never intend to live in and being rent-seekers and causing negative externalities that affect the local neighborhood that they never even go to. It's less about local businesses jacking up their prices because they "smell money" in the neighborhood, and more about local businesses getting fucked by the lack of anti-trust enforcement and by local government on the take from billionaires. It's less about the billionaires themselves being the source of the problem, and more about the winners-keep-winning systems that allow people to accumulate so much wealth in the first place.

I guess the reason I make these distinctions is that many reactions that seem like they could be solutions to "gentrification", like running those rich boys outta town, or even something like rent control ... they just don't feel like they're really solving anything. It's an entrenched systemic problem, and the system is huge and interconnected. You can't fix it locally. We need to actually tax the rich. We need to actually enforce anti-trust and consumer protection laws. We need big taxes on properties number 3 through N that go toward subsidizing affordable housing ... or something to that effect. I'm sure others have better ideas than this too. But what we don't need is neighborhood signs that say "no rich people".