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Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

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Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#181

Post by fnovd »

komali2 wrote: post #113
karaterobot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a counter-example at a reasonable scale? By reasonable scale, I mean millions of people.

I never understood why the "at reasonable scale" is presumed. What happens if I reject that presumption? Why do we assume "millions of people" operating in the same social order is a good thing? Because iphones? Is that reason enough? Do we presume that having millions of people under the same social order is required to make advancements in medicine? It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple…

>It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.

Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.

The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#183

Post by postsantum »

bwestergard wrote: post #53
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some counter-examples then? It seems like all animals have hierarchies.

Many bird species. https://asknature.org/strategy/cooperative-herding-catches-m...

Good ideology, wrong species

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#184

Post by pc86 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #72
glimshe wrote: post #39

This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation and not a single person is required to go there or hire someone from there. Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because 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 theo…

> "lets all be poor" As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered,…

This smacks of "once my kids didn't get in I decided these schools weren't that great actually."

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#185

Post by blitzar »

monktastic1 wrote: post #164
blitzar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a non US country so we can for once have the counterfactual, as for us harvard does not exist. I have worked in an environment where {maths degrees} really did seem to matter. An organization set up by people with {maths degrees} where other people with {maths degrees} seemed to have advantages in (a) getting in and (b) getting ahead. It wasn't ever really addressed explicitly (though "credentialism" was oc…

Surely you can see the difference between having domain expertise and having association with a particular brand?

The company was (lab based) biotech - zero maths needed - but management liked the way mathematicians think. Their brand / religion was maths and it beat out domain experience every time.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#186

Post by amluto »

tristor wrote: post #117
ta8645 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Ivy schools pass your children over?

Nobody ever openly talks about it, but the East Coast Ivies are still heavily WASPy, and it's largely due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.

Do you have a source? I’ve never heard of this, and I would be quite surprised if anyone I know or knew well at any elite school was on this list.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#187

Post by gonehome »

CrazyStat wrote: post #175
gonehome wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money.” This does fit my hypothesis that the outliers at state schools are likely undervalued in the market by recruiters. The ave…

> The averages at selective schools are a lot higher This is what I expected when I went from undergrad at a solid but not elite shool (top 100, ~50% admission rate) to grad school (top 10, single digit admission rate). It's not what I experienced. The undergrad students I taught and TA for at the elite school were no better, on average, than my peers at my undergrad school. They were more ambitious and entitled. The…

My observation from doing hundreds of interviews at career fairs was the fancy schools (Stanford) had students that were way better at basic questions. This isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s signal.

If your peers in undergrad were your friends, you were probably selecting a non-representative group (smart people you liked) and your job as a TA shows you a more random sample (or even skewed negative, poor students grubbing for grades).

At least that’s my guess (selection bias).

Of course if I’m wrong there’s an even bigger opportunity in undervalued students, but I’ve done enough interviews to believe that’s not true.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#188

Post by amluto »

sokoloff wrote: post #108
komali2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the argument that the wait-list students that didn't get to actually attend did worse in life than wait-list students that did get to attend, how does your implication that the "students were already good and that's why they did well in life" hold up?

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 sa…

“For most students” can potentially obscure an enormous difference between mean and median income.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#189

Post by codekansas »

endisneigh wrote: post #128
viburnum wrote: post #5

Every tech company I’ve worked at has been run by Ivy people but all the actual code is written by Cal State graduates and high school dropouts.

This is not true of any FAANG and I've worked for all of them. Go to any of them and you will see that most of the SWEs are some combination of MIT, Cal, Stanford, and tier-1 public schools and top 20 (by US News Report) private schools.

From my experience the best people are usually state school undergrad (e.g., Berkeley / UIUC / UNC / UW / GTech) plus selective grad school (Harvard / Stanford / MIT / CMU). At the graduate level those schools are much more meritocratic and it's usually a better indicator of ability. Plus doing well at one of those undergrads is actually really hard.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#190

Post by fnovd »

bwestergard wrote: post #53
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some counter-examples then? It seems like all animals have hierarchies.

Many bird species. https://asknature.org/strategy/cooperative-herding-catches-m...

This is a hierarchy of one stratum (birds) cooperating to dominate another stratum (fish).

If anything, this link shows that operating effectively within a hierarchy has clear advantages to survival.

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