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Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

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Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#311

Post by lapcat »

chimprich wrote: post #249
rayiner wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class. Much of the power in society is therefore held by a…

> Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. "Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries. "Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.

"Inequality tends to be greater in developing countries than wealthier ones. The United States is an exception."

"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."

https://theconversation.com/why-inequality-is-growing-in-the...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067736

Otherwise, rayiner's comment seemed fine, but the "diffuse" part was odd.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#312

Post by rayiner »

gonehome wrote: post #307
rayiner wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to that statement because it's something people say, hence the quotes. I'm not saying I agree with its full scope now. But I get where it's coming from more than I did before. While university admissions people aren't representative of white people, they're in the class of people I had always assumed didn't see people in terms of race. I knew affirmative action was a thing, but I kind of assumed it was…

I think it's a big (and likely incorrect) assumption that all of (or even a plurality of) the people making these comments working in admissions are themselves white. It's not just that they're not representative of an entire group of people, many aren't members of that group at all. It's also not necessarily entirely on the admissions people - the argument made in that substack (and ultimately the conclusion of SCOT…

University employees are overwhelmingly white: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/28/black-adminis.... Over 75% in the mid level employee ranks, and over 80% in the administrator ranks.

I agree the reality hits harder than the theory. I imagined this statistical and detached balancing process, not this.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#313

Post by pseudalopex »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #283
lapcat wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect. Yes, the current purpose or intent. Harvard was established 387 years ago; what was its original purpose or intent? I don't know. In fact, I don't care. It's not relevant to the current argument. Institutions change over time, and we're talking about hundreds of years at Harvard.

> the current purpose or intent … is to make society less meritocratic? Where’s the evidence that this is what the institution is currently driving at as its mission? Versus this being an emergent effect, subjectively?

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#314

Post by squokko »

"We don’t need to sort and classify 18-year olds. It’s absurd. Stop trying to fix it and get rid of it."

Would the OP make the same argument about athletics? That 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and 18-year-old Frankie Fatass, instead of being sorted and classified, should be put into the same soccer program?

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#315

Post by sokoloff »

amluto wrote: post #188
sokoloff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The mean is pulled up substantially by a few famous Harvard drop-outs.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#316

Post by MichaelZuo »

gonehome wrote: post #187
CrazyStat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 grub…

I agree and have noticed this too. Even the median kid from Stanford, Harvard, etc., has a level of elevator pitching skills that are unmatched by anyone below the 90th to 95th percentile at 'lower ranked' schools.

In terms of raw smarts I wouldn't make so bold a claim, but in terms of what folks can realistically assess in a single minute of interaction...

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#317

Post by rayiner »

chimprich wrote: post #249
rayiner wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class. Much of the power in society is therefore held by a…

> Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. "Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries. "Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.

Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it. In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%. And even in the top 1%, a lot of the owners are like retired dentists or early employees at Microsoft. They don’t exercise meaningful power over these companies by virtue of ownership.

That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.

You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#318

Post by MichaelZuo »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #304
sixstringtheory wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think yours is less a problem of how to keep up with the joneses and more a problem of realistically evaluating your circumstances and expectations. Whoever is telling you that you aren’t good enough is trying to pull something over on you at this point. It works well on people that can never be satisfied.

I think the people that told me that aren't good enough are the admissions committees of the 2 elite schools I applied to that rejected me (I only applied to 4 schools in total). They've already decided that I have no "merit".

To put it in another way, if you genuinely expect to be one of the world's major decision makers, wealthiest, etc., then yes there's close to zero prospects, given the stated background and age.

But if your expectation is to have a happy life, a nice house in a decent neighbourhood, etc., then there's no reason to listen to them and self-flagellate.

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#319

Post by JohnBooty »

pc86 wrote: post #178
JohnBooty wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow the discussion. It probably shouldn't matter, but it does. Very much so.

Maybe it does help if your goal is to attend a top 3 medical or law school, and then go on to equally impressive practices after, or if you want to go into very very high level investment banking or something. It's shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement to say that if you want to be one of the top in the world in a given field you probably need to go to one of the top universities. Even then you'll find plen…

     I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from 
     Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a 
     boring suburban part of a boring state for a 
     company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone 
     from Harvard is killing it.
I... don't think that anybody is claiming that literally every single individual who went to Harvard is successful. Surely you see that this discussion is about trends and aggregates?

Re: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

#320

Post by mandmandam »

BearOso wrote: post #144
commandlinefan wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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,…

I totally agree that the legacy and nepotism needs to be dropped. But there's some caveats to consider: * It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things. * Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores. * It depends on the major they int…

Those aren't very good caveats, imo.

> * It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.

One of the biggest factors for success is zip code; that needs changing too. And in any case, if you can graduate valedictorian in a shitty school in a shitty neighborhood, that's a big achievement nonetheless. Ivy League schools would be well served taking those students in, and not just for reasons of basic fairness.

> Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.

The difference between 99% and perfect has little to do with ability, and everything to do with the ability to spend time/money hacking a metric beyond reason.

> * It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.

That doesn't actually follow. If it's a popular major, then there ought to be more slots made available for students. It's not like Harvard doesn't have the money to make that happen.

... We may disagree on these, but I also agree that legacy and nepotism is a major problem, and that there are better schools, from an academic / learning standpoint.

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