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Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

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Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#361

Post by 411111111111111 »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #325
411111111111111 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its further biased by how many iq tests the testee has done before. Honestly, iq tests are pointless unless you're selecting for people that are willing to invest time into worthless knowledge in order to win in a contest. Which is a valid criteria, considering that these are the most motivated people... Its just not "intelligence", though that itself is just as pointless to measure.

IQ tests are not pointless, the scores have strong correlation with lifetime achievement and are useful for population statistics about things like educational outcomes and the harms of childhood malnutrition. The meaningfulness of the test score breaks down if someone carries out a campaign of preparation, but that doesn’t make the tests useless. IQ testing gets a lot of flak from people who seem to have an axe to g…

Seems you're misinterpreting my comment. Though I'm not sure how, considering I literally wrote at the end that selecting for it can make sense

As I said before, the iq test mainly measures how much the participant is motivated... Or so many other reasons which are loosely correlated with professional success such as enjoying puzzles and figuring things out etc.

It just doesn't say anything about "intelligence", and measuring that is pointless, because it's not even possible to clearly define it... like so many terms, there are as many definitions for it as there are people in the room.

But even if you use the official definition of it being the ability to apply knowledge I'd still disagree with the usual iq tests measuring that. They're puzzles at best and measuring how someone can apply knowledge is not that easy to standardize.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#362

Post by alexhutcheson »

vinay427 wrote: post #360
alexhutcheson wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally succ…

> hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US I agree with the rest of your comment so I don't want to generally detract, but I think the qualification of major coastal metro areas includes a lot of places where your comment doesn't apply and excludes a lot of others (e.g. the upper Midwest). I think there are aspects where major coastal metros are outliers, but grade school and public university…

Yeah, it was a short-hand way to convey the categorization and could have been more more precise. In reality, every region has its own culture that is somewhere along this spectrum.

I’d also note that I think “school/university quality” != “a high pressure environment”. There are plenty of places that have one but not the other. In particular, there are lots of places where high schools are providing excellent education and public university options are good, but students don’t feel like they are in a pressure cooker.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#363

Post by dennis_jeeves »

_5yps wrote: post #267
dennis_jeeves wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish I could say I'm above it all, but I've certainly internalized it to some extent IMO, you are well above it all, or may be you will get there in a couple of years. You are doing fantastic for someone who is 16. Most people do not achieve this level of self-awareness even when they are 60. But there is a dark side to this precociousness. You are not ignorant, and that will often drive you to despair when you o…

[flagged]

>>It seems that you're implying I'm a massive cunt.

?? Nope, I'm not, the opposite actually.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#364

Post by samatman »

nostrademons wrote: post #157
vostok wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that more of this difference is explained by class/social factors than by the passage of time.

Entirely possible, but there's also potential selection bias. I was a teen in the late 90s, and was friends with a lot of the druggie/stoner/party crowd. By and large, these people do not have kids, because they can't afford to. A good many of them are dead now, either from overdoses, or drug-related accidents (like crashing their car while going 100 mph while high), or suicide. The 55 years of American history post-…

That's anecdotally interesting, but the numbers don't bear it out: there's a consistent negative correlation between degree of educational attainment and number of offspring.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#365

Post by sk5t »

kick wrote: post #136
ausbah wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not necessarily to the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw), but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.) Cornell is an ivy league school, and calling the likes of cmu and Duke "second tier" schools?? by any metric they're on par or. better with ivy league schools

The value of an Ivy is the prestige that comes with it. CMU is only prestigious in computing. Academically Duke is better than most Ivies, and it's got some pretty nice name recognition because of its outreach programs, but it doesn't really have the prestige of most Ivies. I'm mostly just entertained that in a discussion like this, MIT is completely absent. For obvious reasons, granted, but it's still funny.

CMU has a tremendous reputation in fields other than CS--engineering, fine art, psychology. However, it may be that those fields themselves are less prestigious than law, finance, and politics.

As a CMU undergrad in the 90s, most of us in technical majors talked and thought about the school as a deliberate act of self-flagellation. I don't imagine Harvard students fell into similar ways of thinking.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#366

Post by selimthegrim »

7thaccount wrote: post #342
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

I graduated from High School in 2008 and in my small area, it was only just becoming possible to take college classes (dual enrollment) with the local community college. The next year, most of the AP and Honors kids were taking several classes to at least knock out all the non-relevant classes you have to take for any degree. This likely saved them time and money in college since if they went into something like phys…

TOPS is a subsidy to the middle class at the expense of those who really need it. Let me assure you as a graduate student at a Louisiana institution (not LSU) I am not impressed by their pouring fuel on the fire of rising college tuition with oil money

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#367

Post by selimthegrim »

kick wrote: post #99
mnky9800n wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the second tier of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. Lol.

While CMU is huge in computing, it's lacking in prestige. Cornell is most-frequently referred to as a 'fake Ivy' everywhere college discussion can be found, and has been since the 1980s. I direct the audience's attention to the results of the search query "fake ivy university": https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+ivy+university

I thought UChicago had that laurel

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#368

Post by School-Cotton »

Joof wrote: post #300
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

You just suggested that a lot of ivy-league schools are second tier. I'm not sure you're very representative of the vast majority of people. In Texas, there's stuff like Stanford and Cornell, which is ivy league -- 1-2 kids might do that. Then we have 2 top tier state schools, then it's the other stuff. Everyone else I work with got some degree from an Ivy League. Half have PhDs. It carries some weight and I think we…

When I read these threads I feel like I'm reading an ethnography of life on another planet.

I did an IB magnet program in high school, graduating ~2008, and I don't know anyone from even that self-selected sample of people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. One girl went to MIT.

The overwhelming majority of these people, who again, were a much brighter sample than the average teenager, ended up at either the U. of A. or ASU (A=Arizona).

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#369

Post by benibela »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #69
MrJagil wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly ironic that the first comment is a request for a blog post.

It is not ironic; it is in direct response to what he wrote. He mentions extensively the importance of building one's brand, and that even he is a victim of that mindset. Therefore I am curious IF he has a blog, and I am curious what that blog contains in case that it exists.

Social media is more important for building a brand than a blog

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#370

Post by dang »

switch007 wrote: post #90
_5yps wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not true that nobody's fucking. The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected. I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style. I always thought it was subpar - too many clauses, a slew of unnecessary qualifiers and weasel words, no shortage of kludges for things I can't express very well. I tend to be better at it after I've been…

> The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected. I'm trying to be charitable and not over-interpret the juxtaposition of "LGBT" and "lower achievers". I'm surprised you have so much time to study who is having sex. Quite remarkable.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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