Live data from Hacker News

Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

economist.com

401–410 of 466 posts

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

#401
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Second-tier compared to the world's top universities; that is, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and their ilk. I've seen posts on this website[0] how some big tech companies almost exclusively skim off the top. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543371

Going to a university that's top in your field is perfectly fine for anyone who intends to go to a FAANG, take it from me. Tech employers care about what you can do with your education, not where it came from.

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

#402
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'm getting to 35 now and I had an experience that felt very similar to yours in my coastal magnet school. Lots of academics, lots of extracurricular stress, kids of immigrants who pushed for more, more, more. The guy who sat next to me in German committed suicide.

As the years have gone by I've realized two things:

1. The other behaviors are there, but they get filtered and harder to notice. Many of the situations you see in dramas are just...less dramatic, and more ordinary in real life. People don't want to bring it up, they want to stay in their routine, and when you have a ton of structure(as is the case in these schools) things move on too quickly to reflect on anything or become self-directed, so it gets repressed. The media version goes out of its way to highlight it, in contrast.

Many years after I graduated, the popular physics teacher at my high school was caught fooling around with the girls and doing favors for them. Apparently this had been going on for many years. You never would have known. He was a good teacher.

2. At a young age, even if you've encountered these things, you aren't necessarily sensitive enough to accurately judge what is happening to you or to others. Since teenagers struggle with this they start looking for easy ways to provide themselves with an identity - and media is happy to supply you with a stock identity that is, in rough approximation, true to you. But of course, they are all a mismatch on some level. And when young people socialize they are often prone to projecting on each other in an unhealthy way, drawing boundaries and defining characters out of thin air.

Which, if I were to turn that into advice, it would be: Stay focused on the ordinary stuff. Keep a diary so that when you notice something, it gets recorded and you can reflect on it and challenge it. It's the one thing that is most missing when you get caught up in feelings of urgency.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory military service is nothing more than nationalistic brainwashing.

I think all this praise for people that go into the military as having “served” and whatnot is nationalistic brainwashing. I really don’t see any other option for Americans to start caring about what their politicians do than to make them personally feel it.

That has failed miserably for getting people to care - at least as they should because of attributation. It is their bread and butter to claim successes they had nothing to do with pin their failures on their foes or a scapegoat who is now their foe.

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

#404
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 are really well spoken.

2 things: Don’t be fooled by the price of attendance, Rensselaer is a mid tier school.

Well said about exhibitionism as a pathology.

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Walter, I should've phrased that differently. With less time used taking classes like Psych 101 (which is generally a waste of time for engineering and science majors) you have more time to study and complete assignments in your core classes. The university says it wants you to take these classes to be "well rounded", but honestly, they just want more money from students. Regarding Calculus and Chemistry (all imp…

AP stem classes are great for easing the transition to college level work, but they are no substitute for college stem classes. If you're a physics major, for example, you need to be taking honors calculus as a freshman, not the weeder classes, and AP calculus is just a warmup. In my experience, every STEM class in college is just paint over a math class. The stronger your math skills are, the more you can concentrat…

It's kinda ironic that you don't really know what classes you'll need until you are in industry (or whatever).

For example, I really wish I could've only taken EE classes relevant to power systems + public speaking + several comp sci electives (programming, databases, etc) and as much statistics as I possibly can. The standard major was still good though and set me up to learn on my on.

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those aren't the two options. If loss of life were equal due to equal participation, you'd get 45% loss of each sex (using your 90% of men figure as the potential loss), which (while still devastating) isn't the same argument for losing the breeding capacity of the country. The reality is that those sorts of rules are very much based on culture tradition ('historic'). It takes a long time for parts of our culture…

Scenario A: 100 women, 100 men. 100 men go off to war, 10 men return. But with polygamy, 100 women have 100 children for the next generation. Scenario B: 100 women, 100 men. 50 women and 50 men go off to war, 5 men and 5 women return. You have 55 women left in the population and 55 children for the next generation. The limiting factor in human population growth is the number of women that can have children. The cold…

The cold calculus is also hopelessly outdated in so many ways given the timescales of modern wars and modern transportation speed and connection. Even in an extended war the reproductive capacity is frankly irrelevant as even 1 million moms can't pop out a fully trained soldier. And it isn't a matter of cannonfodder anyway. Gender ratios and population growth may be resolved better by immigration than enforced by isolation polygamy.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently. It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke. Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper…

Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tec…

> being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired)

Jeez - that is awful. Since you're anonymous, will you say which FANG this was? I don't always hear great things about FANGs but sacking the bottom 10% of employees every 6 months does raise some eyebrows.

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

#408
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…

As current college student who went to a competitive (but not the most competitive) Silicon Valley high school a few years ahead of you, your story rings true. I thought I'd share my story to show my post-graduation perspective. In my high school class the students who got into Ivy Leagues were either legacy students or the ones that took as many AP classes as possible and had other activities to boost their resumes.…

> but had my pick of top UC schools.

It's not an Ivy but I would think a UC Berkley diploma would get you practically as much access as any of them. UCLA and maybe UCSB to a great extent as well.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tec…

> being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired) Jeez - that is awful. Since you're anonymous, will you say which FANG this was? I don't always hear great things about FANGs but sacking the bottom 10% of employees every 6 months does raise some eyebrows.

The only FANG that doesn't do this is Google (annual review only, no Stack Ranking, Needs Improvement rating is only for 1-4% of the company). Also, Google is the only one without an "up or out" policy limiting your maximum time between promotions to four years (i.e. you get canned for not meeting your expectations for career growth). This forced attrition policy is why FANG companies are always rapidly hiring (even during COVID-19), have tons of open positions, and the average tenure for software engineers is only 2.5 years. The mentality is that these companies hire the best of the best, pay the best, and as a result, expect your very best performance in return.

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That negative correlation exists only between social groups, not within social groups:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/

If you look at only populations who were likely to go to college in the first place - say, white (formerly) middle-class two-parent households, which is what the bulk of my high-school friends were, there's a positive correlation between educational attainment and fertility. Simpson's Paradox strikes again...

Post reply on HN