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
Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
401–410 of 466 posts
Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
#40216-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 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)
#403Earlier 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.
Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
#40416-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…
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)
#405Earlier 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…
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)
#406Earlier 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…
Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
#407Earlier 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…
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)
#40816-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.…
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)
#409Earlier 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.
Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
#410Earlier 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.
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...