Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 548 posts

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#461

Post by username90 »

asoneth wrote: post #290
kansface wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital- pick any two and you get success on average. That’s about all there is to it. Success could look like making a bunch of money, starting a business, doing research, making interesting art. The point is a smart, hard working person can pretty much choose to do anything and an intelligent person will do fine with an infinite runway regardless of work ethic, etc.…

> Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital Agreed that these are important factors in success, but in practice they don't seem to be equivalent in importance. An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or conscientiousness but was born into affluence in the US is more likely to remain higher on the socioeconomic ladder than a successful person who has both intelligence and conscientiousness but wa…

> An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or conscientiousness but was born into affluence in the US is more likely to remain higher on the socioeconomic ladder than a successful person who has both intelligence and conscientiousness but was born poor.

Are you using the same scales here? If the affluent person was 1% you should take a top 1% person in terms of intelligence or grit. If the affluent person was top 25% in intelligence then the other person should be in a top 25% income family. (top 25% intelligence isn't even 110 IQ, so not high at all)

It isn't fair to take a bottom 10% person with top 2% intelligence and compare that to a top 0.1% in terms of wealth and top 25% in terms of intelligence, but that is the kind of argument people usually makes.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#462

Post by CheezeIt »

bsder wrote: post #406
hodgesrm wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear what Gary Kildall has to do with this argument. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and developed one of the first successful operating system for microcomputers. It's really hard to see him as disadvantaged. The legend of course is that he whiffed one of the biggest business opportunities in the history of computing, but lots of people have blown it in business. [1] The IBM story was interesting becaus…

Kildall couldn't "bet the farm" like Gates could because he didn't have the fallback of rich parents. The business was the fallback and he wasn't going to bet it. Kildall couldn't break the IBM logjam with CP/M because he couldn't call the IBM CEO directly.

Most people have parents with a couch you can crash on.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#463

Post by shados »

seoaeu wrote: post #287
shados wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably oversimplified but the idea is there. Maybe it would be better put as "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do". Being a cashier for a fast food joint on night shift is absolute hell on your mental and physical health, it takes a ton of endurance, and is all around not very pleasant. But a lot of people have that endurance and the ability to power through it. Being a cab driver…

Amusing this definition of "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do" basically contradicts the idea that DO THINGS can possibly be a great equalizer. Any equality that only some people can have, is pretty much by definition not equality.

That's why equality is so hard.

I do think it can still be an equalizer, though diversity. If you can code but I can't, while I can do project management but you can't, then both our "do's" are valuable. What prevents THAT from working is that the amount of people who can do each will be different as will the demand. We're straight back at capitalism.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#464

Post by zepto »

oriolid wrote: post #235
zepto wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Lots of countries have their own social networking apps. Some have their own search engines. Also, quite a few countries have strong computer science schools and developers. Linux was developed in Finland. Raspberry PI was developed in England. “Big tech” isn’t preventing them from developing anything. The only thing holding these countries back is their business culture.

> Linux was developed in Finland. I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland. If you want more Finnish operating system, try Jolla. There was a lot of Finnish contribution to Series 60 too, but it's kind of awful.

> I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland.

Linus did quite a bit before the network of hackers joined in. But I don’t disagree with you. My main point is that the US, and big American tech companies don’t have a monopoly on talent.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#465

Post by duud »

borodi wrote: post #337
Applejinx wrote: post #321

A lot of people here need to talk to some entrepreneurs. It doesn't matter how good, or how well funded, the school system is: if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts, much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things. Period. This does not in ANY WAY mean there sho…

As always, the easiest way to be successful is to be born in a successful family

And in a (economically) successful country. You make more as a ditch digger in a developed country than a doctor, engineer, etc in a developing country.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#466

Post by zhangjunphy »

It is really interesting to read the comments in this thread.

From an outsider's perspective, US has been the most prosperous country in this planet. People generally have good chances to move up the class ladder. And there are a lot of active enterprises. But I had the strong feeling that this stop to be the case in recent decades.

The reason, as I see it, is the natural tendency of capitalism, people seeking to maximize their individual capital. In the past century, with the pressure of the cold war, this tendency is balanced by the government, as US needed its working class to actually make innovations and make products to gain the advantage in the competition with the Soviet Union. In fact, the working class got their best treatment during the cold war, and then it worsens in recent decades.

Now with the Soviet Union dead, and China is still too young to be an actual competitor. There is no obstacle for the capitalists to play their games. It should be evident for most Americans that the price of properties are inflating while the increase of their salary slowed. The government also got eroded, most of the people there are either capitalists or have good relationship with them. What will be their incentives to change the rules?

This is not just the problem with US, it happens also in China. And I don't see a solution to it. The lower classes are controlled tightly by the media, which is controlled by the capitalists. And the middle class is thin and divided. In fact a lot of the middle class try very hard to climb the social ladder so they can be one of the upper class. They don't want the game changed, just "modified" to benefit themselves a bit.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#467

Post by [deleted] »

rkk3 wrote: post #374
8note wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those posts give me the sense that those companies are looking for investors (the rich parents) rather than somebody to do work

Google famously only hired people with elite education credentials in the beginning. "We also didn't want to hire anyone from what were considered lesser universities" Eric Schmidt https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=1756

[deleted]

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#468

Post by derbOac »

rkk3 wrote: post #374
8note wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those posts give me the sense that those companies are looking for investors (the rich parents) rather than somebody to do work

Google famously only hired people with elite education credentials in the beginning. "We also didn't want to hire anyone from what were considered lesser universities" Eric Schmidt https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=1756

Stuff like that is so soul crushing to me. It's caste systems in another guise.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#469

Post by WalterBright »

sokoloff wrote: post #444
WalterBright wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would certainly expect progress on the unstable foundation after a year and a billion dollars spent.

In this analogy, the foundation is “the years of schooling the student has already experienced”.

There's no evidence that things for the first year students have improved.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#470

Post by WalterBright »

kenjackson wrote: post #284
WalterBright wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chronically underfunding schools In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted. There has been zero improvement in results. There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all. Edit:…

You do realize this is about where the money was coming from. The state had a constitutional mandate to fund education at a certain level and weren't doing so. Local and federal funding was making up the gap. You won't see any impact to education because there isn't more money coming to education as a result of this ruling. Rather more money can flow from federal and local gov't to other programs (or in theory taxes…

If what you're saying is true, then why did the school system say this would fix education?
Post reply on HN