I'm not dismissing the role of education, however. Education is vastly important. A formal education with an expensive stamp on it? Not so much.

Continuing my discussion of the startup/technology sector, there was a time when a great degree would get you into places where you worked with awesome folks doing hugely important jobs. Over time, more awesome folks and hugely important jobs existed separate from that great degree. We've now reached a point where having that great degree many times is counter-indicative of performance ability, so it becomes kind of a social club.

I hate to say it, but for run-of-the-mill high technology jobs where you interact heavily with a business customer and make some magic happen? I view deep dives in college as a warning sign that you might be validating yourself against a model that has little practical impact in the larger world.

I really hated to admit that, because I deeply love education. But dang it, I believe the tables are flipped. You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 20-year-old who knows everything about technology from his personal passions than you are from a 25-year-old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution. And in terms of organizations, it's a big red flag as far as productivity goes for those places with tight controls over collegiate applicant. Unless you're building the next LHC. Whenever I see some job that's a straight technology job that has "and a masters degree in CS" without the following "or equivalent experience"? I'm thinking this isn't a place I want to be associated with. They have no idea what they are doing.

> You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 20-year-old who knows everything about technology from his personal passions than you are from a 25-year-old with a Master's degree from an Ivy League institution.

This is a false dichotomy with a side order of strawman.

Here, let me play:

"You are more likely to get great help in the startup/technology sector from some 25-year-old who pursued their passion for websites and earned a Masters from a dissertation on HTTP than you are from a 20-year-old with a who reads two dozen blogs and keeps up with the tweets".

See how that works?

Whether a person has a degree or not is orthogonal to their passion for a subject. But it so happens that you don't get a top score in a research degree by just ticking the boxes or colouring between the lines. You need to be passionate about the topic.

And it so happens that this is true of mastery of any subject. Those who are passionate about a subject will obsessively read about it, study it, tinker with it and spend the time to deeply grok a topic because that's what they love doing.

Sometimes this happens in academia. Sometimes in industry.

But I think you missed my goal. I was making a sweeping generalization about my personal preferences. Much as "I've found I like ice cream with chocolate in it more than others" Such statements are by necessity overly broad and full of false dichotomies.

I do appreciate your comment, however. It helps clarify further discussion. Just wanted to point out that my goal wasn't a deep dive on all things graduate-degree related. It was to announce (mostly to myself) a heuristic that I have been carrying for a while without recognizing it.

Congrats on your degree. It's great to achieve a goal. Now go make a difference in the world. Getting a degree wasn't it.

Funnily enough, the dissertation grew out of a startup idea I had a few years ago. And now I've come full circle; I've been steadily working on the products of the research to launch the business (2 days ago I filed my first patent).

The key all along was a passionate interest in the subject.

So yes, you can create any favorable/unfavorable comparison you want with the words by adding "passion" before the comma. But there are some instances where people still need this reminder.

Just recently, a recruiter wrote that a CS degree from Brown would count for a lot more than one from UIUC or U Tex. I was personally sort of shocked by this, because I thought that it was widely understood that the rigor and quality of CS programs at these universities was very high (absolutely nothing against Brown, which has great students, I was just sort of amazed that a recruiter would discount degrees from two "top 10" programs simply because, as large state schools, they're easier to "get into"... yeah, and anyone can "get into" basic training in the marines, it's getting through that's the tough part). So I'd say "a student who has excelled in a highly rigorous CS program is better prepared than an indifferent student from an elite college."

See, I just did it. But is this as vacuous as any statement you can construct using this trick/tactic?

I will say one thing - you've added something to my "alert phrases." You're entirely right that people do abuse this rhetorical trick, so I'll be on the lookout for it. However, I wouldn't dismiss these sorts of comparisons outright, they can be meaningful.

It's not a question of passion, it's a question of goal orientation. My experience is that results-oriented environments (like YC) have better outcomes than status-oriented environments (anyplace that confers come thing called a "BCompSci with 1st Class Honours").

Could you elaborate?

> My experience is that results-oriented environments (like YC) have better outcomes than status-oriented environments (anyplace that confers come thing called a "BCompSci with 1st Class Honours").

My experience is that successful people are successful. Name a traditional predictor of success and lots of success people don't have it in the background. YC just goes on the same pile.

Personally, I wouldn't participate in YC. To me it seems that the principal advantage of YC isn't that you get $x thousand dollars. It's that you will belong to a somewhat influential old boys network.

A bit like an Ivy Leaguer, actually.

I think you're trying to put things in nice little buckets when the truth is that the world's a messy place. Also, it feels like you'll suffer from confirmation bias, as well. Maybe you're just thinking about the latest single-page-web-app startup. What about places like Bose, which came out of MIT? Or really any of the myriad companies that have been born out of academia.

I was asking for a rate comparison vs YC.

I think a better measure would be wealth net wealth at particular intervals -- 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years.

Some students are then invited to take an honours year, during which they will take postgraduate courses and undertake a research project.

That I earned "first class" means I earned a distinction for my project and maintained a distinction average for my coursework.

The difference with the US system is that the honours year is meant to prepare you to move directly into a PhD without needing further coursework. In the US system, when you take a PhD you do some coursework first and can terminate early with a Masters.

EDIT: Jacques, did you notice the last line in Daniel Markham's response to your comment? It will be great to see your awesome startup.

Basically you're just arbitrarily attaching "status" and "results" labels to things.

It's an argument I can't win, because by raising my own achievements by way of disclaimer[1], I am "bragging", which is a "status orientation" on my part.

But the fact that I worked towards a measurable goal in a structured way according to a plan of my own design -- that somehow isn't results-seeking behaviour?

[1] because usually, these discussions boil down to an argument between people with a degree and people without a degree -- and there's a strong correlation between the pro-degree/contra-degree camp and who has a degree.

Watch this space: http://robojar.com/

There are, as far as I've seen, very few "20-year-olds who know everything about technology", but there are plenty of 20-year-olds who know a great deal about some specific technology or technologies. And if that technology is what you need (note, not what you want), they're golden. And if by "startup/technology sector", you mean the "web startup sector", that's fairly likely. On the other hand, if it isn't, you may not be. If all you have is a hammer and a screwdriver, everything is going to look like a threaded nail.

When I was working in Italy I would sometimes listen to a US Forces radio station on my drive in each morning, and the success story propaganda was fascinating. Every so often, there would be a completely irrelevant and disconnected sixty second summary of some lucky chap who did really well in business, with an undertone that all you needed was to work hard and you'd become a millionaire.

The "work hard and you may become a millionaire" undertone is a good thing.

OR

If we agree the american dream is fallacy then is the only purpose of it to keep the rich from being guillotined?

I'm not sure what I think of the american dream or even what it means. But I find the idea of lying to the disenfranchised so they can feel better about themselves condescending.

Modern society looks down on poor people, labelling them as losers when they are really a product of unfortunate circumstances. Unfortunate because they had no books in their house, unfortunate because they were surrounded by family who derided learning, unfortunate because they had the wrong colour skin or wrong gender for the career they wanted.

I'm not even sure I buy your argument that they feel better about themselves. Being constantly reminded of your supposed failings isn't a great place to be.

The worst part of "work hard and you may become a millionaire" is for the majority it is a lie.

* I am a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.

* You should work harder to be successful.

* They are poor because they are moral degenerates.

As long as you can keep the three attitudes separate and attached to the proper groups, you'll have no problems understanding modern American culture.

What else is there to believe in? I find the supposedly realistic belief that "life is hard and then you die" very depressing. From personal experience, the only thing keeping me going in my worst times is the thought that I can still turn things around and succeed (again) - otherwise I would just give up because what the f am I living for?

And I don't see success as being a millionaire - people define success in different ways, to each his own. You gotta have something to keep you going and it does feel better to believe that you're just temporarily down rather than being a born loser who will die a loser.

I'm not saying you shouldn't strive to improve your situation, just that adopting the stoical attitude of appreciating what you have will result in better outcomes for most people.

That's the thing, this line of thinking has come to equate "being successful" with "being rich/having material wealth". The fact is we cannot all be rich, because "being rich" it's relative (a "poor" American is "rich" compared to someone from Laos, for example), so what should we do?

I know of some countries that have created a "happiness index", in place of the GDP-based index, but I don't think that's the best solution, just a realization that things are probably not on the right track. For example, my personal solution is to base my views when it comes to "life success" on the views of Seneca (who was a very rich guy, incidentally), whose views have also been borrowed by early Christianity, if I'm not mistaken.

I'll take job satisfaction when I can get it (and fortunately I have it right now after a few years of not having it), but a good job and a good salary aren't the goal of my life, but the means for me to achieve my goals.

Of course, maybe I'm too well-off to think my material possessions don't make as much of a difference and I'm just being a hypocrite.

Maybe I'd feed differently if I really were struggling like I know too many people do, but regardless, I would rate myself very successful and in no way envious of the so-called 1% (of which I am most certainly not a member).

I disagree. Few people will become millionaires compared to the general population, and many people who come into wealth didn't do so because of hard work. This undertone obscures the actual facts about wealth and who is wealthy, things which have a lot to do with social inequality.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Definition 1 - In America, it doesn't matter who you are, you can be successful. You could run your own business or attain a high-level political office (to name a few).

Definition 2 - In America, if you work hard, you will always attain a high level of success. You will never be treated unfairly or have to obstacles you need to overcome in order to succeed.

I think if you ask most immigrants who came to the US from countries with authoritarian regimes, they'll agree the "American Dream" still exists. Of course their perspective is quite different. In their home country no matter how hard they worked they could never be successful because they were the wrong race, member of the wrong political party, didn't have connections to the right people, didn't go to the right schools, etc.

I don't think any reasonable definition of the "American Dream" demands that America is perfect. It's just an observation that America is very unique in the world in the opportunities it offers people from all backgrounds. Heck, I've spoke to European friends who feel that the US offers more opportunities for everyone than their home country does.

But I am absolutely certain that these give them a purpose to try harder and become better in whatever they do. Even so it is largely an illusion, it benefits society overall as it motivates people to live up to their best possible capabilities.

But I don't believe that there is anything such as a fair game and that those not benefiting from the current rules of the game will always call it unfair. This is similar to the discussion in the article of the Ivy Schools. Is what they do fair? Absolutely not! Does it serve its purpose of positioning the schools as institutions that bring together the intellectual and societal elites? Yes it does.

It's indeed an excellent trick. Appeals nicely to people's greed and wishful thinking.

A question of importance, then, is what happened to noblesse oblige...

Not everyone who tries to get rich, will get rich. In fact, most won't. That is true.

That doesn't mean that trying is foolish. Quite the contrary; it is the basis of free market capitalism. When everyone tries, our collective choices in the marketplace can select for the best ideas, most organized managers, most inspiring leaders.

If no one tries, we're stuck with whoever is on top now, staying on top. That's not a recipe for improvement in a changing world.

The main problem here is that much of US society believes it is a necessary and sufficient condition - i.e., they've perverted "you need to work hard to get rich" to "if you work hard you will get rich", or the more pernicious format: "if you're not rich you didn't work hard".

The last form of this thought is one of the most persistently toxic concepts of modern US society.

Case in point: categorical prioritization of progeny, inherited wealth, or the impact of power and wealth acquisition on the functioning of an otherwise more productive mind.

(ETA) Part of the reason we, as software engineers, don't have a lot of autonomy or respect is that we don't have the tribal mentality. Many engineers will gladly sell out their own colleagues to management in the hope of getting a promotion.

So yes, you can continually get through on connections despite what we would call meager effort, at that social milieu. It won't make you CEO, but you can move fairly seamlessly from one high-prestige job to another.

Or that, like, junior lawyers at big law firms are these community-minded individuals who just pick up the slack so that their colleagues can coast?

A lot of people from my college went on to be lawyers and i-bankers. My understanding of those jobs does not match your description. Like, even a little bit.

There are undoubtedly people out there who are underqualified and coasting in cushy jobs that they got through their connections. But the finance and law jobs that super-elite universities feed into to a grossly disproportionate degree are -- at their junior levels, at least -- overwhelmingly not those jobs. They're high-paid, but they're both grind-houses and shark tanks. Their cultures are ones of shallow relationships, little loyalty, and burning out junior employees to support a pyramid structure of more comfortable senior people.

I don't know of people in the UK that can get into universities with significantly lower grades, just because of their family.

And the part about jobs migt be true for a family firm, but I doubt if it would work at, say, IBM.

Yup, my fault, not clear enough. I'm talking about the US more than the UK, although now that UK universities have essentially been told by the government to behave like businesses, with poor people already less likely to apply than the rich since fees went from zero to almost ten grand a year in the course of a decade, I expect the UK to catch up soon enough in terms of buying your way into a good university (there is indeed already rumbling about places going to foreign students who can be charged far more than home students, establishing the principle, so I expect that as soon as universities work out a way to let people buy their way in, they will).

------------EDIT-------------

Edit to answer this point below: ""Give up, no point working hard, you will never make anything of yourself, the game is rigged"?"

No. My alternative narrative is "know the game is rigged". If you're playing a rigged game, your chances are so much better if you realise this (hence my very first post here - the people who rig the game work hard to make the unlucky ones think it isn't rigged).

"Some people will have it much, much easier than you and some people will have it much, much harder. That is irrelevant to how well you do, so have at it."

But going to the right school makes it considerably easier to go to the right University in the UK and going to the right school really is very strongly tied to wealth and status of families.

There's not really a test for such qualities. I mean, you can try, but it's very difficult to see how someone performs in trying circumstances until you put them there.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I'm sure many of HNers have read), Kahneman gives an anecdote about his time working for the Israeli Defence Force. The IDF wanted a way to identify who should be put through officer training, and they turned to a team of psychologists to develop a testing program.

Kahneman and his colleagues came up with a series of scenario-based tests. Some problem would be posed to a group of soldiers ("move this log over the top of this wall"). The group would be observed and notes taken.

One thing that the psychologists watched for was spontaneous leadership. Who in the group took charge? Surely such a soldier was bound to command!

The problem is that, upon reviewing the performance of their selections, Kahneman and his colleagues found that their candidates did no better -- either in training or in the field -- than candidates chosen by other means. Simply seeing the "obvious" leadership qualities of a particular individual in a highly artificial situation is a basically useless predictor of actual outcomes.

It's satisfying noise.

One of the problems with this of course is that the kinds of things that get you into such a school (grades, tests and extracurriculars) really have almost nothing to do with finding a leader. Even tests looking for dominant personality types (Type-A types) tend to find extroverts, not leaders. And even worse, it's been my observation that formal leadership training programs seems to churn out emotionally aloof general managers than "leaders".

One thing that the psychologists watched for was spontaneous leadership.

This is tough too. It ends up selecting for hardship leaders, not daily grind leaders. It's easy to start barking orders and look like you know what you are doing when there's an immediate task to accomplish and nobody else wants to. It's very hard to motivate a workforce for years at a time doing grind work.

An anecdote:

When I was a youngster, I knew a kid who was one of those emergent leader types. In any group activity he instantly tried to take charge and started organizing the other kids, barking orders etc. It didn't really matter what the activity was, kickball, hide and go seek, and when we were a bit older volunteer community work like habitat for humanity type things. And there were usually a few of the kids that would follow him.

The problem was that he was also terribly annoying. When facing a complex activity, one where there was no way he knew anything about the task or how to direct it. He'd still inevitably march up and start pointing and ordering like he had been doing this task for 20 years. The parents thought that he was such a wonderful natural leader. The other kids wanted to punch him in the face. It was only because of the trouble we'd get in that we didn't do exactly that (but oh where there backroom conspiracies about how to deal with him).

Now, decades later, I look back and realize that a great deal of my problem with him was likely due to differences in Keirsey Temperaments. He was obviously a Fieldmarshal [1] (correlate to Myers-Briggs ENTJ) while I'm very strongly a Mastermind [2] (MB:INTJ). According to the theory, my personality type will assume a leadership role IFF they feel the dominant Fieldmarshal personality has fundamentally failed. Basically I'm a coup maker and there was nothing more that I wanted to do with this kid than to undermine him, usurp him and delegitimize his assumption of power. I didn't want to necessarily be his replacement, but boy oh boy did I ever want to humble him. What troubled me the most was that there was inevitably a group of kids that would follow him simply because he was giving the appearance of organizing things.

I've reflected on this interaction deeply in my life to expose my own flaws, but also to learn from. Even though he wasn't qualified to run things, the fact that he simply stepped up and acted like he knew what he was doing was a terribly useful leadership technique. He really didn't seem to care that it was resented by his peer group, and as children I'm sure there was an element of parent pleasing to his behavior.

I've used this simple technique many times in business to organize out of control efforts that have floundered under the "emotionally aloof general manager types" mentioned before. Now that I'm aware of my Mastermind type tendencies, I can also watch out for destructive "coup" traits.

I don't know if I have a point other than to say that "leadership" is a very complex thing and that there are many many kinds of leadership we have to be aware of.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldmarshal_(role_variant)

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(role_variant)

The first is that taking control of a new group is easy. Just start; people will fall into line. I can't remember where I first learned that, but I do from time to time consciously take control of groups to speed up the process.

(Being a tall white male is, um, helpful when pulling this stunt ... YMMV).

The secret to leadership, apparently, is delegation. It helps that I am naturally lazy.

The second thought is: avoid the MBTI. It's not a very good psychometric system. The current best classification approach is the "five factor model".

... and even then it's only weakly predictive and only for certain kinds of behaviour.

I think there's a lot of truth to this. One observation I've made over the years: a number of people I've known who might have made great leaders failed to due to almost overwhelming trust and control issues. Almost to the person I've found that almost all of them came from very troubled childhood homes. Anecdotal, but I wonder if our social inability to address these types of developmental issues short changes us as a society from a great number of potential leaders.

No, the secret to management is delegation. A big part of successful leadership is actually about being on the front lines with your followers and sharing their burden and risk.

I can't remember where I did the reading, but engineering disciplines seem to have an unusually large concentration of them. All of the KTS types break down into two subtypes which are pretty much the difference between the Myers-Briggs E and I extraverts and intraverts.

All of the temperaments have strengths and weaknesses. In the case of an INTJ/Mastermind [2], there's a tendancy to ignore social costs in the pursuit of "getting shit done" (GSD). In some other readings on the type I've found descriptions that basically describe Masterminds as masters of strategy who prefer to sit in the backgroud behind a competent Field Marshall [3]. But when they feel the Field Marshall is no longer competent, the need to GSD can overwhelm them and they will attempt to assume control in order to accomplish the goal. Then once the goal is accomplished, fade into the background behind a new field marshall. Viewed negatively Masterminds are basically coup makers. And that's very rarely something to be desired. I've found that it's usually better to simply change positions and get away from under a poor leader than try and overthrow them. It almost never puts one in a good light.

Of course KTS and MB both have the feel of a kind of tarot card pseudo-science hand waiving. But I've found that none of the other KTS types come as close to matching the internal thought processes I have about my temperment. It's not a perfect descriptor, but it's about 90% on the nose.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(role_variant)

[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldmarshal_(role_variant)

The scary part of that paragraph is that it actually describes me accurately. Without giving too much about myself, I can say that I have been in, and utilized the situations where I've pulled strings behind the leader (this, was in school/college, but still quite scary).

Although I too consider this as hand-wavy, pseudo-y stuff I seriously think I should start looking at this and try to know when I'm committing such actions.

I think that this tendency was sub-conciously "read" by others and growing up I rarely found myself in direct leadership roles. But after I started working on that part of myself, I think that vibe started to go away and I find myself in many more leadership roles these days.

Different tasks can be approached with different structures, which also depends on the composition of the group. The kind of person to lead (or not to lead) the group effectively would vary greatly.

So how does it make any sense to pick a leader without knowing the context?

Oh, you meant identifying individuals who would be good leaders? Yeah, you're hosed there.

Around the middle of the article, the author argues that Jewish whites are overrepresented in top colleges relative to non-Jewish whites, also arguing that white Jew academic performance has declined over the past decade. He argues that in essence, Jewish whites disproportionately dominate colleges, and that both Asians and non-Jew whites are underrepresented relative to the proportions of top students that are Asian and non-Jewish white. However, much of his analysis is based on analyzing the last names of students who earned National Merit Scholarship awards (these are awards given out nationwide among nearly all high school students), a method which might work for Asian surnames (which are highly distinctive), but one that is highly flawed when trying to distinguish between a white Jewish and white non-Jewish surname. This is rather shaky ground. In the author's defense, this is probably the only source of data that he could get, given that it is difficult to find data on Jewish vs. non Jewish white scholarly performance and college admissions.

If there's any section you should skim, that's it.

The later sections of the article are particularly eye-opening: the author enters into a discussion of the personal biases that admissions officers can hold. One example is that a researcher found that participating in certain "high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, ...these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations." Another interesting fact is that people (and by extension admissions officers) have a tendency to drastically over-estimate the proportion of blacks/Hispanics/Jews in the US population.

However, the article ends rather weakly; the author basically suggests that the best solution is to have top colleges select a small portion of their students by pure talent (geniuses), and then select the rest by lottery out of a pool of academically qualified applicants. To me, this seems just as unfair as the alternatives, and de-motivational for academic success.

For some context: The author is Ron Unz, an "activist" type & former financial software guy whose company was acquired by Moodys in the mid 00s. He's quite difficult to pin down with traditional USA political shorthand (see his other positions on social services for immigrants vs bilingual education in CA for example.) It seems that whatever subject on which he focuses, he really goes all in.

This is a pretty interesting profile of him from the late nineties: http://www.onenation.org/9907/071999.html

If you're familiar with Steven Colbert's SuperPAC shenanigans you might remember that someone named Trevor Potter (former FEC) was Colbert's legal advisor & "straight" counterbalance. This is what that Potter said about Unz's unsuccessful campaign finance reform initiative:

"[...] Unz's "California Voters Bill of Rights" includes voluntary spending limits accompanied by partial public financing, a ban on corporate giving to candidates, overnight Web-based disclosure, and reasonable contribution caps (e.g., $5,000 for statewide races) that should survive a court challenge. "It's far wider-reaching than McCain-Feingold," says Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission

This post was provocative & definitely passed the "...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" test.

Not only that, but part of the value of the Harvard education is that you end up being at the school where everyone recruits from. They are on shaky legal ground giving you an IQ test, but "Was admitted to Harvard 4 years ago" is a decent proxy for one.

All this talk about the top 1% just sounds like envy. Why do we compare ourselves to that?

I live in a neighborhood of a thousand 3000 square foot houses with three car garages. I imagine all the people in them reading that article and shaking their fists with anger at the 1% and realizing they're all failures who will never get ahead.

I just don't get that mentality.

Also, you clearly live in a very wealthy neighborhood, but many people are struggling. Even if people aren't struggling, the "you can't complain about anything being injust because someone, somewhere is in a more unjust situation" is an absurd line of reasoning.

Also, why can't owning a hot dog stand that pays the bills and puts your kids through college be considered the American Dream? When did that turn into yachts and trips to the International Space Station?

One could point to basically every country in Africa and many in Latin America and Asia for support of the assertion. One counter-example (not that I agree China is even a counter-example in this case) doesn't disprove the theory in social science. There are always weird exceptions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E

Sure you can. Anyone "comfortably in the top 5%" can afford a very large home, it just might not be exactly where you'd want it to be.

You're choosing instead to devote more of your income to being close to where you work and/or living in an area with ready access to services you find valuable.

Even where I live, which is very rural with comparatively cheap homes, only gets you a modest sized home. You need at least $500K to even start looking at 3000 sq. feet homes with big garages unless they are complete dives.

I'd be interested to see which calculator and which figures randomdata was using. I have a hard time getting less than $750,000 for a "conservative" figure, assuming your debt isn't absurd and you save up for a $100K down payment (should be very manageable with $200K gross).

And what about local wealth distributions? A $100K income puts you in like the top 0.5% in my community. Someone making that much here is part of a 1% group, just not at the country scale. If houses are cheap in your locality, I expect things to be similar.

I usually make the wild assumption that most people who post here are in San Fran.

A top 1% personal income starts at around $190K per year. A $120K job and a decent investment portfolio and you are there.

If you are still young, my only tip is to start investing too. With any luck, your time will come as well.

""" Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.90

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”91

"""

But this is just a tip of the iceberg. The American groupthink of political correctness, lowest common denominator, and political posturing toward various political/ethnic/religious/sexual orientation groups is rotting this country inside out.

Worse things are yet to come.

/rant over

Be careful when choosing your enemies. You become them.

I'm not entirely sure the author appreciates the likelihood of various strange outcomes using a purely random lottery for admissions, for example "outlier" admissions classes that heavily over-represent one racial/gender group by chance.

Another rather damning point of the article is that university admission officers may be spectactularly unqualified to actually make admissions decisions. But I have been privy to the admissions decision process at the graduate level and bucketing applicants into the "will succeed" and "will not succeed" and "who knows" bucket usually winds up with a rather sizable number in the "who knows" bucket. So maybe the critque on the admission officers should be less worrisome than presented. I think PG has made statements that one of the biggest problems with YC applicants is that there just isn't an easy way to look at many applicants and make any reasonable determination about whether or not they could create successful startups.

Anyway, this is an excellently thought-provoking article and thanks for bringing it here.

Regardless, the bigger story of the alarming anti-meritocratic direction in the US is the poor social mobility in general.

edit: WP says Asians are 5.6% of US population.

So there are lots of qualifications needed for what constitutes this number. If it is a self-selected demographic choice it may include these groups, e.g. many peoples from the Indian subcontinent refer to themselves as "Asian" even though this doesn't align with the American use of the word.

The American right hates higher education for reasons that have nothing to do with meritocracy. Higher education takes young people away from their small often rural and suburban cultural bubbles and exposes them to a larger world. This exposure undermines the parochial teachings of fundamentalism, and tends to corrode prejudices through contact. (E.g. seeing that gay people are not monsters or twisted freaks that only want to get in your pants.) The cosmopolitan influence of universities is deeply hated and resented by social conservatives.

Your comment might make sense in the bubble in which you live, but it's balderdash.

I find the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg examples poorly chosen. Silicon Valley is probably one of the few remaining industries that largely resembles a meritocracy in America. There are countless cases of people succeeding despite lacking a formal/prestigious education or having the right connections.

Success doesn't strike me as something that you just stumble upon. There is always work to be done, but most people just won't do it. I'm not saying most people are lazy, I just think that they decide to work on the wrong things.

Furthermore, if your determination can be deterred by an article, I wouldn't bet for you to be successful to begin with.

There is an intellectual foundation for many parts of conservatism; see Michael Oakeshott in particular as the leading 20th century philosopher of conservatism as a serious intellectual movement.

For the pro-market counter-case, see FA Hayek's Why I Am Not A Conservative; though I think Hayek later contradicted himself in The Origins and Effects of Our Morals.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

It would be if it were true. The satire you're referring to, used the word as a way to criticize how the British government of the period was selecting people into an elite ruling class based on suspect standards of intelligence and aptitude. The word itself was invented as a shorthand to refer to that process and its justifications. It was not a parody of the idea of meritocracy as it is understood today.

From wikipedia; Meritocracy is the implementation of advancement based upon intellectual talent. Often, advancement is determined by demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.

Aside from that, I'm curious, If you believe that meritocracy is indeed evidence of right-wing sociopathic behavior. What would be the Communist/Liberal/Democratic alternative? Surely you're not advocating a kakistocracy (i.e. rule by the worst).

I'm not against meritocracy or ownership. I'm against not capping poverty and I'm against worshipping those who are lucky in life.

Not even mathematicians have a clue what we are talking about (apart from 'abstractions' which relate very little to the world we live in).

String theory is not fact. Currently accepted theories in physics are relativity and quantum mechanics. You know the shit running the computer you typed that insightful comment on and the fibre optics that brought your great wisdom to me.

/sarcasm

There's an inherent exploit/explore tradeoff in "social". Or, more to the point, are you going to document social relationships or improve them (in spite of the fact that there are powerful people who don't want improvements to occur)? There's a lot more money and less risk in the former, but I'm more a fan of the latter, because that's where the great companies come from. Which is why I like Meetup a lot (with its unusual focus on growing the social graph) and feel more tepid about LinkedIn. They're a great company and they've executed well, but their model is still stuck in the old, broken, credential-and-resume way of doing things.

Since my colorful Google history has (against my will) been exposed to public digestion, I'll admit that what started that fracas was a document-vs.-improve debate regarding Google+ that I, unwisely and half-unintentionally, got myself caught in. (I was on the "improve" side.)

What on earth does this have to do with the Ivy League and college admissions? Well, this talk about "disrupting" education through online courses (e.g. edX, Coursera) is really about improving social and knowledge graphs, and that's really exciting. Admissions officers just document; they take notes on who looked impressive at a young age. I see admissions as a less interesting problem with time. If our generation does its job, no one will give a shit about college admissions in 30 years.

I wish I had thoughts that could further this comment, right now they are failing me though

tangentially related thoughts http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2...

I think people are going to be averse to having their minute-by-minute activity mined for any purpose, so I don't see that as a recruiting angle. What I do think is that there's more signal in a person's willingness to learn later in life rather than at age 20 when it's expected. I'm more impressed by the 37-year-old who picked up a machine learning course or textbook on his own and, in a year, picked up a respectable working knowledge of it. Whether he went to college is immaterial, at that point.

but that's not so different from alot of real world activity, showing face time at work, being 5 minutes early for meetings, that sort of thing

those sorts of little things go into your real world reputation, ie do you feel good about recommending someone for a job that's always 5 minutes late? (superficial as that may be)

part of that is why personal recommendations carry the weight they do

if taking classes with minute by minute monitoring were shown to correlated with better chances a monetary reward at the end (x% gets a job, x+y% gets a job with monitoring), that'd change the calculus for alot of people

admittedly, the branding for that is pretty weak