Comment by kemiller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemiller | Hacker News Reader

The whole affair is reminding me of how Ivy League colleges (and Oxbridge) work. They used to be places where the privileged, moneyed elite could educate themselves in relative privacy, save for a few exceptional commoners allowed in on scholarship.

Nowadays, the proportion of talented commoners to moneyed elite is considerably greater than it was even 100 years ago, but the basic principle remains: foster connections among the elites, and give them first crack at any emerging talent. This way anyone with a potentially destabilizing talent becomes attached to the existing power structure at an impressionable age. Better to invite them in and dilute the pool a bit than risk them draining it later.

Any commoners who don't work out, they will drop without hesitation.

I'm not saying this is evil. If you were among the elite, you'd probably do the same thing. And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works. From their point of view, I'm quite sure they see this as noblesse oblige: they're just reaching out, "giving back" and trying to help useful and interesting people succeed. But it nevertheless has embedded in it the idea that the most important part of success is meeting people who already have power.

And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.

New blood from the commoners actually helps sustain the system in two ways.

(1) They usually don't dilute anything, but rather add talent and ambition. Remember -- they got their scholarship by being smart and hungry. If they adopt the norms of their new class and make a pile of bucks, why not let them marry your daughter and go to Nantucket with you.

(2) They add plausible deniability to the class structure -- we can say "look, this kid from a middle class family in West Virgina made it, there's no such thing as class structure." (Or "Clarence Thomas made it -- don't tell me about systemic racism".)

I'm the son of an immigrant, went to Harvard and have no idea what you're talking about concerning the Ivy League. Would you (or anyone who upvoted) care to explain?

Yes, the collective behavior of very complex game theoretic systems, where individuals act to maximize their own benefit, can sometimes seem to be controlled by a central decision structure, even where none exists.

Or-- people have a bias towards seeing massive, planned conspiracies.

> And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works.

His point is that the system of individuals acting to maximize their own benefit, because of the way that "benefit" is defined, favors entrenched players, even if it wasn't supposed to - no conspiracy necessary.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy - such a system could arise simply through evolution and survivorship bias. Imagine you have two power structures. One of them has a rigidly entrenched core group, with no possibility for advancement. The other of them identifies people who might be threats, and then offers them the possibility of advancement within the system.

Over time, such revolutionaries will arise in both systems. In the first system, they eventually gain a critical mass of disaffected youth, and overthrow the government. That paves the way for another system, and eventually, someone will try something like system #2, and that won't be overthrown by restless revolutionaries.

History actually looks remarkably like this, with plenty of absolute monarchies being violently overthrown by smart & charismatic revolutionaries, until a system arose where those smart and charismatic people can achieve personal advancement without overthrowing the system.

I, for one, believe in conspiracies...

... but I also believe in class conflict, which I see as different things. Our economic system is predicated on the existence of both a working class and an owning class -- it's no fun to be a general if you don't have a bunch a bunch of enlisted to boss around. And in the US, the myth is that the enlisted commoners deserve their lot from lack of smarts and ambition.

The owning class, and their educated lackeys like me, intuit that if we don't keep this division going, we lose our positions in the upper half of the pyramid, and adjust our day-to-day behavior accordingly without ever explicitly working it out in our minds. Also, we just plain feel more comfortable around people who share experience and cultural background.

These dynamics, plus a HUGE difference in access to educational know-how, are enough to sustain class divisions even while making it plausibly deniable that any systematic class oppression exists.

Also, there is a rhetorical technique called the "straw man" which the commenter is using: subtly re-characterize your opponents argument as something easily attacked, and then attack it. The commenter explicitly said there was no grand explicit conspiracy, but you attack him as if he did.

(One of the things I like about HN is that when issues like this come up there are smart people here on both sides -- libertarians and Marxists, united by a love of hacking!)

I have a little trouble conceiving of a completely classless society - at some point you have to acknowledge that, for example, some programmers are better than others, and that that's a positive thing. That acknowledgement alone creates a class. The important thing is upward mobility - we shouldn't define "better" as "knows the other people who are 'better'".

This cannot be argued. But many people conflate worth of skills and accomplishments with worth as a person. They over reduce the dimensionality of a superiority vector. And worse, assume transitivity of the elements composing said vector.

Often (though not always) the reason for differences in talent are directly traceable to personal background, and by allocating different resources to folks growing up is how we sustain our class system. Bourdieu.

It is funny that you mention "game theory, maximize, benefit and central decision structure". Because I can draw a rough analogy from game theory and argue why a central decision structure likely exists at least implicitly.

What we have here in life is a positive sum game and if everyone is trying their best to play an optimal strategy then it is likely that they are at least at a correlated equilibrium. This in turn implies some central shared decision structure. I posit that in modern society this shared device is the status-quo, the media, status worship, fame chasing and celebrities. This correlating device evolves or rather is naturally selected by the top of a society wishing to keep it so. Things did not get this way by accident and our values are certainly not all set in stone or irrefutably valuable.

So long as everyone follows the signals given as optimal by this correlating device/trusted mediator we achieve correlated equilibrium. If anyone deviates then all bets are off. This then highlights why it is so key that the elite behave and indoctrinate as they do. And gibes well with what nostrademons had to say. If people are not acting in a way that "sensible" people should act to get and then stay ahead then we fall out of the comfy equilibrium and the stability of the status-quo is lost.

I don't think he means to focus so much on the historical anecdote about Ivy Leagues. His point is that the existing power structure (whether it's business, gov't, or education) is based on networking, not merit, and that by inviting some people who have merit to network, it only creates the illusion of meritocracy, because success is still founded on networking - which benefits the existing aristocracy, even if the intention was to move toward meritocracy.

Also son of an immigrant, went to Amherst, and upvoted the grandparent post.

The type of entrenched power base that I believe he's talking about works at a cultural level, which means it's mostly subconscious. I found the "elites" that I went to school with generally weren't overtly snobby - there were one or two douchebags, but in general they were looked down upon by the rest of the student body, and for the most part people could forget about who had money and who didn't.

But I came out of Amherst a different person than when I went in, and I've noticed that I think differently than HN or Reddit posters who didn't go to college or went to a state school. And I think that a lot of that is because I picked up the cultural values of going to an elite college, and now have a lot more skin in the game of preserving the existing system.

Assuming that you are like most HN contributors and want to become successful one day, how would you go about it? What does success mean to you? A good, high-paying job at a company that gives you a lot of freedom to work in what you want? A company that gets lots of users and nets you a few tens of millions when you sell it? A tenured professorship at a major research university?

Now step outside of your cultural values and consider all the other things that people might consider successful. A world where everybody's equal and nobody needs to worry about the basic necessities of life. Glory on the battlefield and domination over one's enemies. Physical strength and goods well built.

Why is it that we value money and knowledge, but not valor or compassion? Why did Athens win over Sparta, when historically Sparta won?

One of the neat things about studying sociology and anthropology is learning how to frame observed behavior from different viewpoints. People usually don't become powerful by winning on the battlefield; they become powerful by shifting the battlefield onto areas where they're naturally strong. So naturally, people who are wealthy and smart want to shift society's value system to reward money and knowledge. If another group was in power - say, the 8th grade bullies who used to beat me up - they would probably want a society that rewarded brawn and ruthlessness.

The university system is a way to effect that shift. It works by identifying youngsters who might otherwise challenge the status quo, and then giving them the means and the opportunity to succeed within the status quo. Once they get out of it, they have little incentive to tear down the system, because the system works for them. Why risk destroying a good thing?

Other things you learn at an elite university:

1. How to greet, stand, dress, and speak in a way that reassures social elites that you are like them and can be trusted.

2. How to mingle with elites without being intimidated.

3. How elites' system of friendship and obligation works -- how to ask for favors, grant favors, and make friends and connections with the elite.

4. What elites value, i.e., how to make yourself useful to them so you can enter into reciprocal relationships with them.

5. How particular systems work that are dominated by the elite. For example, if you go to Harvard, you'll probably pick up a little bit about how the financial industry works, just because that knowledge is in the air there and is of interest to many Harvard students. If you go to Pretty Good State U, you'll get a lot less second-hand knowledge of the financial system and fewer classmates who have a serious or even casual interest in it. I had a girlfriend whose parents were social workers, so I learned a little about that just from listening to her talk. If her parents had been investment bankers or diplomats, I would have learned about that instead. (As it happens, any of those would have been irrelevant to my own interests, so no harm done.)

You won't just get those skills; you'll also get a head start on using them. You'll have the opportunity to meet people with valuable connections and people who will become extremely valuable connections in the future. It might be kind of minor league; you might just call someone up and say, "Hey, I'm looking for an internship in finance, but I don't know where or how to apply. Do you think your dad can tell me what kinds of places to apply to and what they like to hear from applicants?" That isn't exactly Instant Entry Into The Corridors of Power but if your classmate's dad is an executive at Citibank you'll get slightly better advice than you'd get from the career guidance counselor at Pretty Good State U.

> And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.

that was one of the things that struck me most forcibly about the article. i would have predicted (a touch optimistically, perhaps) that the "b-listers" would just find other interesting people to meet and socialise with during those few days - heck, ted is packed with them! perhaps i'm just spoilt by exposure to mainly hacker conferences (and unconferences), and science fiction conventions, in both of which celebrities are welcomed, but not especially lionised.

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