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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college

This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an actual difference in the quality of the experience or the person that results from it.

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No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.

Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.

In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.

Wow, I didn't realize I was advocating for excess deaths. Thanks for clarifying that for the folks at home.

Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.

It's a trade-off. I'd rather live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime. Even authoritarians are correct at least twice a day.

> live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime.

that's a straw man false dichotomy. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because trump and his administration handled it poorly, doesn't mean it can't be handled well under a democracy. Look at new zealand and australia - they handled it fairly well.

I think it's an appropriate reply to someone specifically holding up China's COVID response as an example of the right answer.

Both democracies and authoritarian regimes can be found among governments that have had laissez-faire policies and both can be found among those that have had strict lockdowns. You can probably find the world's full range of policy responses to COVID-19 within the United States.

Well, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc relaxed on the vaccination distribution and got hammered.

Also, authoritarians sometimes get the actions right even if they don't understand the science or the math.

And do you remember the great "fogging disinfectant trucks" in China. Completely ineffective show that may have fooled the masses but would have failed to destroy any viral agents.

We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit.

Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?

What does this have to do with the parent comment?

This argument is trying to show that elite colleges are more than

> artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand.

In that they produce good research results.

Chinese leaders were the ones that let COVID leak out of the lab and censored the doctors that tried to warn the population.

Could you share some sources for that assertion?

The second half is well sourced.

Maybe it's just that my search skills are subpar, but I can't seem to find any relevant works on Google Scholar. Would you mind taking the time to share some of these sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...

Why would you search Google Scholar for the claim "Chinese authorities censored doctors trying to warn the population [about COVID]"?

In general, it's not a good look to go around asking for sources for facts that are very well known.

Thanks for the link, I actually haven't seen that. Here's an interesting preprint tackling this issue as well: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/rw4es

I'm also curious as to why you thought that this was "very well known," however. Could you elaborate on how you determine which set of facts can be selected to be well known, and which set cannot?

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> I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees.

That has been true for a long time. And before then, the primary function of those institutions was training ministers.

Joking aside, there's lots of evidence (assembled in a book like The Cult of Smart [1]) that the effects of education are saturated in developed countries. In other words, you won't get an appreciably better education at a prestigious school than you will at an unprestigious school. The biggest educational difference arises from the composition of the student body, not the actual instruction.

So many young people are working themselves raw in high school and college to be prestigious when it doesn't have much of an effect on outcomes. Couple that with an antiquated curriculum and the modern college experience is so much wheel spinning.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389/thecultofsmart

The VP of Global Operations where I work who has his undergrad in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard and MBA from Dartmouth will tell you, all those schools bought him over a public institutions was a network for after he graduated.

The scarcity isn't artificial, I don't think. There are limits on how many people a given faculty can teach, beyond which teaching becomes much less effective. People with reject letters are probably not significantly less deserving, but there's no fair non-competitive means to decide who gets a go, IMO. The competition could certainly be fairer, as with most things.

If your main point is that less prestigious schools can potentially deliver on education just as well, and the main difference becomes the marketability of the degree and superficial status, well... I agree.

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