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Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

>The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence.

You might be conflating class signaling with intelligence. I've dealt with plenty of people from Harvard that did not impress in the slightest, but oh boy were they good at getting their suits tailored.

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I second this notion. I was actually super well-qualified for Harvard, because I happened to go to a feeder prep school and I took calculus, Latin, and Greek. But I had some class gaps if you will, and sometimes kids with worse grades and qualifications made me feel stupid.

One snobby rule there that some kids had was to always pretend like you know more than you do, and never show weakness. So you have to say "Whaaaat? You've never heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?" -- even though you only learned about it last week. You psych out the competition so that you don't have to compete on a level playing field.

I’m not conflating class signaling with intelligence. It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said. My point was that college involves the exchange of ideas, and each student’s intelligence is a combination of their baseline intellect combined with the ideas they’re exposed to. Most of this idea exposure comes from other students. If the students you are surrounded with have good ideas, then the quality of your own ideas improves.

>It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said.

Yeah, probably says I know something about normal distributions work.

the few ivy league graduates i've worked with were idiots with no original thought who constantly needed handholding. they were good at parroting other people's opinions & ideas and at schmoozing with the boss so maybe those are the good ideas that students at their school had.

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