It wasn’t the case for him but I’d like people to also note that in Korea, one of the strategy for getting into good universities is to actually drop out of high school and grind for the national exam by going to cram schools (hagwon)
People do this because there are certain admission categories where the university only looks at the test results. So they go “okay, by not going to school, my child can fully focus on exam instead of wasting time on useless subjects like art and PE. And school math curriculum is too easy anyway”
This really saddens me because schools should be more than gateways to universities, but I digress.
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile.
Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc.
Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.
Look I’m a first generation American with a sister 3 years younger. We grew up in poverty in the 2008 aftermath. Like food stamps and stretching leftovers by mixing them with pasta broke
I navigated the system alone for myself then again to help her after I had learned from all my college friends. We both went to “prestigious private schools” with single digit acceptance rates and have similarly “prestigious” jobs
Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
Not really convincing. How many poor kids did not even come to an understanding of how the admission system works? How many kids did not even know what work was to be put in?
I am also someone born at the bottom (my first passport was a convention of 1951 passport), who went to a world famous university. As I've gotten older, I've realized it's not really a useful way to think about it. We like to say "you can do it if you really try", but it's just not true. Not only is it not true, it's a thought-ending statement that makes it easier for rich kids and harder for poor kids, because why would you need to support the poor kids if they can just work really hard?
Even you have to be able to see that you got lucky. When I applied, the entrance rate for my course was about 8%. I had no idea that I could have tried easier courses, or that I could have filled the form in slightly differently for a better shot. A single-digit acceptance rate is a lottery. You could do everything the same again and not get in. You don't realize it when you get in, because you happen to get questions that you can answer, but there's a heck of a lot of questions an Oxford professor can ask an 18 year old that will make him look bad.
When I arrived, of course all the other kids were ordinary upper middle class kids. People went to feeder schools where they teach you how to do the Oxbridge interview. People who didn't grow up pinching every penny. What happened to the poor, hard-working kids? They're mostly not there.
What about stepping back a bit and realizing that proper life success has almost nothing to do with school you go to? I am not saying not going to school per se, but this hard focus on career as soon as possible... where is focus on quality of life for example?
Optimizing hard for some rat race for some soulless (or soul crushing) office jobs among high functioning sociopaths that management inevitably always is. Most of those folks are not properly happy by any measure, thats not a win in life to end up there nor something to respect.
We are in rather unique period of time, especially folks here, that life fulfillment and happiness can be achieved for almost everybody and not just some top 0.1% if correct direction is taken. How about we realized that and focused more on actually long term important aspects of life?
(here is another guy who went the proverbial rags-to-modest-riches on my own but I would never had such mindset, when talking about successes of my life its about countries I've travelled, people I've met and intense experiences that shaped me more than career paths taken)
Yes, absolutely. The one thing I have quipped about with my kid's school is this: Everyone is scared to death of their kid not being able to get the job that they are hating.
I live in a bit of a bubble where pretty much every kid's parents are professionals. Some of these people are off to London before the kids are in school, and arrive back home after they are asleep.
People spend a lot of money on top of private school to get a tutor in order to get into the grammar schools. This is a pure loss for society: the wrong kids get in, since not everyone can afford to learn this particular test. And money is spent on reducing the kids' free time for exploration.
> Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
How many others have tried to put the work you did and didn't achieve it?
I think that's the crux of it, being possible doesn't mean anything if it shuts out the majority of the ones who attempt it. It's possible to become a professional athlete and still a lot more kids fail to achieve that even if they put the work for it. Contrary to being a professional athlete, good education is both much more accessible and much more needed.
Exactly because you managed to achieve it that I believe there should be more empathy for how fucked up the system is, imagine how much less suffering you would have gone through if there was a better way? Why not work for it to be a better way even though it's already possible?
It's not impossible to be the fastest Olympic swimmer in the world, and it's a LOT easier with money. But, just like your story, you can't guarantee it will happen by "understanding the expectations and putting in the work to meet them".
As orphans (?) did you get scholarships to the private school? I'm curious if you couldn't afford to eat, how the school worked out? Did the jobs come through school connections?
University admissions are generally aware such things exist, though. And if they're actually evaluating on chance of success at university, will take that kind of thing into account. (I.e. a kid from a poor background and a bad school who manages to get good grades will be given priority over a rich kid who went to a good school and got perfect grades. Often the limiting factor for the former in terms of admission to a top university is that they're not ever told that it's a realistic option for them and so they don't even apply).
The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Fundamentally, the university is going to analyze all its applicants, more-or-less rank them according to its standards, and then take the top X applicants according to its metrics. Since you can't half-accept someone, there isn't a way to do anything else.
And once you have that measure, you are now subject to Goodhart's law [1]. There is no escape.
So, your university gives points for applicants who have extracurricular activities? Here comes someone that joined 15 clubs. Oh, do you want them to be leaders in their activity? Here comes someone who is the president of six clubs, and founded two more. Oh, do you want them academically accomplished instead? Here comes someone who in high school published six scientific papers (please don't look too hard at which journals they were in). No, wait, we don't like what that's encouraging, let's just look at standardized test scores... and here come the perfect scores.
Applicants will make themselves one dimensional. They'll tune to whatever dimension you're measuring on, no matter what you try to do to the basis vector of that dimension. And they'll beat out anyone who is just being normal, or even more cynically, just being honest about their actual activities.
One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking.
The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once.
> The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional.
Ultimately all things are reducible to a function applied to the state of the world. The entire point is that by introducing additional dimensions to the metrics of 'acceptable for admission' the 'representation of the student' ("state of the world") is made out of a higher dimensional variable.
Now, you can game the "one dimensional" student representation or the n-dimensional version. For each of the possible (predictable, finite set) attacks on the function there can be remedies. where there are cases where we can not have effective remedies, that fact itself appears to be independent of the number of dimensions.
Ultimately, it seems hard to argue against a higher dimensional metric given that it is more information rich. And, I venture to guess young teens would also welcome the mere possibility of 'choices' in electing areas to excel.
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
They really, really do. Admission to top universities has become hyper competitive. They're getting tens of thousands of highly qualified applicants with perfect GPAs and great SAT scores. So what they're looking at is more, "Will admission to this university help them to do something special?" or is admission the end goal for the student. And one way to see that is if the applicant is well-rounded and explorative. Are they setting creative fires everywhere they go?
Massive corruption and discrimination (like discrimination against asian students in US universities) would take place if you introduce more dimensions (most of them are subjective and can be gamed)
Are all the applicants who find school unfulfilling so skip it to go straight to university 1 dimensional? For example, some might be more mature than their peers and are going to flower at university.
Disagree. Peter Thiel wrote about this in zero to one. The "well rounded" candidate is essentially hedging their bets. An indefinite optimist.
> You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the
future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if
you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process
trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a
portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to
start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to
appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a
bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s
ready—for nothing in particular.
> A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity
and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does
it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something
substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone
around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just
one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.
I can understand his distaste for the indefinite, but does he actually make a strong case for the opposite?
To me this reads as claiming "making fragile choices is good", which outside of very niche situations I'd say is bad advice: like telling a college basketball player to not waste time outside of practice and later watching him go undrafted in the pros.
You also have to look at who is giving the advice. For him it is great if more people take huge risks and burn their youth on moon shot start-ups since, as a VC, he makes all his money off of those people. A world where everybody is a well rounded liberal arts graduate, working a steady job, with comfortable middle class lifestyle and great work life balance would be terrible for him. If you ruin your life following this advice it has zero impact on his life.
He's giving this advice to make his life better, not necessarily to make your life better.
You should read his book. Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter "you are not a lottery ticket"
> THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about
successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and
arbitrary advantages.” Warren Buffett famously considers himself a “member of the lucky sperm
club” and a winner of the “ovarian lottery.” Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon’s success to an “incredible
planetary alignment” and jokes that it was “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains.” Bill Gates
even goes so far as to claim that he “was lucky to be born with certain skills,” though it’s not clear
whether that’s actually possible.
> Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial
entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of
chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve
Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success
were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist.
> In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers:
“Success is never accidental.”
>Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in The Atlantic, reporter
Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply: “ ‘Success is never accidental,’ said all
multimillionaire white men.” It’s true that already successful people have an easier time doing new
things, whether due to their networks, wealth, or experience. But perhaps we’ve become too quick to
dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan.
> Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not
experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we’d have to rewind to 2004,
create 1,000 copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would
succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every
company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
> From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be
mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus
on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men
believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he
became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who
has everything in order—luck, people call it.” No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior
generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.
> If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is
worthless if you’re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for
Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit’s foot to rub or how to tell which machines are
“hot,” but it can’t tell you how to win.
> Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon,
or did she “lean in”? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far
more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design?
Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters.
I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.
This is a straw-man argument. There's value in a well-rounded liberal arts education beyond job preparation. I say this as a math major with a molecular biology PhD. I took multiple classes in history, economics, etc. It allows one to develop healthy critical thinking skills; and also not underestimate the complexity of social issues facing us - in other words, it fortifies you against the likes of Thiel, who has no problem buying politicians with $$ and pushing for his extreme and frankly dangerous political agenda. Conservatives used to understand and value a classical Western education with room for the great works. Authoritarians don't like thinking citizens, however.
The story includes some skipping class yet
getting a Fields Medal.
At least here in the US:
In academics, a grade of A is better than
the rest yet still some independent or
from outside school results can mean more
than grades and even make poor grades
irrelevant.
Some examples:
E.g., for getting into a selective
college, SAT Math scores (from outside of
school) the highest in my high school
class made everything else irrelevant.
E.g., overlooked my F in Typing!
Actually, the Typing class was very
worthwhile and learned touch typing, but
the class was nearly all girls, GORGEOUS,
who buzzed away with perfect accuracy at
maybe 30 characters a second!
E.g., in graduate school, found a problem
and in two weeks got a solution accepted
right away by Mathematical Programming.
Suddenly had an impenetrable shield and
all grades and everything else were
irrelevant.
E.g., before grad school thought of a
problem and had a first solution; in grad school wrote a
first draft; wrote and ran the related
software; and wrote the document, all
independently. Stood for orals and
graduated.
Again, course grades are not everything,
and good independent work can make
everything else irrelevant.
Not really possible when success in South Korea is literally like the Squid Games and entrance exams are extremely difficult compared to what Westerners may be accustomed to. I agree the signal provided by this is low-dimensional, but it’s an objective way to measure applicants.
People do this because there are certain admission categories where the university only looks at the test results. So they go “okay, by not going to school, my child can fully focus on exam instead of wasting time on useless subjects like art and PE. And school math curriculum is too easy anyway”
This really saddens me because schools should be more than gateways to universities, but I digress.