[easymodex]

I will quote one of the nested comments which really hit the mark imo:

"""I think the definition of "ruin your life" is different now than it was in the 80s. Stakes are higher for kids now, and one little mistake can put you on the road to the have-nots instead of the haves.

Back when I was in high school, you could make mistakes and still end up successful. You could get a few B's in your grades, you could decide not to do so many sports and extracurriculars, you could get detention, you could even get in light trouble with the police for horsing around--and still make it into a good University and move on to a good career. I know because I made all of those mistakes. Plus, the consequences for being mediocre were not too severe. B students had community college, C and D students had decent jobs at the mill and the factory or could learn a trade, and so on.

Today, the bar for entry into a comfortable, middle class career is so high, that my kid needs to make zero mistakes. She has to get straight As, she has to stay out of any kind of trouble, she has to have the right polished "profile" for all the various career- and life-gatekeepers she will meet and need to pass. And if she doesn't pass the gatekeepers, where is she going to end up? There is no safety net and no real humane jobs left for lower-performers. Life is so much more bifurcated now, the kids know it, and they stress about not making a mis-step.

In the 80s I was competing with my small town. Now, kids are competing with the entire world."""

This nails it, the bar for "normal" life is really high, coupled with social media where every day you're bombarded with what you can achieve if you try really hard or pay enough money for it - traveling, having fun, luxury, having a perfect body and being envied by other people, etc. Being an overachiever try-hard is cool these days. Weed makes you a bit lazy and when you smoke you're not 100% super productive and you're not living your life to your "fullest potential".

[_yb2s]

I don’t think any of this is true, although enough people expect it to be they exclude themselves. I think all of the anxiety from the perceived (but untrue) high stakes makes a lot of people that would otherwise succeed never bother to try.

In the USA anyone can fail high school and still go to community college for next to nothing in tuition. In many states if they pass with Cs- allowing for infinite retaking of classes- they will be guaranteed a spot in the public university of their choice. Ultimately they can graduate sooner, with less debt then if accepted directly from high school!

Or, they can skip the community college and just go to any university as an extension student, and only actually apply once they have a proven track record of success at that very school, and letters of recommendation from their own faculty.

Basically, you absolutely do get unlimited chances to retry in the USA academic system, even if you don’t take it seriously as a teen.

As a parent, I’m not going to put any of the pressure on my kid that modern parents in the USA do- the things they are afraid of simply aren’t so.

[keiferski]

I don’t know if it is true in an academic sense, but I think it probably is in a more general social sense. The widespread use of video-taking cell phones means there’s an underlying assumption that anything you do could go viral and be seen by millions. This makes doing “socially unacceptable” things seem less appealing, if only on a subconscious level. 20-30 years ago I think it was more acceptable for kids to do dumb time-wasting things, partially because the world was a bigger less-connected place.

[_yb2s]

Yeah, that seems to be the premise of the recent book "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt. I only read the first chapter or so, but seems to be pretty convincingly the case, and really harmful for kids mental health.

Personally, I don't post on social media, and I ask my friends and family not to post content with or about me. However, doing the same would be much harder and more socially isolating for teenagers.

[rachofsunshine]

The interesting thing about this - if we assume for a moment that it is true, which I think it mostly is - is that it implies one of three things should be true.

-----

CASE 1: This gatekeeping is wrong, and is actually excluding a lot of good people and imposing a lot of arbitrary if not outright stupid requirements. In that case, there ought to be a huge market inefficiency. You should be able to build an elite university by finding all the smart people who didn't do a bunch of dumb signaling extracurriculars, or build a great company by hiring all the smart people who don't have great resumes, etc.

CASE 2: This gatekeeping would be wrong in isolation, but the smartest people mostly "play the game", and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we collectively agreed that smart people spend six months when they're 16 hopping on one foot in a purple clown suit, then everyone smart would do that, and it would actually become a good signal of e.g. conscientiousness and class.

CASE 3: This gatekeeping is right even in isolation, and we've gotten to a point where we can, with some reasonable reliability, tell who really won't amount to anything. And if that's the case...is it really a matter of hard work or virtue if we can tell ahead of time what you will or won't succeed at? And if it isn't, is it just to leave you to suffer because you happen not to be gifted in particular ways, whether in intelligence or in motivation or in class signals?

----

I'm not really sure which one of these is true, to be honest. I've got my chips on case 1 at the moment, but I have no idea whether I'm right. And I think it's a decent ethical test to ask yourself what you believe about "meritocracy" in each of those cases. Personally, I think:

- In case 1, we don't really run into a conflict, because the incentives run the right direction. The market is just being irrational right now, and you can make your fortune exploiting that irrationality. That would be great news! The problem in case 1 ought to solve itself, if perhaps only to create new variants of the same problem.

- In case 2, the problem is fundamentally one of class. Like a peacock's tail, we've effectively created a system that demands costly signals of ability, signals that are costly to everyone. If that's the case, we should figure out how to minimize the "peacock factor" as best we can, perhaps via some form of regulation, so that we're not wasting a bunch of resources on things that fundamentally don't matter.

- In case 3, the problem is fundamentally one of (somewhat indelible) inequality. Some people will be ahead, and others behind, and it's not a matter of their decisions, but of their personalities or natures or formative experiences or whatever. And in that case, I'm not sure the idea of competing for a place in the world has any ethical justification, because it effectively means we reward those whose lives will already be inherently better and punish those whose lives will already be worse. Case 3 would undermine the entire case for a competitive social system, really.

[ndriscoll]

Personally, I believe in case 4: the gatekeeping is imagined. Maybe I just haven't perceived the changes and haven't noticed myself losing touch, but I was a B student who graduated from the local state university in the early 10's, and I've done fine. In fact, I've done far better than I could've imagined as a kid. My estimation is it's maybe people who are already in good careers that have created a bubble for themselves where they think their kids' only options are to go to Stanford or live in poverty.

I'm not seeing the issue with case 3 though. Our "competitive" social system isn't about being sporting or "fair" (in some cosmic sense where we consider counterfactual universes to try to distill some idealized metric for intrinsic "goodness" of each person). It's (ideally) about people's actual merit. What can they contribute? What do they contribute? The real world is full of people that have needs, and it makes sense to reward and appreciate people who help meet those needs.

If you had upper-class parents who had plenty of time and resources to raise you to be kind, thoughtful, wise, knowledgeable, strong, and driven, then congratulations! You're actually a great person. We should reward that because we want to see more of it.

[portaouflop]

It’s all luck and randomness - that’s why both of you fail to come up with any rational explanation.

You can be upper class and get all the best resources etc and still be a piece of shit human being that has a net negative impact.

You can be dirt poor and not have any education or even hope - and you can become one of the most influential people on the planet.

[ndriscoll]

Yes, there is an element of randomness. I was addressing the idea that if someone is nominally a great person, then it "doesn't count" as much if they were lucky enough to have good genetics or mentorship or circumstances or whatever, which is nonsense. The only reason to care about circumstances is so that we know what to encourage more of to shift that probability distribution (evidently I don't think "money" is the critical factor here).

[clayhacks]

We should look at statistics, not your anecdotal case. I’m sure there are plenty of people like you who are pretty smart, but perhaps not a genius. Statistically that is an outlier and most people are doing worse than their parents.

Having the qualities you’ve listed does not automatically entitle you or earn you rewards. Frequently there is extra buffer with having generational wealth to help give leg up and extra chances to do better.

[ndriscoll]

What does it mean to say statistically people are doing worse than their parents? By what metrics?

Educational attainment has been increasing for decades so it's hard to believe that it's become significantly more difficult to get in. The school I went to has an 86% acceptance rate, for example. It's also hard to believe that going to a state school is going to doom you. There just aren't enough ivy graduates for that to be practical. The BLS stats also indicate that getting a math/engineering/CS degree is a pretty solid choice and is more likely than not to bring you success (e.g. the median personal income with those degrees is a decent amount higher than the overall median household income. Want to have a single-income household? You can do that while living better than average).

If comparing to one's parents, obviously the bar is different if you come from lower vs. upper-middle classes, which is sort of my point. My B performance put me in a much better position than my parents. I could've done a decent amount worse and still met that bar. The child of an MIT-graduated engineer has a higher bar to meet, but that's not actually necessary to do okay in life.

I didn't imply that having these qualities will automatically reward you. I was addressing the idea that if we can tell ahead of time who will "amount to something", those people are somehow less deserving of their success, which is ridiculous. My teachers identified that I was likely to be successful starting in kindergarten, but I've still had to spend the rest of my life consistently showing up and doing the work. I'm sure I also could be more aggressive about chasing career success, but I'm happy not to. If others want to do that, good for them. Maybe they had engineer tiger parents that taught them not to be such slackers, and now they can be rewarded for that. If they're happy then that's great.

[watwut]

> This gatekeeping is wrong, and is actually excluding a lot of good people and imposing a lot of arbitrary if not outright stupid requirements. In that case, there ought to be a huge market inefficiency. You should be able to build an elite university by finding all the smart people who didn't do a bunch of dumb signaling extracurriculars

The University you went to matter and the smart people know that. It would be dumb of them to go to your no-name, untested university. Smart people will do what is good for them and practically, doing those dumb signaling extracurriculars is better for their future then skip on them and bet on your new establishment.

[bradlys]

The issue with this is assuming all “smart people” value social status elements.

A lot of us “smart people” when we’re younger rebel against social status qualifiers and so on due to ideals and hopes that we can change the system. It’s only with vast experience that you realize that the system is so hopelessly fucked and you’ll never make a dent in anything. You can have incredible ambition and then watch it get drowned by a shit world.

I’m pretty sure everyone’s hopes for universal healthcare in the US died along with Bernie’s run for presidency. We haven’t talked about healthcare in politics for about eight years now. That should give you an idea of how optimistic people were and then saw the system completely fuck them over and realized there was never going to be a hope for change.

It’s also why most people are apathetic about most every societal issue right now. We all hoped we could change things but now we realize the capitalists own it all and we’ll never be able to do anything.

[watwut]

Being able to pay better healthcare, food and housing is not merely social status element. Having a choice in terms of which employer you will have is not merely social status element. The fact is, if you have a choice between no-name new university and elite school, you will have more control and agency over your own life if you pick the elite school.

Rebels are found on the whole spectrum of "smart" however you define smart and we are talking about statistics here.

[bradlys]

Strawman.

There is no reason to believe someone who is rebelling will do all the socially accepted status seeking norms to get into an elite college. They will not seek an elite college to begin with because they do not believe in the status of it.

[watwut]

> They will not seek an elite college to begin with because they do not believe in the status of it.

My claim is that smart will believe in advantages it gives them, because well it gives them better position in life.

Rebels can be both smart and dumb. But neither group has any reason to go to no-name university that was just created.