Summary
- You can’t tell people that there’s a secret way into college or other good places (do good, creative work), otherwise you create noise and fakery as people attempt to do it
- The American educational system seems to allocate talented students’ labor into what they’re actually passionate about rather than grinding for the college entrance exam or postgraduate degrees
- This increases variance compared to standardized testing so people who deserve acceptance are not admitted and people who don’t deserve it are
- This is probably better for the country as a whole because wealth comes from labor and innovation
- Lack of company loyalty implies less training, meaning diligence and doing a good job are disincentivized compared to skill. This causes talented people to chase skill. Lower level workers are not rewarded as much for loyalty and they wouldn’t be able to achieve high skill, so they don’t see the point of maintaining things, explaining why the basic levels of the country seem to be falling apart.
- Tradeoffs between group cohesion and creativity; banter versus seriousness and building
Definition and background
Everyone is running forward, but the relative positions between people don’t change. Ever more work is used just to ‘keep up.’ This is the “Red Queen’s Race” (RQR).
We primarily see this in education. College entrance exams are notorious for this. Advanced but often ultimately irrelevant material, one test, cram schools, and only one way to do things. It doesn’t get easier after undergrad in some countries: more education is needed for basic consideration of entry-level jobs.
The US is a bit different because it seems that skill can be decoupled from college entrance exams and be rewarded. The multifaceted college application system, various programs throughout society such as academic summer programs, programs for innovators, grants, and cultural attitude all play a role in this.
Credential inflation and the alternate path
People still attempt to inflate things: honor societies, meaningless extracurriculars, fake clubs, and so on, but they don’t tend to be viewed highly. By doing that, they’ve fallen for the non-productive activities that the culture at the higher levels disincentivizes.
Parents are stuffing their kids with sports, acting, music, and so on. The Red Queen’s Race is still here, and it is one path but possibly not the only one. Schools naturally accept the “best” or “wealthiest” kids in the RQR path, but perhaps they pay careful attention to a “True Ramanujan.” But there was a kid that made a nuclear reactor denied from MIT, so I don’t know if my theory is wholly correct, and I do hear the upper level schools are a lot more conformist these days.
Sure, a system like this leads to more false positives and variance (Type I, someone accepted to college without deserving it) and false negatives (Type II, not accepted to college but deserves it), but it does better at avoiding the Red Queen’s Race overall and rewards students with creative approaches.
Wealth depends on labor, hence the Red Queen’s Race funnels a bunch of labor into something that won’t be relevant. A system that draws out creative labor is better for the society as a whole, even if there are outrageous stories of false positives and negatives.
A friend commented that at top high schools, people know one way to get admitted to a good college is to do something really cool and creative. The issue is that nobody knows how to do something like that which doesn’t end up being another sham nonprofit so it becomes easier to grind for accomplishments such as Olympiads. And another issue is that these shams actually work, but they’re also difficult because you need media coverage. See this handbook from Thomas Jefferson High School students for more insight.
Of course, a gatekeeping system is necessary, but not always correct. Even someone’s life is too early to tell. The significance of some works will only be known centuries after.
And if you tell everyone that the purpose of the education system is to avoid the Red Queen’s Race, then you’ve created another Red Queen’s Race. In essence, to avoid this trap, it selects for perceptiveness, luck, or innate characteristics.
Well, you have to start somewhere, and 4 years in high school where students basically do nothing (unless the parents are extracurricular stuffing) is as good as any time to judge the fruits of their labor.
This is a top-down explanation of the mechanisms of what I see. Is a system like this designed or natural? Do people know what they are doing? And it is only a consideration of the tradeoffs and benefits of the American system and why creativity and innovation occurs here. Other systems may exist for a reason and come with its own context.
A cross-cultural examination
I feel like only going by standardized testing results can be dangerous because of diminishing returns to push yourself to get that extra 1%. There are people who will sacrifice their health and study in the bathroom just to make it. A big discongruity is when parents from certain countries (India and China come to mind) push students in the American system to get “perfect” grades without understanding the system here.
Since the goal of college is to create an association between a single person and a team within a business, research lab, etc. that provides a source of meaning and income, we have to look at businesses in context. American companies are less loyal and want to train their workers less. They want people to already have skills. Graduating a 4.0 with no skills is not as good compared to internships with less than perfect GPAs, but this is a guess from my part rather than possible reality, since graduate jobs often ask for transcripts.
Posting online/social media is quickly becoming the “proof of work” needed to work at a place. Anyone can change words around on a resume.
In countries such as South Korea, it’s my understanding that the people with the best potential tend to be the ones with the best grades. It must imply that companies and workers have greater loyalty. I wonder if people from countries like this know there is a guaranteed job if they meet certain requirements, incentivizing them to keep studying.
I think kids who know how to learn well realize at some point in college that there’s a lot of BS. For me I kind of understood this around age 21 or 22. I think you have to be able to have enough experience to see different types of expertise in people.
Elon Musk realized this when he had a deal idea and the bank he was interning at didn’t want to do it. Earlier, I had imagined getting an MBA would be useful or some other graduate degree, but now there’s no way I want to subject myself to any more school.
In FT comments, autobiographies such as one by Sam Zell, and other personal accounts of MBAs, the water there is bitter and vile.
In America, someone who is really good at (building apps/working on cars/designing rockets) may not necessarily have perfect grades, but they probably have more skill than anyone from other countries just due to working on thing since high school, putting them at the forefront of their field, which would explain why America has so many leading edge companies. By focusing away from grades due to the (supposedly secret in my theory) college admissions process and lack of company loyalty, labor is directed toward acquisition of useful skills.
What of the left-behinds?
Decreased company loyalty doesn’t seem beneficial or help the lower levels. It doesn’t necessarily imply an “upskill or die” mentality because the equivalent in a country that focuses on GPA for jobs would be “get good grades or die,” so it’s not that the American system magically makes people who aren’t good become good. It’s just that the labor of the most talented is better allocated. Other key awareness: in many parts of life, lack of loyalty increases commodification and separation by “levels”.
The Third Wave, a high school social science experiment, has this to say on different parts of society:
By the end of the third day I was exhausted. I was tearing apart. The balance between role playing and directed behavior became indistinguishable. Many of the students were completely into being Third Wave Members. They demanded strict obedience of the rules from other students and bullied those that took the experiment lightly. Others simply sunk into the activity and took self assigned roles. I particularly remember Robert. Robert was big for his age and displayed very few academic skills.
Oh he tried harder than anyone I know to be successful. He handed in elaborate weekly reports copied word for word from the reference books in the library. Robert is like so many kids in school that don’t excel or cause trouble. They aren’t bright, they can’t make the athletic teams, and don’t strike out for attention. They are lost. invisible. The only reason I came to know Robert at all is that I found him eating lunch in my classroom. He always ate lunch alone.
Well, the Third Wave gave Robert a place in school. At least he was equal to everyone. He could do something. Take part. Be meaningful. That’s just what Robert did. Late Wednesday afternoon I found Robert following me and asked what in the world was he doing. He smiled (I don’t think I had ever seen him smile) and announced, “Mr. Jones I’m your bodyguard. I’m afraid something will happen to you.
The trial was over. The Third Wave had ended. I glanced over my shoulder. Robert was crying. Students slowly rose from their Chairs and without words filed into the outdoor light. I walked over to Robert and threw my arms around him. Robert was sobbing. Taking in large uncontrollable gulps of air. “It’s over.” it’s all right.” In our consoling each other we became a rock in the stream of exiting students. Some swirled back to momentarily hold Robert and me.
Three women in the class had told their parents all about our classroom activities. These three young women were by far the most intelligent students in the class. As friends they chummed together. They possessed a silent confidence and took pleasure in a school setting that gave them academic and leadership opportunity. During the days of the experiment I was curious how they would respond to the equalitarian and physical reshaping of the class. The rewards they were accustomed to winning just didn’t exist in the experiment. The intellectual skills of questioning and reasoning were non existent. In the martial atmosphere of the class they seemed stunned and pensive. Now that I look back, they appeared much like the child with so called learning disability.
Poor company loyalty might also explain why things in the USA are falling apart at a lower level. Without loyalty, community, a sense of family, support, and so on, regular people are not incentivized to do their best. Instead you have higher level managers who do not view the people below them as worthy of respect, consideration, an equal share of the rewards, and so on. Perhaps it’s possible to fix company loyalty to get things in the US working again. Another idea is having more independent businesses, making people work in their self-interest.
On a meta level, I think that there is a tradeoff between group cohesion and creativity. The more people follow orders and do things, the better the group acts, explaining why some countries are nice to visit and live in. The more individualistic people are and have their own thoughts and do what they want, the less group cohesion there is. The thing is, a well-coordinated group destroys talented individuals just out of sheer size unless these talented individuals can pilot their own groups. This relates to another thought I had which is that the level of competition in the world is not just individual humans but human societies.
I find that many people tend to be oversocialized and dependent from experience, which means that they crumble under any sort of social pressure, but rather than looking at this such as a bad thing, it means creative people have great opportunities for people who are willing to help and need a leader (rather than feeling like they are being oppressed). On the other hand, if I were working at a large company for a long time, I might feel oppressed. I felt sprinklings of that during internships. Or is it that all people are independent and creative naturally, just that society, the workforce, and school beat it out of them, causing them to lead lives of quiet desperation?
Against Mimetics
This following passage might overestimate my own expertise. But it is honest in how I feel, so it must say something about my perception and taste.
There also seems to be a trend at high-level schools for students to purposely seek the idea of dropping out and start some (what appears to me) meaningless startup. They might do great work in the future, so I’m not dismissing them now just because of that, but it is interesting how a fish cannot see itself in water. They might say they lived in XYZ countries, solo traveled, made businesses, etc. but you don’t see them writing about the natural problems that brings and the conclusions from that. I think the hard part about doing actually good work is a lot of people just sort of… bump into it?
I also find that whenever someone starts to spend a large amount of time around a certain group or their reading and focus narrows, they tend to repeat certain phrases that tend to out them when they say it. And because I’ve read most things on the internet, I’m able to evaluate what many people have to say against what I’ve read and find little new information. I know exactly what they’re referencing and how they see the world so far based on what they’ve done and read.
Being intellectual and being intelligent are completely different: intelligence can be demonstrated in any field, and you can see it from a mix of creativity, problem-solving skills, and good communication. A lot of people in “intellectual” fields that are well-educated don’t actually have unique insights: they just repeat things.
Suboptimal college
Something that bothered me at Georgia Tech is that the interests of many people and mine didn’t align. It seemed like most people were regular people who enjoy watching some movies, playing video games, watching sports, being friendly, and so on. It wasn’t the right fit for my personality and the level of intensity was too low, perhaps. I’m not sure I’d enjoy being in SF or Boston either. Just because people talk about “ideas” doesn’t necessarily make them innovative. Ideas just become their new pasttime. (see paragraph above) Q: Why is my level of intensity and need for originality like this? Why do I have these innate feelings?
(April, 2024): My roommate has some people over and they just like to joke about small things such as X person in friend group is such and such and play verbal games. I can sense that they have a lot of fun but it seems to be the majority of their conversation and even though they are capable of building they seem to enjoy banter more. I wouldn’t be surprised if the personal inclination between banter and seriousness was a significant indicator of how well people built things.
Joke classes that ended up basically being all Zoom meetings are disappointing. COVID caused a lot of that as well. In the beginning stages of college, students identify it more with high school where they listen to the teachers, complete the assignments diligently, and attend class. In this stage of life there is not so much questioning others and pointing out their mistakes. I think the sense of disillusionment grows because the social contract between diligence and getting anywhere in life frays (see company loyalty in the rest of this article). But if you realize this too early (high school) it’s easy to fall off the guardrails of society.
People who pointed to North Korea when asked to find Vietnam. Lack of knowledge or intelligence isn’t necessarily someone’s fault because people have differing prenatal nutrition that leads to different levels of development and metabolism and different quality high school educations, but being in such an environment is kind of unexpected for college. But then again, maybe it’s a high schooler’s fault for not talking to current college students? Some I’m sure do. How do people get greater realizations?
Classes that are too big to find talented people from untalented people, making it impossible to form connections. Kind of like a DDoS Attack.
Something that would be much more beneficial is gathering a bunch of young people and teaching them “how to learn.” That means how to search for information, how to evaluate the level and expertise and quality of something, and how to have greater perception and taste. It means how to learn without a teacher, how to learn from a textbook and writings, how to see where someone else is knowledgeable and when they’re just bullshitting.
Miscellaneous Musings
I’m not sure exactly where the American educational system is leading or what it’s about. I have a gut feeling that college debt is about creating slaves to work menial jobs at large corporations since we know that money is just a representation of labor, putting people in debt with interest they can’t pay off essentially enslaves them, but it’s not very obvious. It uses misdirection, a characteristic of the modern world. And perhaps these people don’t really have “freedom” since employers still use certain signals to hire employees and these people will never acquire those signals such as certain degrees or internships or experiences. True freedom doesn’t actually exist: most people can only choose from a variety of substandard options.
The way I see it, this slave based system is catabolic and will explode at one point. I frequently go to supermarkets where the cashiers literally hate their employers so they don’t scan my items and give me things for free when I’m friendly with them. There is a large crowd of growing resentment that someone else is going to tap soon… Trump is already doing it, but he doesn’t have the coherence to set up good systems. But I do find that people who have college debt seem to be less competent, more prone to partying, and so on. You see it in the spelling mistakes and so on.
My theory isn’t complete yet, and it doesn’t explain the high-paying industry routes that some go into such as consulting and finance because it would be contradicting the idea about GPAs as such companies tend to want higher GPAs. I’d also perhaps want to examine the technology field such as grinding leetcode. My initial hunch is that these companies want people who can suffer grinding boringness to do work that is equally grinding and boring, which is why they select for doing such things. These companies are large and established rather than creative and leading edge.
I guess this observation doesn’t contradict my hypothesis. Established and mature industries that pay well but are not on the leading edge generally want conformist, high GPA, high test score people. It creates a RQR and wastes a lot of labor by making them study pointless things (I think getting an engineering degree just to go into Excel spreadsheeting is such a waste of talent) and essentially selects for very conformist people who will do what they are told, as anyone who understood it well enough or had a certain personality wouldn’t put up with it, which is perfect if you as a leader don’t want to be challenged.