Oxbridge
Article
Oxbridge is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 09, 2021 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “his screening mechanism was as successful as the Ivies or Oxbridge when they screen for bright people”; “This is why public schools and Oxbridge became important in the first place”. It most often appears alongside Ivies, Ivy League, 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 09, 2021
- Last seen: December 09, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Ivies (2 shared issues)
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- Ivy League (2 shared issues)
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- 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire (1 shared issues)
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- Aage Bohr (1 shared issues)
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- Abanindranath Tagore (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Aldous Huxley (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Anderson Cooper (1 shared issues)
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- Andre Malraux (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Huxley (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
We can formalize this objection using IQ, which is nice and quantifiable. Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150. And suppose that he tried very hard to marry a bright woman, and his screening mechanism was as successful as the Ivies or Oxbridge when they screen for bright people - in that case his wife would have the same IQ as an average Ivy Leaguer, maybe 130ish. We would predict their average child to have an IQ of 124. Why is the average lower than either parent? Regression to the mean - IQ is probably a combination of genes and random factors, and if your IQ is very high it means you probably have a combination of good genes and good random dice rolls, and even though you can pass on the good genes your kids will probably only get average dice rolls.
Britain's a good place to see this. The 19th Century created a lot of new "millionaires," but they tried their hardest to ape the aristocracy then intermarried with them (changing them slightly in the process - mid-Victorian aristocrats were notably bourgousified compared to the 18th century). This is why public schools and Oxbridge became important in the first place vs. a purely hereditary system.