Astral Codex Ten

Harvard

8 min read

Harvard

Article

Harvard is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 18, 2021 and June 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U”; “The change in Harvard’s and other university’s admission policy would have been a much bigger deal”; “most US colleges & universities who feared all the money would go to the usual suspects, Harvard, Yale, Illinois”. It most often appears alongside United States, America, Bryan Caplan.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: June 07, 2023

Appears In

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.

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
I've complained about this before, but I can't review this book without returning to it: deBoer's view of meritocracy is bizarre. The overall picture one gets is of Society telling a new college graduate "I see you got all A's in Harvard, which means you have proven yourself a good person. To reward you for your virtue, I grant you the coveted high-paying job of Surgeon." Think I'm exaggerating? He writes (not in this book, from a different article):
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
Yeah I see Brooks as thinking Harvard led the way when it looks more like it followed along (and being more famous later, got the credit/blame as a result).
I feel like if even half of this was true, The change in Harvard’s and other university’s admission policy would have been a much bigger deal. Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position. At the very least there would be legislative attempts to reverse the change. It’s possible the aristocracy didn’t realize how important the change was, but they should have realized it when the meritocrats became a thing, and when their kids stopped getting into top universities. There just wasn’t enough of a fight for something which supposedly toppled a virtual nobility. And it is highly unusual for an entire class of people to make an epistemic mistake about something which it is very important for them to get right, when the consequences of a mistake will be immediate and when the subject isn’t some obscure scientific field which requires expertise to understand. If David was smart enough to figure all of this out, why weren’t the aristocrats? It was far more important for them to get it right, and it doesn’t seem that David’s knowledge of the future was particularly useful for this inference, so the aristocrats had nearly all the relevant information David did.
Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.
Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
More generally, people would rather take someone who looks like Harvard would hire, than someone who (even if they look like someone Harvard would hire) definitely Harvard didn't actually in the end hire.
Some of what's going on is historical, going back to about 1950, when the Feds started throwing money at universities to do research. The NSF was founded c. 1952 b/c everyone realized that science had won WW II thus needed serious funding. The question was HOW, and we got a bastard version of the German system and our old tradition of colleges being for educating elite youth. Remember that many of the important scientists of WW II were German. There, all universities were research universities--there was no UG education as such--and their goal was to produce research and prepare scholars/scientists. They were supported by the German state, and departments were given budgets they could spend as they chose (and there was, basically, just 1 fully tenured "Ordinary Professor" per department, and he ran it, often like a fief. That was what US scientists envisioned after the war--fund the best scientists directly to produce the best science. But this met howls of protest from most US colleges & universities who feared all the money would go to the usual suspects, Harvard, Yale, Illinois (go Illini!), etc. And it was unAmerican. States urged the money go to states for allocation to their schools. The scientists howled -- nobodies at places like the Southern University of North Dakota at Hoople would get, and waste, scientific research dollars. Bad Science would be done!! The compromise is what we have today is the result, anyone, even a nobody at SND@H, could submit a grant, and if it was, in fact Best Science, it would be funded. So, virtually every school in the US tries to be a research oriented school, not just for the prestige, but because of the sweet overhead money that comes in, helping fund student-attracting facilities like salt water pools and paying big money to sports coaches.
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
Americans (especially within a libertarian or neoliberal tradition) tend to think of these as two sides of the same coin. Freedom leads to innovation. The downside of a society where Bill Gates can drop out of Harvard and create Microsoft without anyone’s permission, is a society where someone can drop out of high school and create a drug gang. We’re committed to the Constitution because it guarantees us the right to build a good life however we envision that term.