8 ms·

The Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness

84 points by dsplittgerber 17y ago

melling 17y ago
I picked David because his achievements seemed more concrete. The "marketing" and "sustainability" stuff sounded like fluff to me. I didn't read much more of the article after I found out he chose the other guy.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  It's not just that he picked the other guy, he expects everyone to agree with him, and yet like you I chose the "wrong" guy. Explaining the "amazing" reason that everyone picks his choice seems much less impressive at that point, particularly as it mostly seems like an ad for a book. Does anyone actually talk like this (from the comments): It’s interesting that you mention science fairs. I actually have a chapter in my new book where I take the awe-inspiring resumes of two Intel winners, then break down, step by step, the reality of their achievement
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    I suspect that Hacker News has a bit of selection bias, in that most of the people here are driven, success-oriented individuals who'd like to believe that hard work makes a difference. We've already read all the articles about how success comes from diligence and practice, and that feats that seem superhuman are just the result of focused effort over time. In my personal experience, the majority of people do not think like this. When I was going through grade school, my parents/teachers/etc. often did use words like "awe-inspiring achievements", even for fairly mundane things like getting perfect scores on standardized tests. I got into Amherst through a process very much like the article describes (I had terrible grades but had worked at an all-teenage dot-com startup and aced my standardized tests). In the "brag session" where the director of admissions lists all the awe-inspiring resumes of the incoming freshman class, she said "And one of the students passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class", and a murmur of appreciation passed along the crowd. Really, it's not that hard, you read a book and then you pay $75 for a test - but most of them don't know that. I think it's great that there's more understanding going around of what achievement actually stems from. But that understanding certainly isn't universal, and in the meantime, you can hack people's perceptions of you by playing to the blind spots in their own knowledge. "Everything is impossible until I know how to do it, and then it's trivial."
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      > passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class Passing AP tests is impressive? Whoa.
      - nostrademons 17y ago
        That was my thought too, but a surprisingly large number of people were impressed. Which was the article's point. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. (Well, actually there is an accounting for taste, and that's what the article was about. People can be irrational and yet have perfectly rational explanations for their irrationality.)
- kiba 17y ago
  I also choose David over Steve. Maybe it's because I have a disdain for politics. The ability to cause havocs in UN meetings would more impressed me. Competing with the United States Post Office and then crushing them is also an incredibly impressive to me. What I would search for, as a college admission office is people who is likely to defy authorities and be massively right. If I can get that guy into college, then that's the greatest achievement I could hope for, because this guy will have massive positive impact in this world. I don't need Obamas people, but I would like more Talebs people in my school.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    You know a lot of high school students with “massively right” unique insights into the world that no one has thought of before? Enough to make up a freshman class at a mid-sized school?
    - kiba 17y ago
      You know a lot of high school students with “massively right” unique insights into the world that no one has thought of before? Enough to make up a freshman class at a mid-sized school? Just one guy/gal in his lifetime is what a college admission officer would hope for in his entire career. That's all he need to cause a revolution in a field. The problem is of course, how to find the genuine article in a pool full of candidates sprouting impressive grades and other distracting signals which are probably incidental or have nothing to do with massively right insights generators. My guesses and your guesses is probably as good as the college admission officers. The chance of scoring a direct hit because the officer was able to correctly reasoned that this guy is what he's looking for is probably incredibly low.
- mwerty 17y ago
  I have a hypothesis that one way to drastically reduce the amount of volunteering going on is to not consider it in college/MBA admissions. Every one of my friends who has volunteered has coincidentally highlighted that experience in some admissions essay two years later.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  The article makes the mistake of confusing "surprising" for "impressive". Steve's accomplishments are surprising. I wouldn't have the slightest idea how he went about them; I'd have to ask to get the full story. (The article names this the "failed simulation effect".) I totally agree with you that it sounds like fluff, but it's unusual fluff. David's accomplishments are unsurprising. I know exactly how one gets to be the captain of a varsity sports team while keeping up an interesting hobby outside of school. Impressive, concrete, but doesn't provoke any further questioning from me. I wouldn't pick either of them just from a few sentences. I'd want to see the full essays.
  - shadowsun7 17y ago
    The article makes the mistake of confusing "surprising" for "impressive". Good point there. After reading your comment I reread the article, and it does seem more reasonable to replace all mentions of "impressive" with "surprising". That being said, to an academic reviewer, surprising may very well equal impressive, especially when the transcript is read along with a thousand others ...
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  Same here. David seemed remarkable self-assured; who takes calligraphy all through high school? It's sure not a peer-pressure thing. Meanwhile Steve may have some lofty motivations for his career path, but it says nothing about how well he actually does these things. FTA: "He’s not brilliant. super passionate, or ultra-hard working — instead, he accomplished something that’s hard to explain. " And that impresses people?
- wakeupthedawn 17y ago
  As someone who actually goes to top school, I cannot even fathom how someone would think that being captain of a track team and learning calligraphy would be more impressive than lobby U.N. delegates. Track captains are a dime a dozen and there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it. Working with the UN as a high schooler is something that grabs the attention of an admissions officer. I'm sure his essay about the experience sealed the deal.
  - r00k 17y ago
    I think your reply would have been a lot more persuasive without "As someone who actually goes to a top school..." It sounds like bragging. And worse: it doesn't do anything for your argument. (And for the record, I agree with you.)
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      It gives him somewhat more direct insight, having experience with what such students are like. He clearly meant it in that light. What would he possibly get from bragging? (People who go to top schools are a dime a dozen, after all. ;-)
  - petercooper 17y ago
    there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it. Steve Jobs seems to think it was a big deal: http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - sharms 17y ago
- JangoSteve 17y ago
  I chose Steve because he spent his time doing something that affects people other than himself. Most people I know have some aversion to changing the status quo. David has impressive accomplishments are of no importance to anyone but himself, so the state of things before and after David's accomplishments are more or less the same. In other words, I'm impressed with Steve, not because I'm comparing the amount of work and effort they each put forth, but because Steve chooses to spend his time and efforts changing things.
theoden 17y ago
What's the deal with these joke admissions to American universities. President of some silly high school club? Who cares?
- _delirium 17y ago
  There's just not a lot to go on. The SAT score is one of the few nationally comparable objective measures, and obviously measures only a specific kind of aptitude. High-school GPA is objective but hard to compare across schools, and measures only specific things as well (ability to do well in high-school classes). Essays might give you more information, but might be written by someone other than the student. You end up falling back on some sort of evidence that the student has independent interests/motivations, whether president of some club, or webmaster of some site.
  - sliverstorm 17y ago
    Also, in the case where you have a 2 students with perfect 4.0 (or better) GPA's, both got perfect SAT scores, etc- i.e., match eachother blow for blow, the only way groupthink people have thought of to get ahead is to have extracurriculars. Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. The top X% of students would range from 3.5-4 in their GPA, or something like that. Unfortunately, grade inflation and test coaching is compacting an increasing percentage of the 'top' students into the tiny tiny bracket around 4.0 and 2400 (SAT). Greater-than-4.0 GPA's attempted to extend the headroom, but much like raising the level cap in WoW this didn't help much.
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      > Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. You think these are good measurements of student ability? For myself, I couldn’t complain about such a system, because (probably like many/most here) I did exceedingly well by such metrics. But to be honest, I think they are absolutely terrible.
      - nostrademons 17y ago
comster 17y ago
whats unimpressive is all the spelling mistakes in the article. the end.
jacobolus 17y ago
A better way of saying this is: “I worked a lot on X” is less interesting/impressive than “A bunch of adults acted on something I did.” To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same. Instead of “drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your attention toward becoming an insider”, how about trying to learn as much as you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number), build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are intrinsically valuable things to do?
aphyr 17y ago
I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much less likely that you'll encounter someone who worked with an NGO or the UN--even if Steve's abilities or perserverance weren't exceptional. Still, I think there's something to the model. It is difficult to envision how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in my evaluation.
- underover 17y ago
  By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; I agree with your point, but this sentence is not true.
  - aphyr 17y ago
    Correction: it is highly probable that they will have a captain. :)
postfuturist 17y ago
The whole concept of highly selective schools is distasteful. I can't imagine myself in the position of choosing between prospective students for one. The selection process is highly arbitrary just like hiring. I wouldn't accept the responsibility of turning away prospective students who actually want to come to a school to learn.
- sharms 17y ago
  I think, as I have been guilty of, people underestimate just how hard it is to hire someone. It always sounded easy, but after hiring a few people, it is very hit or miss no matter what you do. To imagine you can predict what a developing student mind is capable of is simply hubris.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  How would you reorganize education? How would you distribute professors among students? Match students to the same courses? Decide which courses each student could take? The current system has gigantic problems. But fixing it is not trivial, because such a big network is incredibly complex.
qaexl 17y ago
Ha I see. In other applications, this is the "hook", the elevator pitch. Or the quick bio when networking that gets people coming back to hear the story. I'm not quite sure how this applies to the "startup story".
shadowsun7 17y ago
Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits, including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue Okay, it was at this point where I switched and picked Steve over David. Captain of the track team sounds impressive, until you consider that there would be 400 other captains sitting in an academic reviewer's inbox. Now I'm not really sure if this is impressiveness, but it sure stands out if I had to sift through a hundred or a thousand applications, and this one guy writes about his experience in the UN.
wallflower 17y ago
Love this quote. I can deeply identify with it. I don't have to be good at something to enjoy it. And you'll improve over time, even if that's not the purpose you seek. The Magic of Time - The Last One Standing: http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-one-standing.html http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on... > When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”
greenlblue 17y ago
By now it's pretty well established that college admissions are a crap shoot so why is this guy wasting time on failed simulation theory and applying it to college admissions.
dgabriel 17y ago
With a solid C average coming out of high school, I got into Carnegie Mellon (not Brown, though...), but wound up going to a state school that gave me a free ride for 4 years. There are lots of ways to hack the admissions process, but none of them include Japanese calligraphy (unless you become a cultural ambassador to Japan).
- nostrademons 17y ago
  If you believe Steve Jobs, however, one of the ways to hack the PC market very much involved calligraphy.
endtime 17y ago
This is particularly exaggerated among Stanford undergrads, presumably by intent of the admissions department. I didn't do my undergrad at Stanford, but I've heard many stories from undergrad friends about the guy down the hall who didn't seem particularly outstanding or bright, until he turned out to be e.g. the #2 model airplane builder in the world. This line in particular stood out to me: >Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting. The emphasis on this elusive impressive/unusual quality over raw academic prowess also explains the quality of some of the problem sets I've graded...but then, doing well on problem sets and starting successful companies (or becoming an outlier by some other metric of success) are completely different things. Stanford optimizes for the latter.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  I bet you’d find worse problem sets just about anywhere else. There are all kinds of reasons why 19-year-olds fuck up on problem sets, not all of them to do with lacking “academic” talent.
jaytee_clone 17y ago
In the mind of a typical high school student, being a team captain is a known path with many known examples. Being a part of UN is not so obvious thus it's a risky path and it may take many failures before stumbling upon the right path. Sure, the right path may be simple. But so are many successful start-ups ideas. Yet you can't just discredit the skills of the founders just because the ideas were simple. Because simple ideas usually came many iterations of bad ones If I am an investor I'd invest in Steve because, he is, as PG once said, relentlessly resourceful.
necrecious 17y ago
The concept of failed simulation is very interesting. I wrote a post about how the capability to simulate is important to programmers and designers, where the failure to simulate is produces bad code/products. http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-for-the-daemon-or-are-you-a-good-simulator/ http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-... This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at all.

84 points by dsplittgerber 17y ago

I picked David because his achievements seemed more concrete. The "marketing" and "sustainability" stuff sounded like fluff to me. I didn't read much more of the article after I found out he chose the other guy.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
It's not just that he picked the other guy, he expects everyone to agree with him, and yet like you I chose the "wrong" guy. Explaining the "amazing" reason that everyone picks his choice seems much less impressive at that point, particularly as it mostly seems like an ad for a book. Does anyone actually talk like this (from the comments): It’s interesting that you mention science fairs. I actually have a chapter in my new book where I take the awe-inspiring resumes of two Intel winners, then break down, step by step, the reality of their achievement
- nostrademons 17y ago
  I suspect that Hacker News has a bit of selection bias, in that most of the people here are driven, success-oriented individuals who'd like to believe that hard work makes a difference. We've already read all the articles about how success comes from diligence and practice, and that feats that seem superhuman are just the result of focused effort over time. In my personal experience, the majority of people do not think like this. When I was going through grade school, my parents/teachers/etc. often did use words like "awe-inspiring achievements", even for fairly mundane things like getting perfect scores on standardized tests. I got into Amherst through a process very much like the article describes (I had terrible grades but had worked at an all-teenage dot-com startup and aced my standardized tests). In the "brag session" where the director of admissions lists all the awe-inspiring resumes of the incoming freshman class, she said "And one of the students passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class", and a murmur of appreciation passed along the crowd. Really, it's not that hard, you read a book and then you pay $75 for a test - but most of them don't know that. I think it's great that there's more understanding going around of what achievement actually stems from. But that understanding certainly isn't universal, and in the meantime, you can hack people's perceptions of you by playing to the blind spots in their own knowledge. "Everything is impossible until I know how to do it, and then it's trivial."
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    > passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class Passing AP tests is impressive? Whoa.
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      That was my thought too, but a surprisingly large number of people were impressed. Which was the article's point. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. (Well, actually there is an accounting for taste, and that's what the article was about. People can be irrational and yet have perfectly rational explanations for their irrationality.)
kiba 17y ago
I also choose David over Steve. Maybe it's because I have a disdain for politics. The ability to cause havocs in UN meetings would more impressed me. Competing with the United States Post Office and then crushing them is also an incredibly impressive to me. What I would search for, as a college admission office is people who is likely to defy authorities and be massively right. If I can get that guy into college, then that's the greatest achievement I could hope for, because this guy will have massive positive impact in this world. I don't need Obamas people, but I would like more Talebs people in my school.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  You know a lot of high school students with “massively right” unique insights into the world that no one has thought of before? Enough to make up a freshman class at a mid-sized school?
  - kiba 17y ago
    You know a lot of high school students with “massively right” unique insights into the world that no one has thought of before? Enough to make up a freshman class at a mid-sized school? Just one guy/gal in his lifetime is what a college admission officer would hope for in his entire career. That's all he need to cause a revolution in a field. The problem is of course, how to find the genuine article in a pool full of candidates sprouting impressive grades and other distracting signals which are probably incidental or have nothing to do with massively right insights generators. My guesses and your guesses is probably as good as the college admission officers. The chance of scoring a direct hit because the officer was able to correctly reasoned that this guy is what he's looking for is probably incredibly low.
mwerty 17y ago
I have a hypothesis that one way to drastically reduce the amount of volunteering going on is to not consider it in college/MBA admissions. Every one of my friends who has volunteered has coincidentally highlighted that experience in some admissions essay two years later.
lotharbot 17y ago
The article makes the mistake of confusing "surprising" for "impressive". Steve's accomplishments are surprising. I wouldn't have the slightest idea how he went about them; I'd have to ask to get the full story. (The article names this the "failed simulation effect".) I totally agree with you that it sounds like fluff, but it's unusual fluff. David's accomplishments are unsurprising. I know exactly how one gets to be the captain of a varsity sports team while keeping up an interesting hobby outside of school. Impressive, concrete, but doesn't provoke any further questioning from me. I wouldn't pick either of them just from a few sentences. I'd want to see the full essays.
- shadowsun7 17y ago
  The article makes the mistake of confusing "surprising" for "impressive". Good point there. After reading your comment I reread the article, and it does seem more reasonable to replace all mentions of "impressive" with "surprising". That being said, to an academic reviewer, surprising may very well equal impressive, especially when the transcript is read along with a thousand others ...
jamesbritt 17y ago
Same here. David seemed remarkable self-assured; who takes calligraphy all through high school? It's sure not a peer-pressure thing. Meanwhile Steve may have some lofty motivations for his career path, but it says nothing about how well he actually does these things. FTA: "He’s not brilliant. super passionate, or ultra-hard working — instead, he accomplished something that’s hard to explain. " And that impresses people?
wakeupthedawn 17y ago
As someone who actually goes to top school, I cannot even fathom how someone would think that being captain of a track team and learning calligraphy would be more impressive than lobby U.N. delegates. Track captains are a dime a dozen and there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it. Working with the UN as a high schooler is something that grabs the attention of an admissions officer. I'm sure his essay about the experience sealed the deal.
- r00k 17y ago
  I think your reply would have been a lot more persuasive without "As someone who actually goes to a top school..." It sounds like bragging. And worse: it doesn't do anything for your argument. (And for the record, I agree with you.)
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    It gives him somewhat more direct insight, having experience with what such students are like. He clearly meant it in that light. What would he possibly get from bragging? (People who go to top schools are a dime a dozen, after all. ;-)
- petercooper 17y ago
  there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it. Steve Jobs seems to think it was a big deal: http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- sharms 17y ago
JangoSteve 17y ago
I chose Steve because he spent his time doing something that affects people other than himself. Most people I know have some aversion to changing the status quo. David has impressive accomplishments are of no importance to anyone but himself, so the state of things before and after David's accomplishments are more or less the same. In other words, I'm impressed with Steve, not because I'm comparing the amount of work and effort they each put forth, but because Steve chooses to spend his time and efforts changing things.

theoden 17y ago

What's the deal with these joke admissions to American universities. President of some silly high school club? Who cares?

_delirium 17y ago
There's just not a lot to go on. The SAT score is one of the few nationally comparable objective measures, and obviously measures only a specific kind of aptitude. High-school GPA is objective but hard to compare across schools, and measures only specific things as well (ability to do well in high-school classes). Essays might give you more information, but might be written by someone other than the student. You end up falling back on some sort of evidence that the student has independent interests/motivations, whether president of some club, or webmaster of some site.
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  Also, in the case where you have a 2 students with perfect 4.0 (or better) GPA's, both got perfect SAT scores, etc- i.e., match eachother blow for blow, the only way groupthink people have thought of to get ahead is to have extracurriculars. Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. The top X% of students would range from 3.5-4 in their GPA, or something like that. Unfortunately, grade inflation and test coaching is compacting an increasing percentage of the 'top' students into the tiny tiny bracket around 4.0 and 2400 (SAT). Greater-than-4.0 GPA's attempted to extend the headroom, but much like raising the level cap in WoW this didn't help much.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    > Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. You think these are good measurements of student ability? For myself, I couldn’t complain about such a system, because (probably like many/most here) I did exceedingly well by such metrics. But to be honest, I think they are absolutely terrible.
    - nostrademons 17y ago

comster 17y ago

whats unimpressive is all the spelling mistakes in the article. the end.

jacobolus 17y ago

A better way of saying this is: “I worked a lot on X” is less interesting/impressive than “A bunch of adults acted on something I did.” To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same. Instead of “drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your attention toward becoming an insider”, how about trying to learn as much as you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number), build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are intrinsically valuable things to do?

aphyr 17y ago

I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much less likely that you'll encounter someone who worked with an NGO or the UN--even if Steve's abilities or perserverance weren't exceptional. Still, I think there's something to the model. It is difficult to envision how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in my evaluation.

underover 17y ago
By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; I agree with your point, but this sentence is not true.
- aphyr 17y ago
  Correction: it is highly probable that they will have a captain. :)

postfuturist 17y ago

The whole concept of highly selective schools is distasteful. I can't imagine myself in the position of choosing between prospective students for one. The selection process is highly arbitrary just like hiring. I wouldn't accept the responsibility of turning away prospective students who actually want to come to a school to learn.

sharms 17y ago
I think, as I have been guilty of, people underestimate just how hard it is to hire someone. It always sounded easy, but after hiring a few people, it is very hit or miss no matter what you do. To imagine you can predict what a developing student mind is capable of is simply hubris.
jacobolus 17y ago
How would you reorganize education? How would you distribute professors among students? Match students to the same courses? Decide which courses each student could take? The current system has gigantic problems. But fixing it is not trivial, because such a big network is incredibly complex.

qaexl 17y ago

Ha I see. In other applications, this is the "hook", the elevator pitch. Or the quick bio when networking that gets people coming back to hear the story. I'm not quite sure how this applies to the "startup story".

shadowsun7 17y ago

Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits, including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue Okay, it was at this point where I switched and picked Steve over David. Captain of the track team sounds impressive, until you consider that there would be 400 other captains sitting in an academic reviewer's inbox. Now I'm not really sure if this is impressiveness, but it sure stands out if I had to sift through a hundred or a thousand applications, and this one guy writes about his experience in the UN.

wallflower 17y ago

Love this quote. I can deeply identify with it. I don't have to be good at something to enjoy it. And you'll improve over time, even if that's not the purpose you seek. The Magic of Time - The Last One Standing: http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-one-standing.html http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on... > When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”

greenlblue 17y ago

By now it's pretty well established that college admissions are a crap shoot so why is this guy wasting time on failed simulation theory and applying it to college admissions.

dgabriel 17y ago

With a solid C average coming out of high school, I got into Carnegie Mellon (not Brown, though...), but wound up going to a state school that gave me a free ride for 4 years. There are lots of ways to hack the admissions process, but none of them include Japanese calligraphy (unless you become a cultural ambassador to Japan).

nostrademons 17y ago
If you believe Steve Jobs, however, one of the ways to hack the PC market very much involved calligraphy.

endtime 17y ago

This is particularly exaggerated among Stanford undergrads, presumably by intent of the admissions department. I didn't do my undergrad at Stanford, but I've heard many stories from undergrad friends about the guy down the hall who didn't seem particularly outstanding or bright, until he turned out to be e.g. the #2 model airplane builder in the world. This line in particular stood out to me: >Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting. The emphasis on this elusive impressive/unusual quality over raw academic prowess also explains the quality of some of the problem sets I've graded...but then, doing well on problem sets and starting successful companies (or becoming an outlier by some other metric of success) are completely different things. Stanford optimizes for the latter.

jacobolus 17y ago
I bet you’d find worse problem sets just about anywhere else. There are all kinds of reasons why 19-year-olds fuck up on problem sets, not all of them to do with lacking “academic” talent.

jaytee_clone 17y ago

In the mind of a typical high school student, being a team captain is a known path with many known examples. Being a part of UN is not so obvious thus it's a risky path and it may take many failures before stumbling upon the right path. Sure, the right path may be simple. But so are many successful start-ups ideas. Yet you can't just discredit the skills of the founders just because the ideas were simple. Because simple ideas usually came many iterations of bad ones If I am an investor I'd invest in Steve because, he is, as PG once said, relentlessly resourceful.

necrecious 17y ago

The concept of failed simulation is very interesting. I wrote a post about how the capability to simulate is important to programmers and designers, where the failure to simulate is produces bad code/products. http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-for-the-daemon-or-are-you-a-good-simulator/ http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-... This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at all.