8 ms·

At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter

15 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago
The Paul Graham twitter thread: 1) At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't. 2) So if you show up at college and find that you're behind the kids who went to better high schools, don't be discouraged. Your position may be worse, but your velocity is higher. By the end of college you'll be ahead of them.
- bigodbiel 5y ago
  So just survivorship bias for public schooled students? I feel like this only exacerbates how public schooling is failing
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  I think Paul's argument is misleading. I say that as someone who went to both in high school. There are public schools that put out the best of the best (i.e magnets and magnet-like schools) and there there are private schools that are just holding pens for the spawns of the wealthy and a few talented athletes. But one thing that many private schools provide that most public schools don't is the academic agency for students to pick from a wide range of courses that match their ability and a standardized curriculum that pairs well with those choice in terms of thoroughness and rigor. Most public high schools don't have AP or IB courses and the ones that do tend to have them in limited supply in the hard sciences ( i.e. AP Physics C, AP Computer Science A, etc). Pursuing some sense of rigor involves taking courses that seem difficult rather than taking them in the hopes of forming a more cohesive understanding for one's future pursuits. Self-teaching obviously helps quite a bit, but that doesn't aid most students in achieving a firm foundation for say, undergraduate research in Physics.
- spacelamb 5y ago
  Paul Graham's assertion that 'parents send their kids to private schools to improve university admission standards' does not guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools.' Some private schools have high admission standards, and these have better teachers and more motivated students than comparative public schools in the area. The existence of these counter-examples shows that Graham's reasoning doesn't hold. He also assumes that the public school students have studied less material, or easier material, than private school students, and are more motivated to learn. This isn't guaranteed; certain public school programs (like IB, mentioned by another commenter here) meet or exceed the curriculum standards by other private schools. In short, the wording of the Tweets in their current form demonstrate weak reasoning. However, to take a more charitable interpretation, it's true that other private schools let anyone in who can pay the tuition, while also having less dedicated teachers and unmotivated students compared to public schools (especially public schools with high admission standards). Using more precise language, it can be altered to roughly: "motivated but less-privileged students can outcompete less motivated, more-privileged students in university." This is a more interesting assertion, but it also depends on the amount of privilege (e.g. some privileged students get an apartment with near-zero commute to the university, lots of cash, the best tutors, etc.). Life isn't truly meritocratic, but you try to do the best you can with the cards you're dealt.
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    > Paul Graham's assertion that 'parents send their kids to private schools to improve university admission standards' does not guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools.' You are correct. However, it does mathematically guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools at any given university (except, maybe, one of HYPMCS)' In any competitive market, from the perspective of a market actor, independent selected-for variables will appear to be inversely correlated.
    - spacelamb 5y ago
      That's correct! Thanks for your comment; I wrote the original to practice logical thinking, and your feedback is helpful for learning.
hresvelgr 5y ago
I guess? I feel like this is one of those instances where it feels intuitively correct but probably isn't. Ignoring that, intelligence is only one dimension of success as well. I know plenty of wickedly smart people who flounder and do nothing because they'd rather stew in mediocrity than ever put themselves in a situation where they might fail. Seems like some unnecessary flavour text around what is essentially: "Do your thing and don't worry about everyone else."
- spacelamb 5y ago
  >I feel like this is one of those instances where it feels intuitively correct but probably isn't. I get this feeling reading a lot of 'insightful' Tweets, especially written by Paul Graham. His essays have been influential and useful, but his Tweets were disappointing (flawed arguments, emotional appeal) to the point where I unfollowed. It's just Twitter, but it does feel like a missed opportunity for a truly insightful feed.
dfdz 5y ago
> At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't. Is there data to backup this claim? In my experience most of the top students at top universities attended private high schools. (I went to public school) This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. It seems likely that the median public school student is smarter than the median private school student, based on the same reasoning in the tweet (but that is less encouraging)
- avmich 5y ago
  > This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. Note that here we're talking about something different - namely, that _at any given university_, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. We don't talk about all kids - only kids in universities, and there is selection filter for who gets there, so in universities the distribution of "smartness" for private or public school kids is different than in schools. In other words, maybe you're right and the average private school student is smarter than the average public school student. But it's not the average student who gets to a university. There was once a stable state when many universities had several candidates for each place, and could choose whom to admit. Theoretically, the better the university the bigger the pool of candidates it has. However some universities were notoriously hard to get to, so candidates didn't even bother to apply there. As a result, the candidate pools in those universities were smaller, but those candidates were of a different kind - as if they have already passed pre-filter which made them more confident that they are those special ones who has better than average chance to get to those hard to get universities.
porknubbins 5y ago
The premise that private school gives an admissions boost may be true but it seems to me that this argument would only necessarily be true for the marginal student, ie public school student A and private school student B both just cleared the bar for admission then student A had to rely more on their own talent. If I had to guess PG is thinking about Ivy/Stanford where admissions are so strict that almost everyone is near the margin and needs some luck to get in. My university was not competitive and the average student was comfortably over the bar so that no such relationship holds.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Citation SORELY needed.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  PG is saying it logically has to be true as "a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects", which subsequently has to be true because "parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't [improve kids' admissions prospects]." I personally think this is an interesting thought experiment—albeit also one with a lot of flaws. What if the kids from private school are smarter because the private schools have better instruction? Or what if only smarter kids are accepted into private school, as private schools have a (frequently competitive) admissions process, whereas public schools have to take everyone.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Both of those could well be true. There’s just no data provided either way. Or any data about what cohort from either a public or private school actually goes to any particular university. It’s just annoying that the author comes out with a grand theory and provides nothing to back it up.
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      You don't need data to prove that the number of Nouveau apples someone purchases will go down if I, the sole farmer and distributor, raise the price. The application of an economic law to a new problem doesn't require the law to be re-proved. The only evidence PG needs is that people continue to spend money on private schools in order to increase university admissions. That serves as evidence that private schooling increases acceptance rates in competitive admissions. It is a variable that schools select for. When selections are made based on multiple criteria, and the market is mutually competitive, it follows that within each selection set (except sometimes those at the very, very top) those criteria will be negatively correlated. Because academic performance and private schooling are both criteria that universities use in selecting admitted students, those two traits will be negatively correlated within each student body, i.e., "at any given university." https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the-market-a-toy-model.html https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the...
anonnyj 5y ago
I assume "smarter" is using the super crude definition "better grades"?
AmericanBlarney 5y ago
Without any supporting evidence, I have no idea how this qualifies as news.
- spacelamb 5y ago
  This Tweet is on HN because its founder, Paul Graham, wrote it. I would contend that if anyone else wrote these assertions (even if a celebrity), it wouldn't receive as much engagement.
joshuamorton 5y ago
This is, I think, a misapplication of Berkson's paradox. The assumption is that, all else equal, a university is less likely to accept a public school student. But there's so many confounders here that Berkson's paradox is unlikely to follow trivially. This might be true, but I expect it's more true for (and as a consequence of) parental income/legacyness than than preference for private schools.
jwarden2021 5y ago
If this is actually true (I don't see a citation), then it looks like a classic example of the "explaining away" effect (also know as "collider effect" or Berkson's Paradox): https://martin-thoma.com/explaining-away/ https://martin-thoma.com/explaining-away/
- lupire 5y ago
  Better explanation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
djenendik 5y ago
Oddly enough this is the first time I agree with PG.
1cvmask 5y ago
In some countries the most elite schools are the public high schools and universities. At those universities in such countries the kids from private schools are crowded out from the top elite universities (whose entrance is solely exam based and which are public and usually free or almost free). So the private universities which are expensive are mainly full of kids from private schools and the elite students at them are also from public schools who are given full scholarships to raise the student academic profile. Italy, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are examples.
- wahern 5y ago
  > Italy, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are examples. These are also countries with high prevalence of private, after school tutoring (i.e. so-called shadow education). For example, as of 2013 more than 40% of Italian secondary students attend private lessons. See Table 1 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2096531119890142 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20965311198901... And in Turkey this figure was nearly 60% in 2003, which may very well be even higher today (or at least # of hours is probably higher). See Figure 4.1 at https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1259703574&disposition=inline https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?acc... Not going to bother posting figures for Japan and South Korea as I don't think anybody disputes the prevalence of tutoring in those or other East Asian countries. If you want to prevent richer (either financially or in parental involvement) kids from getting ahead, you literally need to suppress their ability to capitalize on those assets. Such as China is doing by regulating tutoring companies, or woke school boards are doing in various U.S. cities and universities. Of course, arguably you're merely hiding the underlying inequalities. But I guess this is just Goodhart's law in action, combined with pursuing the path of least resistance. That is, far easier to pursue a metric reflecting a consequence of economic inequality rather than metrics more directly measuring that inequality (e.g. Gini coefficient), let alone addressing the underlying causes themselves.
- quartesixte 5y ago
  Japan’s public > private dynamic is further fueled by the fact that public high schools are entirely admissions test based, and students may choose which school they attend. It is also non-compulsory (although >90% of students attend high school). You also only get 1 shot at applying to a public high school. So students tend to self-select (with some not-so-subtle nudging by their teachers) on the tier of public school they apply to based on various assessments of their own academic prowess. This creates a competitive environment for the top tier public high schools, which feature heavily subsidized and reduced tuition. Yes. You must pay for high school in Japan. And competitive high-performing high schoolers tend to apply for and get into competitive, top tier universities such as Tokyo Universities. Parents and high performing middle school children understand this acutely. So naturally, an entire industry of cram schools emerges to prepare these precocious 14 year olds to apply to the best high schools in their region so they can go to the nation’s best university so they can work at the nation’s best companies and live a life of middle class comfort. On the other hand, private schools largely will overlook test scores in exchange for the more expensive tuition collected. As far as I can remember, you were also only allowed to apply to one private. Not to say privates are bad, or that kids don’t want to go to them. But the high performers definitely were going for the publics with the private school being their backup. As a result, Japanese middle school students are some of the most stressed out teenagers I’ve ever seen.
xenadu02 5y ago
In the USA a large percentage of private schools (possibly a slight majority) are religious and/or ideological in nature. Having experienced this first hand I would challenge everyone to question the assumption that private schools provide a better education. Some do, some don't. Sometimes the "product" being sold is purely satisfying a parental desire for control or safety (real or perceived).
legerdemain 5y ago
IMSA, a private boarding school in Illinois: "Two thirds of our students go on to earn a PhD. Our grads also created YouTube." My school: "The guy who sang Chocolate Rain on YouTube went here!"
yongjik 5y ago
I guess I should be happy if this is true, considering my kids go to a public school, but there are just so many unstated assumptions to make the argument work that I could almost imagine it saying "...and for simplicity, we assume that students are spherical objects in a vacuum." E.g., colleges know which public/private school each student is from. It's not a blind selection process.
t0suj4 5y ago
If I understand it correctly, mostly the smartest kids from public schools get admitted to a university. On the other hand kids from private schools don't have to be that smart as their schools gave them significantly better opportunity to attend universities. Looks like to me that the public school kids get admitted their schools despite.
dogleash 5y ago
broke: This is an unsupported assertion. woke: Why does PG want it to be true? What is he attempting to communicate and to whom?

15 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

The Paul Graham twitter thread: 1) At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't. 2) So if you show up at college and find that you're behind the kids who went to better high schools, don't be discouraged. Your position may be worse, but your velocity is higher. By the end of college you'll be ahead of them.

bigodbiel 5y ago
So just survivorship bias for public schooled students? I feel like this only exacerbates how public schooling is failing
Dracophoenix 5y ago
I think Paul's argument is misleading. I say that as someone who went to both in high school. There are public schools that put out the best of the best (i.e magnets and magnet-like schools) and there there are private schools that are just holding pens for the spawns of the wealthy and a few talented athletes. But one thing that many private schools provide that most public schools don't is the academic agency for students to pick from a wide range of courses that match their ability and a standardized curriculum that pairs well with those choice in terms of thoroughness and rigor. Most public high schools don't have AP or IB courses and the ones that do tend to have them in limited supply in the hard sciences ( i.e. AP Physics C, AP Computer Science A, etc). Pursuing some sense of rigor involves taking courses that seem difficult rather than taking them in the hopes of forming a more cohesive understanding for one's future pursuits. Self-teaching obviously helps quite a bit, but that doesn't aid most students in achieving a firm foundation for say, undergraduate research in Physics.
spacelamb 5y ago
Paul Graham's assertion that 'parents send their kids to private schools to improve university admission standards' does not guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools.' Some private schools have high admission standards, and these have better teachers and more motivated students than comparative public schools in the area. The existence of these counter-examples shows that Graham's reasoning doesn't hold. He also assumes that the public school students have studied less material, or easier material, than private school students, and are more motivated to learn. This isn't guaranteed; certain public school programs (like IB, mentioned by another commenter here) meet or exceed the curriculum standards by other private schools. In short, the wording of the Tweets in their current form demonstrate weak reasoning. However, to take a more charitable interpretation, it's true that other private schools let anyone in who can pay the tuition, while also having less dedicated teachers and unmotivated students compared to public schools (especially public schools with high admission standards). Using more precise language, it can be altered to roughly: "motivated but less-privileged students can outcompete less motivated, more-privileged students in university." This is a more interesting assertion, but it also depends on the amount of privilege (e.g. some privileged students get an apartment with near-zero commute to the university, lots of cash, the best tutors, etc.). Life isn't truly meritocratic, but you try to do the best you can with the cards you're dealt.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  > Paul Graham's assertion that 'parents send their kids to private schools to improve university admission standards' does not guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools.' You are correct. However, it does mathematically guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools at any given university (except, maybe, one of HYPMCS)' In any competitive market, from the perspective of a market actor, independent selected-for variables will appear to be inversely correlated.
  - spacelamb 5y ago
    That's correct! Thanks for your comment; I wrote the original to practice logical thinking, and your feedback is helpful for learning.

hresvelgr 5y ago

I guess? I feel like this is one of those instances where it feels intuitively correct but probably isn't. Ignoring that, intelligence is only one dimension of success as well. I know plenty of wickedly smart people who flounder and do nothing because they'd rather stew in mediocrity than ever put themselves in a situation where they might fail. Seems like some unnecessary flavour text around what is essentially: "Do your thing and don't worry about everyone else."

spacelamb 5y ago
>I feel like this is one of those instances where it feels intuitively correct but probably isn't. I get this feeling reading a lot of 'insightful' Tweets, especially written by Paul Graham. His essays have been influential and useful, but his Tweets were disappointing (flawed arguments, emotional appeal) to the point where I unfollowed. It's just Twitter, but it does feel like a missed opportunity for a truly insightful feed.

dfdz 5y ago

> At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't. Is there data to backup this claim? In my experience most of the top students at top universities attended private high schools. (I went to public school) This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. It seems likely that the median public school student is smarter than the median private school student, based on the same reasoning in the tweet (but that is less encouraging)

avmich 5y ago
> This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. Note that here we're talking about something different - namely, that _at any given university_, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. We don't talk about all kids - only kids in universities, and there is selection filter for who gets there, so in universities the distribution of "smartness" for private or public school kids is different than in schools. In other words, maybe you're right and the average private school student is smarter than the average public school student. But it's not the average student who gets to a university. There was once a stable state when many universities had several candidates for each place, and could choose whom to admit. Theoretically, the better the university the bigger the pool of candidates it has. However some universities were notoriously hard to get to, so candidates didn't even bother to apply there. As a result, the candidate pools in those universities were smaller, but those candidates were of a different kind - as if they have already passed pre-filter which made them more confident that they are those special ones who has better than average chance to get to those hard to get universities.

porknubbins 5y ago

The premise that private school gives an admissions boost may be true but it seems to me that this argument would only necessarily be true for the marginal student, ie public school student A and private school student B both just cleared the bar for admission then student A had to rely more on their own talent. If I had to guess PG is thinking about Ivy/Stanford where admissions are so strict that almost everyone is near the margin and needs some luck to get in. My university was not competitive and the average student was comfortably over the bar so that no such relationship holds.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Citation SORELY needed.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
PG is saying it logically has to be true as "a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects", which subsequently has to be true because "parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't [improve kids' admissions prospects]." I personally think this is an interesting thought experiment—albeit also one with a lot of flaws. What if the kids from private school are smarter because the private schools have better instruction? Or what if only smarter kids are accepted into private school, as private schools have a (frequently competitive) admissions process, whereas public schools have to take everyone.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Both of those could well be true. There’s just no data provided either way. Or any data about what cohort from either a public or private school actually goes to any particular university. It’s just annoying that the author comes out with a grand theory and provides nothing to back it up.
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    You don't need data to prove that the number of Nouveau apples someone purchases will go down if I, the sole farmer and distributor, raise the price. The application of an economic law to a new problem doesn't require the law to be re-proved. The only evidence PG needs is that people continue to spend money on private schools in order to increase university admissions. That serves as evidence that private schooling increases acceptance rates in competitive admissions. It is a variable that schools select for. When selections are made based on multiple criteria, and the market is mutually competitive, it follows that within each selection set (except sometimes those at the very, very top) those criteria will be negatively correlated. Because academic performance and private schooling are both criteria that universities use in selecting admitted students, those two traits will be negatively correlated within each student body, i.e., "at any given university." https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the-market-a-toy-model.html https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the...

anonnyj 5y ago

I assume "smarter" is using the super crude definition "better grades"?

AmericanBlarney 5y ago

Without any supporting evidence, I have no idea how this qualifies as news.

spacelamb 5y ago
This Tweet is on HN because its founder, Paul Graham, wrote it. I would contend that if anyone else wrote these assertions (even if a celebrity), it wouldn't receive as much engagement.

joshuamorton 5y ago

This is, I think, a misapplication of Berkson's paradox. The assumption is that, all else equal, a university is less likely to accept a public school student. But there's so many confounders here that Berkson's paradox is unlikely to follow trivially. This might be true, but I expect it's more true for (and as a consequence of) parental income/legacyness than than preference for private schools.

jwarden2021 5y ago

If this is actually true (I don't see a citation), then it looks like a classic example of the "explaining away" effect (also know as "collider effect" or Berkson's Paradox): https://martin-thoma.com/explaining-away/ https://martin-thoma.com/explaining-away/

lupire 5y ago
Better explanation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

djenendik 5y ago

Oddly enough this is the first time I agree with PG.

1cvmask 5y ago

In some countries the most elite schools are the public high schools and universities. At those universities in such countries the kids from private schools are crowded out from the top elite universities (whose entrance is solely exam based and which are public and usually free or almost free). So the private universities which are expensive are mainly full of kids from private schools and the elite students at them are also from public schools who are given full scholarships to raise the student academic profile. Italy, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are examples.

wahern 5y ago
> Italy, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are examples. These are also countries with high prevalence of private, after school tutoring (i.e. so-called shadow education). For example, as of 2013 more than 40% of Italian secondary students attend private lessons. See Table 1 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2096531119890142 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20965311198901... And in Turkey this figure was nearly 60% in 2003, which may very well be even higher today (or at least # of hours is probably higher). See Figure 4.1 at https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1259703574&disposition=inline https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?acc... Not going to bother posting figures for Japan and South Korea as I don't think anybody disputes the prevalence of tutoring in those or other East Asian countries. If you want to prevent richer (either financially or in parental involvement) kids from getting ahead, you literally need to suppress their ability to capitalize on those assets. Such as China is doing by regulating tutoring companies, or woke school boards are doing in various U.S. cities and universities. Of course, arguably you're merely hiding the underlying inequalities. But I guess this is just Goodhart's law in action, combined with pursuing the path of least resistance. That is, far easier to pursue a metric reflecting a consequence of economic inequality rather than metrics more directly measuring that inequality (e.g. Gini coefficient), let alone addressing the underlying causes themselves.
quartesixte 5y ago
Japan’s public > private dynamic is further fueled by the fact that public high schools are entirely admissions test based, and students may choose which school they attend. It is also non-compulsory (although >90% of students attend high school). You also only get 1 shot at applying to a public high school. So students tend to self-select (with some not-so-subtle nudging by their teachers) on the tier of public school they apply to based on various assessments of their own academic prowess. This creates a competitive environment for the top tier public high schools, which feature heavily subsidized and reduced tuition. Yes. You must pay for high school in Japan. And competitive high-performing high schoolers tend to apply for and get into competitive, top tier universities such as Tokyo Universities. Parents and high performing middle school children understand this acutely. So naturally, an entire industry of cram schools emerges to prepare these precocious 14 year olds to apply to the best high schools in their region so they can go to the nation’s best university so they can work at the nation’s best companies and live a life of middle class comfort. On the other hand, private schools largely will overlook test scores in exchange for the more expensive tuition collected. As far as I can remember, you were also only allowed to apply to one private. Not to say privates are bad, or that kids don’t want to go to them. But the high performers definitely were going for the publics with the private school being their backup. As a result, Japanese middle school students are some of the most stressed out teenagers I’ve ever seen.

xenadu02 5y ago

In the USA a large percentage of private schools (possibly a slight majority) are religious and/or ideological in nature. Having experienced this first hand I would challenge everyone to question the assumption that private schools provide a better education. Some do, some don't. Sometimes the "product" being sold is purely satisfying a parental desire for control or safety (real or perceived).

legerdemain 5y ago

IMSA, a private boarding school in Illinois: "Two thirds of our students go on to earn a PhD. Our grads also created YouTube." My school: "The guy who sang Chocolate Rain on YouTube went here!"

yongjik 5y ago

I guess I should be happy if this is true, considering my kids go to a public school, but there are just so many unstated assumptions to make the argument work that I could almost imagine it saying "...and for simplicity, we assume that students are spherical objects in a vacuum." E.g., colleges know which public/private school each student is from. It's not a blind selection process.

t0suj4 5y ago

If I understand it correctly, mostly the smartest kids from public schools get admitted to a university. On the other hand kids from private schools don't have to be that smart as their schools gave them significantly better opportunity to attend universities. Looks like to me that the public school kids get admitted their schools despite.

dogleash 5y ago

broke: This is an unsupported assertion. woke: Why does PG want it to be true? What is he attempting to communicate and to whom?