12 ms·

Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

142 points by schmico 14y ago

Alex3917 14y ago
"It portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists." Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.
- wmf 14y ago
  The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but perhaps it's a matter of degree.
  - alwold 14y ago
    I think by "bland" they just mean that they reject people who don't have enough of the conforming resume-building activities that they expect :)
  - Spearchucker 14y ago
    There's a school of thought in the UK that feels institutions like this reject applications from applicants who's family don't have deep pockets. Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-educated idiots. Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out there.
    - socksy 14y ago
      I'm not sure Eton is really applicable here, since the income of your parents matters a whole lot more than the application process (and Eton suffer for it in the league tables) — and whilst you may argue that Ivy League schools do just that, I doubt it's quite to the same extent.
      - 234547556 14y ago
        Bear in mind that the ivy leagues get to grade their own students whereas the etonians sit national exams...
  - EricDeb 14y ago
    Yes... so instead they accept people who superficially differentiate themselves and pretend to be non-conformists which then becomes another "admission strategy."
gojomo 14y ago
This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'. The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.
- etherael 14y ago
  This is a very interesting observation, while I don't doubt the observation about typical elite university students is true, I wonder if the inverse observation about the "general population" is enormously less true. This would be necessary in order to expect a different result from said experiment. In my experience, the person who feels no desire to conform whatsoever is an extreme aberration. Far more frequent are people that pretend to be such and actually simply flip the expected behaviour from a conformist norm and behave in a different way but still conforming to some social group. Sure, they're individuals, just like the other members of their subculture / social clique, etc.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his excellent essay "Lonely Dissent" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/): Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
- cjimmy 14y ago
  The participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't Stanford students. I'm not sure any of them were. They were selected by Zimbardo from responses to an ad in Palo Alto. They were selected for their normal-ness, mentally and physiologically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
  - gojomo 14y ago
    You're right that they may not have been exclusively Stanford students. But they were recruited through city and campus newspapers, limited to male college students who were in Palo Alto for the last two weeks of August 1971, and had to report to an on-campus location to sign up. I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess under those conditions would be that most were. But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1 asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less representative again. (As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes what kind of people respond.)
IsaacL 14y ago
As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming the opposite. We compete and work hard but never ask what it's all for.
- debacle 14y ago
  When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game. It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    > When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game. That's one possible result. There are others.
- chubbard 14y ago
  No generation ever knows what its all for until they're 40 possibly 35 because you're outside the holy grail of advertising demographic. Coincidence? Yea probably. If you haven't figured it out by then your not paying much attention anyway. There's prescript of zoloft by the door for you. Anyway, This essay is much the same that Allan Watts articulated in the 60s and I think he did it with much more panache and charm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4 I find its best to laugh because it really has been a well executed practical joke.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Gen Y are you. The Gen Z millenials are the lazy coddled ones.
jeffpersonified 14y ago
William Deresiewicz's address to West Point, "Solitude and Leadership" (http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/) remains the best piece on leadership I've read to date. Ironically, as pointed out by Deresiewicz, the address is given to newly minted officers in the US military. The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has calcified into "hoop" jumping.
- Estragon 14y ago
  I agree; that is an excellent speech.
- twodayslate 14y ago
  The speech was given to the freshmen at the academy. They still have 4 more years until they become officers.
maeon3 14y ago
95% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of society. It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.
- Peaker 14y ago
  The toxic liquids tend to be actually fun to many :)
  - maeon3 14y ago
    Thank you for being a part of my statistic. Alcohol makes you misrable. Say baaa sheep. :) you were trained to say it's fun by billion dollar psychoogical ad campaigns to brainwash you to think it fun. It's abuse in a bottle, wolves realize this and profit off the sheep.
    - scott_s 14y ago
      You will be miserable if you abuse it. It's quite nice in moderation. (Although I understand if people would rather not drink it, for whatever their reason.) Humanity has made alcoholic drinks for thousands of years, well before modern ad campaigns.
    - necubi 14y ago
      Which is why humans have been drinking alcohol since the dawn of history[0]? I don't think they had billion dollar psychological ad campaigns in ancient mesopotamia... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      Miserable? As a bit of an introvert, alcohol can actually be a powerful tool. Most all humans, myself included, crave social interaction. Sometimes coworkers and a smattering of friends isn't enough, and it can be refreshing to occasionally visit a bar and make friends for the night.
treenyc 14y ago
That is why people who attended Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf school perform so well in College. It is a school that DOES NOT give grades to students. And the teach write feed back to the students based on whole aspects of their development including social interaction. When college get ride of tests and grade will be a good start.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  If colleges get rid of grades, however will Peter Thiel know which hedge fund analysts to hire?
  - treenyc 14y ago
    well, business school like wharton prohibits employers to ask about their graduate's grade anyway.
    - Drbble 14y ago
      That's likely because they promote an image that all their students are perfect. It's also possible, but doubtful, thatthey believe class grades are personal development tools, not external qualifications.
- callil 14y ago
  Hello fellow waldorf student in the wild! Remember that most waldorf schools in the country DO grade in highschool. However it is process that allows for more feedback and conversation about your performance.
  - treenyc 14y ago
    Brought up in China. I was NOT fortunate enough to have being a waldorf student myself. But my various experiences in life have lead me to meet many graduates and teacher of waldorf school. So far all of them I meet a incredibly intelligent and very nice to around.
jeffpersonified 14y ago
Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society. Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."
- schmico 14y ago
  Very true. But this is a virtue of human nature, and power. And in business (very generalised) you have the efficiency cycle and the efficacy cycle. Bosses generally only want advice on how the company can become more efficient, to question efficacy is to question his/her judgement and power. But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.
- tkahn6 14y ago
  Hoop jumping in the real world, however, typically nets you real material wealth.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Those rare people tend to be found in places like Stanford and other great universities and successful businesses like Apple and Google...
Estragon 14y ago
What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.
- mtgentry 14y ago
  I think he means that by framing an activity as a "growth experience", it loses a bit of it's soul. Ghandi, Lindbergh, Jobs - they all changed the world because they had a fire in their belly and couldn't sit still. They didn't pursue things because it would grow their character. They did things because they we're compelled to.
  - fumar 14y ago
    You are correct. Certain individuals have proven that with tenacity anything is possible. Still, it appears most people need structure. Structure, to give them a yardstick to measure themselves by. Stanford, or any college, give students goals. They are prepared sheep with plenty for 'growth experience.'
  - Estragon 14y ago
    Oh, choosing activities on the basis of how they extend experience. Thanks, I understand now.
  - endtime 14y ago
    I don't think a world in which everyone is trying to be (or thinks they are) the next Steve Jobs would be so great.
    - mattstreet 14y ago
      There would be even more kids with no father in their lives.
- pnathan 14y ago
  becomes a rat race when you view life in that light, continually maximizing your life-experience-point measure for all actions taken.
SagelyGuru 14y ago
Don't forget the exams. That is loop jumping par excellence and should you try to be a non-conformist over that, you will be out of college before you know it and unable to listen to these excellent lectures on how not to conform.
joedev 14y ago
"We are slouching toward a glorified form of vocational training." What's wrong with vocational training? Maybe the issue is that the market is demanding vocational skills yet schools are trying to find, or trying to artificially create, a market for liberal-arts skills.
- ElliotMingee 14y ago
  Very good point. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but it also isn't feasible to have an entire society (or even just the population of people with undergraduate/graduate degrees) asking the big questions and shaking everything up. Society needs people to keep the cogs turning which involves a lot of "menial" jobs (I use menial not to imply that they do not require intelligence or skill, but instead to point out that they are simply not novel or unique)
karpathy 14y ago
It's a fair point. Doing well in my undergrad classes felt like a game, and I've developed many rules of playing the game to score many points. I think it's fair to say that good grades are some kind of a measure of combination of ambition, perseverance and determination to be the sheep you're asked to be. The most interesting people I think are those who excel at that game because they realize that it's just the way society functions, but on a side maintain a soul-- interesting extracurricular interests, projects, etc. They use their knowledge not only to pass tests, but attempt to expand on it and apply it in their own creative ways. That's why I think the article's title is not very appropriate. I'd call it "Is Stanford training just (really excellent) sheep?". There are some good arguments to be made for an affirmative answer, and yet that's not who I see when I look around me.
oldschooltaper 14y ago
The "problem" is that the problem that top tier education raises -- the one this topic is focused on -- is not really a problem for graduates of those institutions, namely: Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in whatever sector of the economy. People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to prove it. Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena. Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to think outside the box. The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the people who blindly follow them. There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default" thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has graduated from a top tier institution. .
lhnz 14y ago
I am getting quite tired of listening to people argue for or against conformity. You don't become a shepherd by making yourself into a black sheep. And there is nothing wrong with conforming. There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life. We all seem to want to be rare. But what does rare get you? Solitude. Maybe you truly want this? But think it through: are the grapes so sour? We are social animals. I covet the courage to be and do whatever I wish to. I don't need to be scared to be seen along side others. This is a whim to will. It is crazy to want to be more of an individual than others just for the sake of it, and it has nothing to do with living the way I just mentioned.
- scizo 14y ago
  I generally like this sentiment, but I think there are definitely times when the grapes are too sour. If we aren't able to intellectually ask hard questions that challenge our own assumptions we will never recognize sour grapes.
- schmico 14y ago
  I agree as well, but to a point. Do we really want our most targeted education resources being directed towards conformists? I think these institutions should be (almost) reserved for those who are pursuing leadership and cutting edge thinking.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    Why do you think the place for noncomforists is in an institution? Why would they want to attend an institution?
- eternalban 14y ago
  > Solitude. I can remark on this. (20+ years. Not by choice, entirely.) Your point regarding conformity is valid given the qualification that for the overwhelming majority that is a perfectly reasonable choice. This holds true even for some remarkably exceptional people. As an example, Euler somehow managed to be Euler and a family man. And then you have individuals such as Beethoven who seemed destined for solitude even though he was not happy about it at all. > rare The long standing mantra of "to thine own self be true" holds. This is the golden compass. For some, being true one's self may require the path of solitude. For others, it may not. The rare thing is to follow the sage advice.
astrofinch 14y ago
Well there is also a strong intelligence requirement for getting into Stanford. The real question is how many people of the same age as Stanford students are just as intelligent but less sheeplike? Personally, I would guess that elite university undergraduates make up a fairly large fraction of the people their age who are as smart as they are.
jcnnghm 14y ago
I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual thought and understanding. Memorization will do nothing for you. I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs, and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part time. The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it. Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about. People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.
rayiner 14y ago
We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15 minutes during the day to take care of an errand. Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.
- nazgulnarsil 14y ago
  "Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered." To be fair economics has only been around for 300 or so years. We've had birth control in one form or another for thousands and we haven't even caught up with that yet.
- ShiningThrough 14y ago
  Nailed it completely. Great comment.
- ShardPhoenix 14y ago
  It's not like countries with universal health-care are so different in this respect. People are under a bit less stress but most still aim for normal "sheep"-like jobs and lives.
- gammarator 14y ago
  Daniel Brook's book "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America" [1] does a great job showing how the rising costs of student loans, urban living, and health care drive students into corporate jobs. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=explthedataun-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003F76G2Q http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...
waterlesscloud 14y ago
I think it's far more likely that the faculty of elite schools are selected for being really excellent sheep. They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time. I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince myself that the faculty is doing so.
Lednakashim 14y ago
Are State School Students Just (Mediocre) Sheep?
splicer 14y ago
I'm so fucking glad I'm done school. Now I finally have time to learn things like Prolog :)
- currywurst 14y ago
  Datalog's where the action is at now ;) !
tantalor 14y ago
Two word summary: navel gazing.
kamaal 14y ago
I absolutely hated my academics apart from the patches that involved doing projects and interesting 'real world' work. My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates. Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came from working at a Government Military organization called as GTRE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...). I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my semester holidays. Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic. Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done. Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over again for me.
adrianhoward 14y ago
I don't think it's a Stanford problem, or a university problem, or even an academic problem. It's a people problem. I've seen just as many industry sheep as I have academic ones :-) The sort of folk who are going to just jump through the academic hoops and nothing else are exactly the same sort of people who jump through similar industry hoops. They do what they're supposed to do and not a lot else. The people who see the degree certificate as the goal are the same sort of folk who see the promotion or the parking space or the corner office as the goal. They see the what, but not the why. People seem bent towards that particular approach to life long before they get to work or university.
dazuck 14y ago
This is a pretty discouraging thread to read. The vast majority of posters seem to be of a CS (or related) background, extremely smart (academically, at least), and hold their college experience in low regard. Consensus seems to be that the core CS coursework was pretty easy, forced conformity, and didn't have much interesting material to spark learning or creativity. How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects? Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS. The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc. probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.

142 points by schmico 14y ago

"It portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists." Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.

wmf 14y ago
The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but perhaps it's a matter of degree.
- alwold 14y ago
  I think by "bland" they just mean that they reject people who don't have enough of the conforming resume-building activities that they expect :)
- Spearchucker 14y ago
  There's a school of thought in the UK that feels institutions like this reject applications from applicants who's family don't have deep pockets. Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-educated idiots. Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out there.
  - socksy 14y ago
    I'm not sure Eton is really applicable here, since the income of your parents matters a whole lot more than the application process (and Eton suffer for it in the league tables) — and whilst you may argue that Ivy League schools do just that, I doubt it's quite to the same extent.
    - 234547556 14y ago
      Bear in mind that the ivy leagues get to grade their own students whereas the etonians sit national exams...
- EricDeb 14y ago
  Yes... so instead they accept people who superficially differentiate themselves and pretend to be non-conformists which then becomes another "admission strategy."

gojomo 14y ago

This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'. The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.

etherael 14y ago
This is a very interesting observation, while I don't doubt the observation about typical elite university students is true, I wonder if the inverse observation about the "general population" is enormously less true. This would be necessary in order to expect a different result from said experiment. In my experience, the person who feels no desire to conform whatsoever is an extreme aberration. Far more frequent are people that pretend to be such and actually simply flip the expected behaviour from a conformist norm and behave in a different way but still conforming to some social group. Sure, they're individuals, just like the other members of their subculture / social clique, etc.
- scott_s 14y ago
  Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his excellent essay "Lonely Dissent" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/): Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
cjimmy 14y ago
The participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't Stanford students. I'm not sure any of them were. They were selected by Zimbardo from responses to an ad in Palo Alto. They were selected for their normal-ness, mentally and physiologically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
- gojomo 14y ago
  You're right that they may not have been exclusively Stanford students. But they were recruited through city and campus newspapers, limited to male college students who were in Palo Alto for the last two weeks of August 1971, and had to report to an on-campus location to sign up. I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess under those conditions would be that most were. But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1 asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less representative again. (As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes what kind of people respond.)

IsaacL 14y ago

As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming the opposite. We compete and work hard but never ask what it's all for.

debacle 14y ago
When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game. It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  > When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game. That's one possible result. There are others.
chubbard 14y ago
No generation ever knows what its all for until they're 40 possibly 35 because you're outside the holy grail of advertising demographic. Coincidence? Yea probably. If you haven't figured it out by then your not paying much attention anyway. There's prescript of zoloft by the door for you. Anyway, This essay is much the same that Allan Watts articulated in the 60s and I think he did it with much more panache and charm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4 I find its best to laugh because it really has been a well executed practical joke.
Drbble 14y ago
Gen Y are you. The Gen Z millenials are the lazy coddled ones.

jeffpersonified 14y ago

William Deresiewicz's address to West Point, "Solitude and Leadership" (http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/) remains the best piece on leadership I've read to date. Ironically, as pointed out by Deresiewicz, the address is given to newly minted officers in the US military. The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has calcified into "hoop" jumping.

Estragon 14y ago
I agree; that is an excellent speech.
twodayslate 14y ago
The speech was given to the freshmen at the academy. They still have 4 more years until they become officers.

maeon3 14y ago

95% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of society. It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.

Peaker 14y ago
The toxic liquids tend to be actually fun to many :)
- maeon3 14y ago
  Thank you for being a part of my statistic. Alcohol makes you misrable. Say baaa sheep. :) you were trained to say it's fun by billion dollar psychoogical ad campaigns to brainwash you to think it fun. It's abuse in a bottle, wolves realize this and profit off the sheep.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    You will be miserable if you abuse it. It's quite nice in moderation. (Although I understand if people would rather not drink it, for whatever their reason.) Humanity has made alcoholic drinks for thousands of years, well before modern ad campaigns.
  - necubi 14y ago
    Which is why humans have been drinking alcohol since the dawn of history[0]? I don't think they had billion dollar psychological ad campaigns in ancient mesopotamia... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Miserable? As a bit of an introvert, alcohol can actually be a powerful tool. Most all humans, myself included, crave social interaction. Sometimes coworkers and a smattering of friends isn't enough, and it can be refreshing to occasionally visit a bar and make friends for the night.

treenyc 14y ago

That is why people who attended Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf school perform so well in College. It is a school that DOES NOT give grades to students. And the teach write feed back to the students based on whole aspects of their development including social interaction. When college get ride of tests and grade will be a good start.

MartinCron 14y ago
If colleges get rid of grades, however will Peter Thiel know which hedge fund analysts to hire?
- treenyc 14y ago
  well, business school like wharton prohibits employers to ask about their graduate's grade anyway.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    That's likely because they promote an image that all their students are perfect. It's also possible, but doubtful, thatthey believe class grades are personal development tools, not external qualifications.
callil 14y ago
Hello fellow waldorf student in the wild! Remember that most waldorf schools in the country DO grade in highschool. However it is process that allows for more feedback and conversation about your performance.
- treenyc 14y ago
  Brought up in China. I was NOT fortunate enough to have being a waldorf student myself. But my various experiences in life have lead me to meet many graduates and teacher of waldorf school. So far all of them I meet a incredibly intelligent and very nice to around.

jeffpersonified 14y ago

Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society. Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."

schmico 14y ago
Very true. But this is a virtue of human nature, and power. And in business (very generalised) you have the efficiency cycle and the efficacy cycle. Bosses generally only want advice on how the company can become more efficient, to question efficacy is to question his/her judgement and power. But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.
tkahn6 14y ago
Hoop jumping in the real world, however, typically nets you real material wealth.
Drbble 14y ago
Those rare people tend to be found in places like Stanford and other great universities and successful businesses like Apple and Google...

Estragon 14y ago

What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.

mtgentry 14y ago
I think he means that by framing an activity as a "growth experience", it loses a bit of it's soul. Ghandi, Lindbergh, Jobs - they all changed the world because they had a fire in their belly and couldn't sit still. They didn't pursue things because it would grow their character. They did things because they we're compelled to.
- fumar 14y ago
  You are correct. Certain individuals have proven that with tenacity anything is possible. Still, it appears most people need structure. Structure, to give them a yardstick to measure themselves by. Stanford, or any college, give students goals. They are prepared sheep with plenty for 'growth experience.'
- Estragon 14y ago
  Oh, choosing activities on the basis of how they extend experience. Thanks, I understand now.
- endtime 14y ago
  I don't think a world in which everyone is trying to be (or thinks they are) the next Steve Jobs would be so great.
  - mattstreet 14y ago
    There would be even more kids with no father in their lives.
pnathan 14y ago
becomes a rat race when you view life in that light, continually maximizing your life-experience-point measure for all actions taken.

SagelyGuru 14y ago

Don't forget the exams. That is loop jumping par excellence and should you try to be a non-conformist over that, you will be out of college before you know it and unable to listen to these excellent lectures on how not to conform.

joedev 14y ago

"We are slouching toward a glorified form of vocational training." What's wrong with vocational training? Maybe the issue is that the market is demanding vocational skills yet schools are trying to find, or trying to artificially create, a market for liberal-arts skills.

ElliotMingee 14y ago
Very good point. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but it also isn't feasible to have an entire society (or even just the population of people with undergraduate/graduate degrees) asking the big questions and shaking everything up. Society needs people to keep the cogs turning which involves a lot of "menial" jobs (I use menial not to imply that they do not require intelligence or skill, but instead to point out that they are simply not novel or unique)

karpathy 14y ago

It's a fair point. Doing well in my undergrad classes felt like a game, and I've developed many rules of playing the game to score many points. I think it's fair to say that good grades are some kind of a measure of combination of ambition, perseverance and determination to be the sheep you're asked to be. The most interesting people I think are those who excel at that game because they realize that it's just the way society functions, but on a side maintain a soul-- interesting extracurricular interests, projects, etc. They use their knowledge not only to pass tests, but attempt to expand on it and apply it in their own creative ways. That's why I think the article's title is not very appropriate. I'd call it "Is Stanford training just (really excellent) sheep?". There are some good arguments to be made for an affirmative answer, and yet that's not who I see when I look around me.

oldschooltaper 14y ago

The "problem" is that the problem that top tier education raises -- the one this topic is focused on -- is not really a problem for graduates of those institutions, namely: Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in whatever sector of the economy. People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to prove it. Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena. Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to think outside the box. The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the people who blindly follow them. There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default" thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has graduated from a top tier institution. .

lhnz 14y ago

I am getting quite tired of listening to people argue for or against conformity. You don't become a shepherd by making yourself into a black sheep. And there is nothing wrong with conforming. There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life. We all seem to want to be rare. But what does rare get you? Solitude. Maybe you truly want this? But think it through: are the grapes so sour? We are social animals. I covet the courage to be and do whatever I wish to. I don't need to be scared to be seen along side others. This is a whim to will. It is crazy to want to be more of an individual than others just for the sake of it, and it has nothing to do with living the way I just mentioned.

scizo 14y ago
I generally like this sentiment, but I think there are definitely times when the grapes are too sour. If we aren't able to intellectually ask hard questions that challenge our own assumptions we will never recognize sour grapes.
schmico 14y ago
I agree as well, but to a point. Do we really want our most targeted education resources being directed towards conformists? I think these institutions should be (almost) reserved for those who are pursuing leadership and cutting edge thinking.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Why do you think the place for noncomforists is in an institution? Why would they want to attend an institution?
eternalban 14y ago
> Solitude. I can remark on this. (20+ years. Not by choice, entirely.) Your point regarding conformity is valid given the qualification that for the overwhelming majority that is a perfectly reasonable choice. This holds true even for some remarkably exceptional people. As an example, Euler somehow managed to be Euler and a family man. And then you have individuals such as Beethoven who seemed destined for solitude even though he was not happy about it at all. > rare The long standing mantra of "to thine own self be true" holds. This is the golden compass. For some, being true one's self may require the path of solitude. For others, it may not. The rare thing is to follow the sage advice.

astrofinch 14y ago

Well there is also a strong intelligence requirement for getting into Stanford. The real question is how many people of the same age as Stanford students are just as intelligent but less sheeplike? Personally, I would guess that elite university undergraduates make up a fairly large fraction of the people their age who are as smart as they are.

jcnnghm 14y ago

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual thought and understanding. Memorization will do nothing for you. I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs, and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part time. The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it. Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about. People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.

rayiner 14y ago

We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15 minutes during the day to take care of an errand. Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.

nazgulnarsil 14y ago
"Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered." To be fair economics has only been around for 300 or so years. We've had birth control in one form or another for thousands and we haven't even caught up with that yet.
ShiningThrough 14y ago
Nailed it completely. Great comment.
ShardPhoenix 14y ago
It's not like countries with universal health-care are so different in this respect. People are under a bit less stress but most still aim for normal "sheep"-like jobs and lives.
gammarator 14y ago
Daniel Brook's book "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America" [1] does a great job showing how the rising costs of student loans, urban living, and health care drive students into corporate jobs. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=explthedataun-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003F76G2Q http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...

waterlesscloud 14y ago

I think it's far more likely that the faculty of elite schools are selected for being really excellent sheep. They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time. I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince myself that the faculty is doing so.

Lednakashim 14y ago

Are State School Students Just (Mediocre) Sheep?

splicer 14y ago

I'm so fucking glad I'm done school. Now I finally have time to learn things like Prolog :)

currywurst 14y ago
Datalog's where the action is at now ;) !

tantalor 14y ago

Two word summary: navel gazing.

kamaal 14y ago

I absolutely hated my academics apart from the patches that involved doing projects and interesting 'real world' work. My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates. Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came from working at a Government Military organization called as GTRE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...). I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my semester holidays. Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic. Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done. Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over again for me.

adrianhoward 14y ago

I don't think it's a Stanford problem, or a university problem, or even an academic problem. It's a people problem. I've seen just as many industry sheep as I have academic ones :-) The sort of folk who are going to just jump through the academic hoops and nothing else are exactly the same sort of people who jump through similar industry hoops. They do what they're supposed to do and not a lot else. The people who see the degree certificate as the goal are the same sort of folk who see the promotion or the parking space or the corner office as the goal. They see the what, but not the why. People seem bent towards that particular approach to life long before they get to work or university.

dazuck 14y ago

This is a pretty discouraging thread to read. The vast majority of posters seem to be of a CS (or related) background, extremely smart (academically, at least), and hold their college experience in low regard. Consensus seems to be that the core CS coursework was pretty easy, forced conformity, and didn't have much interesting material to spark learning or creativity. How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects? Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS. The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc. probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.