6 ms·

That is very sad but understandable, incentivize is hard to overcome Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants

asdsadasdasd123 1y ago
this whole thing is like a crypto currency exercise where you input x compute for an expected value of y prestige points over 3 yrs
charcircuit 1y ago
If they look at more than it makes sense to spend more time improving all of those aspects instead of wasting time at school.
- DrBenCarson 1y ago
  Which is why American universities require a HS diploma and good grades in a variety of subjects
  - mattmcknight 1y ago
    But why waste time getting the grade if you could pass the final today?
331c8c71 1y ago
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile. Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc. Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.
- DrBenCarson 1y ago
  Look I’m a first generation American with a sister 3 years younger. We grew up in poverty in the 2008 aftermath. Like food stamps and stretching leftovers by mixing them with pasta broke I navigated the system alone for myself then again to help her after I had learned from all my college friends. We both went to “prestigious private schools” with single digit acceptance rates and have similarly “prestigious” jobs Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
  - lordnacho 1y ago
    "I did it so it isn't impossible" Not really convincing. How many poor kids did not even come to an understanding of how the admission system works? How many kids did not even know what work was to be put in? I am also someone born at the bottom (my first passport was a convention of 1951 passport), who went to a world famous university. As I've gotten older, I've realized it's not really a useful way to think about it. We like to say "you can do it if you really try", but it's just not true. Not only is it not true, it's a thought-ending statement that makes it easier for rich kids and harder for poor kids, because why would you need to support the poor kids if they can just work really hard? Even you have to be able to see that you got lucky. When I applied, the entrance rate for my course was about 8%. I had no idea that I could have tried easier courses, or that I could have filled the form in slightly differently for a better shot. A single-digit acceptance rate is a lottery. You could do everything the same again and not get in. You don't realize it when you get in, because you happen to get questions that you can answer, but there's a heck of a lot of questions an Oxford professor can ask an 18 year old that will make him look bad. When I arrived, of course all the other kids were ordinary upper middle class kids. People went to feeder schools where they teach you how to do the Oxbridge interview. People who didn't grow up pinching every penny. What happened to the poor, hard-working kids? They're mostly not there.
    - jajko 1y ago
      What about stepping back a bit and realizing that proper life success has almost nothing to do with school you go to? I am not saying not going to school per se, but this hard focus on career as soon as possible... where is focus on quality of life for example? Optimizing hard for some rat race for some soulless (or soul crushing) office jobs among high functioning sociopaths that management inevitably always is. Most of those folks are not properly happy by any measure, thats not a win in life to end up there nor something to respect. We are in rather unique period of time, especially folks here, that life fulfillment and happiness can be achieved for almost everybody and not just some top 0.1% if correct direction is taken. How about we realized that and focused more on actually long term important aspects of life? (here is another guy who went the proverbial rags-to-modest-riches on my own but I would never had such mindset, when talking about successes of my life its about countries I've travelled, people I've met and intense experiences that shaped me more than career paths taken)
android521 1y ago
Massive corruption and discrimination (like discrimination against asian students in US universities) would take place if you introduce more dimensions (most of them are subjective and can be gamed)
willvarfar 1y ago
Are all the applicants who find school unfulfilling so skip it to go straight to university 1 dimensional? For example, some might be more mature than their peers and are going to flower at university.
bko 1y ago
Disagree. Peter Thiel wrote about this in zero to one. The "well rounded" candidate is essentially hedging their bets. An indefinite optimist. > You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular. > A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball. Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.
- strken 1y ago
  Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters. I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.
david927 1y ago
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants They really, really do. Admission to top universities has become hyper competitive. They're getting tens of thousands of highly qualified applicants with perfect GPAs and great SAT scores. So what they're looking at is more, "Will admission to this university help them to do something special?" or is admission the end goal for the student. And one way to see that is if the applicant is well-rounded and explorative. Are they setting creative fires everywhere they go?
klooney 1y ago
> discouraging 1 dimensional applicants Often when you look at the other dimensions, it's a way for the admissions office to smuggle in criteria that other people find objectionable.
jerf 1y ago
The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Fundamentally, the university is going to analyze all its applicants, more-or-less rank them according to its standards, and then take the top X applicants according to its metrics. Since you can't half-accept someone, there isn't a way to do anything else. And once you have that measure, you are now subject to Goodhart's law [1]. There is no escape. So, your university gives points for applicants who have extracurricular activities? Here comes someone that joined 15 clubs. Oh, do you want them to be leaders in their activity? Here comes someone who is the president of six clubs, and founded two more. Oh, do you want them academically accomplished instead? Here comes someone who in high school published six scientific papers (please don't look too hard at which journals they were in). No, wait, we don't like what that's encouraging, let's just look at standardized test scores... and here come the perfect scores. Applicants will make themselves one dimensional. They'll tune to whatever dimension you're measuring on, no matter what you try to do to the basis vector of that dimension. And they'll beat out anyone who is just being normal, or even more cynically, just being honest about their actual activities. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- phi0 1y ago
  One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking. The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once. [1]: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
- yubblegum 1y ago
  > The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Ultimately all things are reducible to a function applied to the state of the world. The entire point is that by introducing additional dimensions to the metrics of 'acceptable for admission' the 'representation of the student' ("state of the world") is made out of a higher dimensional variable. Now, you can game the "one dimensional" student representation or the n-dimensional version. For each of the possible (predictable, finite set) attacks on the function there can be remedies. where there are cases where we can not have effective remedies, that fact itself appears to be independent of the number of dimensions. Ultimately, it seems hard to argue against a higher dimensional metric given that it is more information rich. And, I venture to guess young teens would also welcome the mere possibility of 'choices' in electing areas to excel.

asdsadasdasd123 1y ago

this whole thing is like a crypto currency exercise where you input x compute for an expected value of y prestige points over 3 yrs

charcircuit 1y ago

If they look at more than it makes sense to spend more time improving all of those aspects instead of wasting time at school.

DrBenCarson 1y ago
Which is why American universities require a HS diploma and good grades in a variety of subjects
- mattmcknight 1y ago
  But why waste time getting the grade if you could pass the final today?

331c8c71 1y ago

> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile. Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc. Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.

DrBenCarson 1y ago
Look I’m a first generation American with a sister 3 years younger. We grew up in poverty in the 2008 aftermath. Like food stamps and stretching leftovers by mixing them with pasta broke I navigated the system alone for myself then again to help her after I had learned from all my college friends. We both went to “prestigious private schools” with single digit acceptance rates and have similarly “prestigious” jobs Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
- lordnacho 1y ago
  "I did it so it isn't impossible" Not really convincing. How many poor kids did not even come to an understanding of how the admission system works? How many kids did not even know what work was to be put in? I am also someone born at the bottom (my first passport was a convention of 1951 passport), who went to a world famous university. As I've gotten older, I've realized it's not really a useful way to think about it. We like to say "you can do it if you really try", but it's just not true. Not only is it not true, it's a thought-ending statement that makes it easier for rich kids and harder for poor kids, because why would you need to support the poor kids if they can just work really hard? Even you have to be able to see that you got lucky. When I applied, the entrance rate for my course was about 8%. I had no idea that I could have tried easier courses, or that I could have filled the form in slightly differently for a better shot. A single-digit acceptance rate is a lottery. You could do everything the same again and not get in. You don't realize it when you get in, because you happen to get questions that you can answer, but there's a heck of a lot of questions an Oxford professor can ask an 18 year old that will make him look bad. When I arrived, of course all the other kids were ordinary upper middle class kids. People went to feeder schools where they teach you how to do the Oxbridge interview. People who didn't grow up pinching every penny. What happened to the poor, hard-working kids? They're mostly not there.
  - jajko 1y ago
    What about stepping back a bit and realizing that proper life success has almost nothing to do with school you go to? I am not saying not going to school per se, but this hard focus on career as soon as possible... where is focus on quality of life for example? Optimizing hard for some rat race for some soulless (or soul crushing) office jobs among high functioning sociopaths that management inevitably always is. Most of those folks are not properly happy by any measure, thats not a win in life to end up there nor something to respect. We are in rather unique period of time, especially folks here, that life fulfillment and happiness can be achieved for almost everybody and not just some top 0.1% if correct direction is taken. How about we realized that and focused more on actually long term important aspects of life? (here is another guy who went the proverbial rags-to-modest-riches on my own but I would never had such mindset, when talking about successes of my life its about countries I've travelled, people I've met and intense experiences that shaped me more than career paths taken)

android521 1y ago

Massive corruption and discrimination (like discrimination against asian students in US universities) would take place if you introduce more dimensions (most of them are subjective and can be gamed)

willvarfar 1y ago

Are all the applicants who find school unfulfilling so skip it to go straight to university 1 dimensional? For example, some might be more mature than their peers and are going to flower at university.

bko 1y ago

Disagree. Peter Thiel wrote about this in zero to one. The "well rounded" candidate is essentially hedging their bets. An indefinite optimist. > You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular. > A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball. Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.

strken 1y ago
Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters. I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.

david927 1y ago

> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants They really, really do. Admission to top universities has become hyper competitive. They're getting tens of thousands of highly qualified applicants with perfect GPAs and great SAT scores. So what they're looking at is more, "Will admission to this university help them to do something special?" or is admission the end goal for the student. And one way to see that is if the applicant is well-rounded and explorative. Are they setting creative fires everywhere they go?

klooney 1y ago

> discouraging 1 dimensional applicants Often when you look at the other dimensions, it's a way for the admissions office to smuggle in criteria that other people find objectionable.

jerf 1y ago

The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Fundamentally, the university is going to analyze all its applicants, more-or-less rank them according to its standards, and then take the top X applicants according to its metrics. Since you can't half-accept someone, there isn't a way to do anything else. And once you have that measure, you are now subject to Goodhart's law [1]. There is no escape. So, your university gives points for applicants who have extracurricular activities? Here comes someone that joined 15 clubs. Oh, do you want them to be leaders in their activity? Here comes someone who is the president of six clubs, and founded two more. Oh, do you want them academically accomplished instead? Here comes someone who in high school published six scientific papers (please don't look too hard at which journals they were in). No, wait, we don't like what that's encouraging, let's just look at standardized test scores... and here come the perfect scores. Applicants will make themselves one dimensional. They'll tune to whatever dimension you're measuring on, no matter what you try to do to the basis vector of that dimension. And they'll beat out anyone who is just being normal, or even more cynically, just being honest about their actual activities. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

phi0 1y ago
One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking. The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once. [1]: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
yubblegum 1y ago
> The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Ultimately all things are reducible to a function applied to the state of the world. The entire point is that by introducing additional dimensions to the metrics of 'acceptable for admission' the 'representation of the student' ("state of the world") is made out of a higher dimensional variable. Now, you can game the "one dimensional" student representation or the n-dimensional version. For each of the possible (predictable, finite set) attacks on the function there can be remedies. where there are cases where we can not have effective remedies, that fact itself appears to be independent of the number of dimensions. Ultimately, it seems hard to argue against a higher dimensional metric given that it is more information rich. And, I venture to guess young teens would also welcome the mere possibility of 'choices' in electing areas to excel.