Comment by JoeAltmaier
9 years ago
Hm. I went to Stanford. Famous for diverse, risk-taking non-mediocre graduates. I guess its the exception that proves the rule?
9 years ago
Hm. I went to Stanford. Famous for diverse, risk-taking non-mediocre graduates. I guess its the exception that proves the rule?
I went to Stanford, and I disagree. Sure, there are exceptions, but most fellow alumni I know are very boring.
For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:
- have an "interesting" hobby - work out at the gym - hang out with friends at the bar or club - work on their career - start a "start-up" - travel - ... other very self-serving pursuits
Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford-...
And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something about this. Enough is enough.
Frankly, I'd be disappointed if mob justice prevailed in the case that you highlight above. Stanford hired a (presumably) competent lawyer to investigate the case and found the accused's case to be more compelling.
Nothing I have seen in the case indicates anything beyond a large amount of awkwardness and lack of comfort. Most of the evidence that she was actually discriminated against with regards to tenure is entirely circumstantial.
Having been intimately involved with these systems while at Stanford I have seen how cunningly many intelligent people at these institutions co-opt and leverage the prevalently liberal political attitudes towards race and gender issues for personal motivations, interests and grievances.
In fact I served as a residence assistant and witnessed someone who is now a very prominent politician wrongly accuse one of our students of racial discrimination. Having known the accused student ... I knew for a fact that no discrimination was involved. The student that made the accusation instantly leveraged the incident on several public forums to build political and social capital. His entire persona was based around "fighting racial oppression" -- even when said oppression was constructed purely for personal gain.
> and do little of note besides the following:
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.
If these people's personal statements reflected their true intentions for what they want to do with their Stanford education after they graduated, they wouldn't have gotten in regardless of how good their grades, test scores, and extracurriculars were. Stanford isn't for these people. They could just have gone to some other university, still achieved their personal goals, and made room for people who really mean it when they say they want to make a mark on the world.
I've always wondered what it'd be like to go to Stanford and then just end up at Facebook or Google, alongside many state-school graduates. Would it be a massive let down? Sure, you might have learned more at Stanford than at your peers' state schools, but you are only using as much of your education as your peers are using.
'just'?
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What's wrong or boring about any of the things you mentioned? What would you do differently?
There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
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It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
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Here is another possibility for something to work on. We are deploying IoT at scale without much concern for security. Effectively, we are building a massive weapon for our enemies to use against us -- one that is distributed, fault-tolerant, and built into our infrastructure. We would not be able to escape the consequences of such a weapon.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
Throwing away big chunks of your company for VC cash before you've done a lick of work is risk taking?
What are some examples of "risk-taking"? (I don't think I've know anyone who could be described as risk-takers.)
Stanford is a great school but how do you figure those criteria are something Stanford is famous for?