Comment by dlo
9 years ago
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'?
How is it not "just" ending up at Facebook or Google when you could've BS'd your way through high school, gone to a mediocre state school, and landed a new-grad position at one of those companies? Stanford or X State University, suddenly all of those years mean nothing and new graduates of both schools come to the same starting blocks, only this time at a massive software company where tens of thousands of others follow suit.
Sounds like a let down to me.
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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?
I think you are stereotyping Stanford grads, particularly older ones. There are plenty of Stanford grads outside the US as well as on East Coast, etc. There are also plenty of Stanford grads in medical and science careers.
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
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Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.
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It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
> It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
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People don't exist to 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.