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Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.

You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.

In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

I'd argue that, while it may not be selfish to have kids, most people who are having kids do it for selfish reasons. They don't want to "die alone". They want to show that they can afford it. They want to vicariously get into Harvard and work in publishing (if traditional publishing still exists in the 2040s at all) and live some imagined high life... even though the probabilities are minuscule and most children are going to inherit a world even shittier than the one we were stuck with.

I don't think I'll have kids. It's the one vote I've got. Why would I stake anything I care about on a society that will almost certainly fail them?

The best route is either to roll your own or go with a service like Ghost. Sure, you'll have to pay hosting, but you're not going to have shitty ads run on your blog.

Substack seems to be a decent technology; the problem is that it's owned by Y Combinator, which means it can't be trusted--if you piss off whoever's running YC at the time, you can be suddenly banned and have your data stolen.

Our healthcare system is an absolute travesty for the poor, but it's pretty lousy even for people who can afford care. I know plenty of people with 7- and 8-figure net worth, people who have connections to the medical system, who've still received substandard care. It's at the point where no one's winning.

On the other hand, for-profit medicine is great for the shareholders.

I see that phrase thrown around a lot. It's a variant of "you're never going to be a billionaire (so you shouldn't be against X)." Why do people assume that you have to think you'll be a billionaire to be against something that would affect billionaires negatively? Is something only wrong if you think you'll find yourself in that position one day?

Obviously cappies (meaning people who support capitalism, who are not necessarily actual capitalists--most aren't) don't walk around believing they personally have a greater than 50% chance of being billionaires. It's hyperbole. That said, they do overestimate their future earning potential while severely underestimating the number of ways in which preexisting social class will block them. This is evidently true; behavior and preferences reveal beliefs, and no one supports capitalism and its extreme inequities unless they harbor a belief--perhaps an underexamined and irrational one--that they'll one day be invited to join the capitalist class, since there's literally nothing to justify the system but "It's good if you're one of them."

This is absolutely going to be used against unionizers, which is what's really meant by "colluding". In the US this is going to get a lot of people fired. In other parts of the world, it's going to get them killed. This kind of software is Zyklon B for the 21st century.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?

There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.

If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?

This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.

Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.

If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.

That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.

I think this is a great idea, but for a different reason. "Elite college" is a relative and somewhat zero-sum term, since it refers not to the quality of education but the quality of job and networking opportunities that are available once a person graduates. The embarrassing truth of these elite colleges is that there's not a whole lot of value-add. The classes are good--well, some of them--but you can find classes that are just as good at a decent state university. Elite colleges don't give anyone the ability to beat the job market; they select those who are likely already to beat it.

They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.

So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.

The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.

Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.

Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.

I bet there are also bodies of work by posters on internet forums, social media etc. that would constitute great works if properly compiled, edited, and promoted.

I'd be careful. People get banned for merely mentioning that guy.

Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example.

If the bosses (the higher-ups, not the middle managers) don't like you, you're not going to get this anyway, and 99% of whether they decide they like you is based on preexisting social class similiarity. The pre-anointed winners with rich, connected daddies benefit from this--they're the ones who get tapped to be CEO's proteges--and they'll be just fine without going into an office.

The rest of us, if we have to go to an office, are just wasting our time so someone else feels important, and that's really it. They don't see us as one of them, so they're not going to invest in our careers, so we have no reason to care beyond the minimum and having to pretend otherwise (that is, indulge and uphold bourgeois false consciousness) is emotional labor we're better off without having to do.

The headline's a bit of a stretch compared to what is really going on.

We're nowhere close to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and we may never get there, because humans with malevolent intentions, bolstered by algorithmic utilities, are already quite dangerous. Give a capitalist or imperialist a computer and you have something far more dangerous than any robot that exists now or will in the next 50 years.

AI (which, in today's world, is mostly advanced statistics) isn't inventing racism, of course; it's picking up on the racial injustices that exist in our society. A loan decision engine that is allowed to use ZIP code (or similarly precise residential information, given the history of redlining) will discriminate against racial minorities not because "the AI is racist" but because it's picking up on preexisting social inequities, like the fact that even in 2022, black Americans get fucked over on the job market (longer periods of unemployment, more likely to be the first ones laid off) and suffer financially as a result.

The fact that human culture is adjusting to unexpected innovations (including, in Go, those generated by programs) is not new. Scientific and technical progress have been major influences on human culture since they have existed.

The other problem with the "we need to fix the system" arguments is that they often ignore the much greater problems in our society.

Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.

We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.

People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught.

Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.

The article describes what it takes to getting published; ie, passing an ever increasing number of gatekeepers. Agents, "blurb writers", publishers, reviewers are all professional gatekeepers, organized in a giant, very strict filter.

If you self-publish, you have to anticipate the tastes of readers. There are millions of them; you have to reach the right ones. The best and the worst are out there, and sometimes the best for one genre are not the right readers for your book. Hit the wrong crowd, and you'll (arguably deservedly) get lackluster reviews.

As a no-name self-pubber, you'll also have to price your first book low--which itself is tricky, because the most price-sensitive readers are not the ones you really want... at some point you run into the boos from the cheap seats problem... so there's a fine line, in discounting, between rewarding early adopters (which you must do) and courting readers who won't be invested enough in your book to generate desirable word-of-mouth, and who might leave lousy reviews.

Ultimately, if you self-publish, you're betting on readers--you're betting on people with no status (nobodies like you and I and 99% of authors; mostly under-25, 75% female) but who are (of course) just as smart as the literati, and who actually read. They will push your book, but they're not influencers or "book buzz" people, so it will happen slowly (the best you can hope for is a slow exponential).

Or you can aim for trade publishing. In that case, you're betting your career on a small number of expensively educated and overly connected people who haven't read for pleasure--haven't read deeply at all; reading for work at a 45-minutes-per-book pace doesn't count--since... well, since they were under-25 nobodies with no social status.

If you do trade publishing, you have to give up on the idea of "great literature". Don't write books you love; write books people will show to their bosses, because that's what you need to get through... a manuscript that people aren't afraid to show to the next person up the chain... and it takes several decision-makers to give your book the nod to even have a chance at playing.

And yeah... MFA fiction is quite a plague. If you write enough books that nobody reads but lots of people claim to read, you can get a prestigious job where you teach other people how to write books that nobody will read. Where have we seen this before?

I want to compare OKRs to Performance Reviews and Roadmapping. They’re all worthwhile ideas that can bring discipline and structure to the chaotic world of business, all dreaded by their participants for some reason.

It's not mysterious, why those things are hated.

In business, there are innate conflicts of interest. The company wants to suck as much out of people, and pay as little, as it can. You want... something else. Not to be exploited. To have a career. To make more money. Doesn't matter. The company is a paperclip maximizer and you are made of atoms it can use for something else. When you write OKRs, you have to generate information that will only be used against you--never for you. You have to pretend that you're doing this out of some sense of mutuality when, in fact, the situation is inherently adversarial.

You might have a decent manager. Great. That happens sometimes. However, all these devices exist as ways for companies to make managers unable to protect their own people. That's why "Agile" time-tracking exists. That's why there are two management structures (product and people management) for reptilian executives to pit against each other. That's why performance reviews with failure quotas exist. For your boss to be able to protect you from the company is the last thing the company wants.

Ball packing (no, it's not some new thing Bay Area VCs are doing--I mean, it probably is also that but it's not what I'm referring to here; rather, it's the n-dimensional analogue of sphere packing) gets stranger in n-dimensions as well.

If you have an n-dimensional integer lattice with unit n-spheres at each even-numbered point, you get inscribed n-spheres. For n = 2, those circles are tiny: about 29% (1-1/sqrt(2)) of the radius of the bigger (r = 1) ones. At n = 3, they're somewhat bigger but still small. At n = 4, they're the same size. At n = 5+, the inscribed n-spheres are actually larger than the unit spheres, which means they extend farther despite being "inscribed". This is probably impossible to visualize, because it's never that way in our 3-dimensional world.

High dimensional spaces also make it difficult to come up with good distance metrics. In 1000+ dimensions, nearly all the volume is on the boundary, and neighborhoods in the classical sense (e.g. visible clusters) don't exist. It's trivial to come up with metrics that "work" but it often requires domain knowledge to come up with ones that are useful.

Casinos are regulated.

Casinos don't dominate the economy.

Casinos haven't wasted the bulk of a generation's top talent to enrich a small number of pederasts in a tiny geographic area.

My view of "morals" laws is that harm reduction should be the policy. Do I like gambling or drug abuse? Of course not. Do I think they should be illegal? Probably not, because empirical evidence shows that harm is better reduced by making these things legal and then regulating them.

Of course, if I found that casinos were having huge negative externalities, then my opinion would change.

Most venture-funded startups solve silly non-problems or in fact cause serious harm to society, but make billions of dollars in doing it.

Meanwhile, we haven't been to the moon since the '70s, life expectancy in the US is declining, and a substantial percentage of our energy comes from coal. Oh, but if you want to bet your life savings on (entries in a distributed ledger that say you own) digital pictures of dog penises, I imagine there's a way to do it.

Technology didn't fix the evil of neoliberalism. It didn't clean anything up. It accelerated the corrosion.

Ninety-nine percent of private equity profits come from taking strategies that are illegal with regulated, public companies and applying them to unregulated assets. And venture capital is a subset of private equity. Almost every conversation VCs have amongst themselves would be considered market manipulation if it pertained to an exchange-traded company, and of course the fact that it's all insider trading goes without saying. So no one should be surprised.

It's astonishing how much money can be made while providing absolutely nothing of value to society.

Capitalism isn't the cause of all police brutality, but the upper class deliberately divides working people against each other, which creates the racism and classism (middle vs. lower) that makes it commonplace and which make brutal, racist police officers (who are probably not the majority) nearly invulnerable. You'd still have a few incompetent cops in any economic system, but it's because of capitalism's doing that there are so many bad apples on forces.

As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century.

Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster.

In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back.

It's not just B-school; the predictive variable is the social class of the students.

In low-income public schools, the problems are systemic and have more to do with society than the quality of teachers (which is not as poor as the right wants people to believe). The teachers are mostly fine; the total environment is broken, as the students live in a society that has already (through no fault of theirs) given up on them. So, there, the school ends up functioning as daycare, but there's pressure due to crowding to pass kids even when they didn't really learn anything. It's administration that pushes teachers to lower standards.

In the middle-income public schools, the problem of relaxed standards probably exists the least. You don't have entitled parents (until college, it's the parents who cause these sorts of problems--the kids find it embarrassing) suing over a B-minus in biology and what it will do to little Timmy's future, but--unlike in a low-income area--you don't have the problem of kids being unable to concetrate on homework because of living in a world that is actively at war with them.

In the prep schools, and also the Ivy League colleges, there are a lot of sue-happy students and parents, and even though these lawsuits have an infinitesimal chance of actually winning, administrators would rather just change a grade, and of course the parents know that most people prefer the path of least resistance. Over time, this leads to people doing it preemptively, and the standard declines. This obviously isn't what educators want, and it's often not happening consciously.

For an example, every Ivy League college has, informally, two economics tracks. There's the "real econ" track in which the students study actual economics--and usually have to take real analysis--and then there's pre-banker econ where the courses barely require any work and grades below a B+ are simply not given. If you want to challenge yourself, you can, and you're going to have to do some serious work if you want to come out in the top 10% at an Ivy... but you don't have to.

Disagree. Business schools have upgraded the "Gentleman's C" to an A-minus, due to grade inflation. (I wouldn't use the word "gentleman", though; most of the people today have no culture.) Even at Ivy League colleges, while you can challenge yourself and learn a whole lot--there's nothing wrong with the programs, and the professors are often top-notch--you don't have to do so, because there are plenty of rich kids with no real talent or work ethic but who need a good enough GPA to get into investment banking.

One of the reasons the Soviet system had so many unpleasant years is that it was a system of economic totalitarianism. If Stalin wanted a road built in Siberia, he would make sure it happened. Your whole life belonged to the economy; people grew to resent that.

We also live under economic totalitarianism. The reptilians at Davos decide what work you're allowed to do, where you're allowed to work, what kind of friendship circle you will be able to maintain, and everything else. If the self-appointed "jawb creators" decided to create more jawbs in eastern Wyoming (to build "performance improvement" camps, let's say) then you are expected to "move where the jobs are"--at your expense, of course.

Employed work is not everything.

I could be wrong, but I'm interpreting the OP as expressing frustration not at the school system, but at a labor market that has no demand for creativity (except in the few remaining good jobs, which have pretty much all been earmarked by the upper classes for their underwhelming kids). That is, I don't see OP as arguing that education should be reduced to job skills, so much as that maybe we shouldn't tolerate the mismatch between an educational system that does nurture (some) creativity and the prison-like employment conditions that 99% of people will face.

In my ~20-year career I have never once been in a workplace setting where creativity wasn't valued.

Mayhaps, but if true this is atypical and fortunate. Ninety-nine percent of people get shunted into subordinate labor with no creative meat, in which their job is to support the manager's career and that it all that matters--and this is also true in software, now that the Jira jockeys have taken over and turned it into ticket-shop day labor. Congrats if you've escaped the sprint work, but most people can't.

The purpose of school isn't to create employees.

I'm not OP, but I think his question is more, "Why does school set people up to be disappointed by the jobs available to them?" Not, "Why does school teach things that aren't necessary on a job site?"

The ambiguous intention behind the question has spawned two separate discussions in this thread, one of which isn't that interesting because I think we all agree (that there's more to life and education than employment).

If I'm right and his stance is the first, I'm sympathetic to it. The system, while training people for jobs better than what will actually exist for them, isolates people from its most broken aspects (workplaces), promising betterment and skill advancement, during the age of peak revolutionary energy. By the time they figure out what employment really is--for most people, an exploitative and unforgivable waste of their time--they are already in their late 20s, and any revolutionary movement has been deprived of their most energetic years.

It's not that employers don't reward creativity quite the opposite most do.

Most employers don't reward or punish creativity itself. They don't care. As long as the boss doesn't look bad in front of his boss, no one cares either way if you're creative. The system, however, is built not to rely on individual excellence (that being rare, and usually coming with personality). You can do fine without creativity; the disruptive elements that almost always come with a creativty personality are never appreciated in the corporate world.

The real problem is employers do not like this unbridled creativity that is not tempered with experience.

No, that's not it. (I do agree that creativity grows in value with experience, and that experience is undervalued in the technology industry, but that's a separate debate.) It's just that more experienced people know to hide their creativity unless there's a major personal payoff (i.e., a massive promotion or 6+ figure bonus) because otherwise there is only downside. Sometimes, just doing your job too well can cause problems by making others look bad.

This has been studied quite a bit by sociologists. Schools in low-income areas tend to reward subordination and punish self-expression. Closed campuses, metal detectors, the start-of-class bells... the messages are clear. Schools in middle-income areas tend to nurture some more creativity, though within limits; the upper-class prep schools tend to be most academically lenient (although the students are brutal and hazing/sexual abuse are common).

So... this is mostly a middle- to upper-middle class perspective, that of people who were bred to take white-collar "creative" jobs that are no longer creative and haven't been for ~40 years, due to consolidation and geographic polarization (e.g., society no longer has demand for cutting-edge advertising firms in Duluth or even Minneapolis).