You lost something when every other person started doing the same thing. Now you have to write or review ten applications instead of one. Now you're going to get paid less because it cost $20k to hire you instead of $2k. Now your company is going to be filled with like-minded people, "hustlers", who do not know how to improve things themselves, just spray and pray until someone mistakenly rewards them.
Seems like a momumental waste of energy being pushed as "hustling". Applying to college should be cooperative between you and the admissions office: asking, are we a good fit? Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
Admissions are sort-of Pareto distributed, so most people admitted were on the edge of being rejected. Since there is a bit of noise in the process, this is why any one individual applying to 10x as many places of a similar tier will be more likely to get into one. But then when everyone does it, no one is more or less likely to get in except those that are actually cooperating with the admissions office. You're burning down the commons for a fleeting bit of warmth. Might I suggest installing a furnace in your house instead?
All I can say is that the method works specifically because people like you exist. It kind of defeats the purpose if we try to change your mind about this.
Lol, yes. If you're a selfish egoist, you probably don't want to convert others to your philosophy.
I think it's possible to punish people who are taking these selfish actions, and I think universities should. Maybe they should make a secret database where they list the people who applied to their university, and subtract off points for every other university they applied to. Or, recruiting agencies can mark down candidates for every other job they are applying to. I don't think they do, and this isn't the startup I want to make or area I want to devote my life to, it just sucks that people are being rewarded for playing negative-sum games.
> Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
What? That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I just found the post to be a helpful reminder of how to have a healthy mindset towards some uncertainties in life, but it seems like you took away something completely different.
What do you mean by "a healthy mindset"? It isn't healthy for society. It isn't healthy in the world where everyone has this mindset. It isn't healthy to treat your life as a lottery, hoping for a winning ticket instead of creating that ticket yourself. The fact that you consider applications to be uncertainties in life is very telling. You can make them much less uncertain, if you stop thinking of them like a lottery and start doing the things that prove you are valuable to others.
Did you know that USAMO qualifiers have >50% rate of admission to MIT? IMO gold medalists have >80% acceptance rate, and it's only so low because international admissions is limited to 10% of the student body. Life is only a lottery if you have an unhealthy mindset holding you back from improving yourself. Just because university admissions involve a lot of luck at the bottom does not mean you have to limit yourself to a bottom feeder spraying and praying to get in.
Again, I think you've completely misinterpreted the post as well as what I'm trying to say. A "healthy mindset" is simply one that gives you a framework to navigate the world without falling into despair when things don't go your way. Learning to accept that things won't always go your way, and that in some cases they might not go your way the majority of the time, but that they don't have to, is one component of that.
I'm not making any recommendations on how people should actually go about finding wealth, or success, or happiness, or whatever it is you're looking for in life; only how to deal with it when they don't get those things immediately.
Again, I think you don't understand: your "healthy mindset" here is a vice. I do not think it is healthy to drink away your woes. I also do not think it is healthy to cope by treating your life like a big lottery. As I have said several times, the reason I do not consider it healthy is it does not actually help you get what you want, and statistically will leave most people worse off. Finally, from a societal perspective, just like drunk driving hurts everyone around you, this coping behavior also hurts everyone around you.
I would be okay with people spreading beliefs that only hold themselves back, especially if it made them happier. However, I draw the line when they endorse antisocial behavior. I've personally been negatively effected by these hustlers' acions. Almost everyone has, whether or not they can articulate why it seems impossible to get interviewed for a job these days.
I'm not at all advocating for treating life like a lottery. I've had overall a successful career due in large part to my own effort, but the best opportunities have come to me simply by being in the right place at the right time, so it would be arrogant to discount luck entirely. I've also had periods of repeated failure, and if I had counted each and every one of those as a score against my own value then I wouldn't have made it this far. Put more simply, the healthy mindset I have is to do what you can, and accept what you can't. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. Easier said than done.
It seems like you're misinterpreting my words through the lens of your own frustrations right now, so I don't think there's anything else I can say to help you. I just hope you find what you're looking for eventually.
You are not even talking about the article at this point. "All it takes is for one to work out" is TFT. You are instead saying, "be stoic in the things you cannot effect." The latter is much more defensible, and something I endorse. But if you hold the latter, then all it takes is for none to work out. You would accept none, even if you would prefer one, two, or ten. Your comment is a classic motte-and-bailey defense.
Wow, I really dislike this framing of life as a lottery. Yes, people can get lucky. You could win the lottery. Statistically, someone else will hold the winning ticket, every time. It's even worse, because graduate school admissions and startup success are correlated between attempts. If you bring a shotgun but you're not even aiming at the target, you're never going to hit it.
It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!
It might be the best outcome for society, but it's not the best outcome for the people. I experienced severe violence directed at my person for most of my life and it caused lifelong trauma. I was further punished for defending myself, expected to just allow people to harm me. During school I was beaten many times, had bones broken, was stabbed with a pocket knife, and had numerous other things happen. Unlike the kids from the bad homes who exacted that violence against me, I didn't get my trauma from home I got it from school.
I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.
I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.
Sorry, I should make it more clear when I'm being sarcastic. I tried to juxtapose these two clauses as close as I could:
> (1) education is just a ranking game
> (2) since the point of education is to help people learn
I feel like people who actually believe your situation was for the best must have a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Either that, or they just don't actually care about you and feel alright with hurting you for a chance of a slight gain for the people they do care about.
It's also a pretty hard sell to claim these kinds of situations are the best for society. If you could produce 2x as many billionaires by expelling the bottom 10% of the population from the education system (and imprisoning them for life), that would be better for society (financially). It might be worse for social reasons, but I kind of find that hard to believe.
This is why I think empathy doesn't scale. It's much easier to point people's empathy towards the person who is ruining their own life, and many others' at school, because they won't have a happy future. It's much harder to point people's empathy towards someone who will likely be successful in the future, even if they're being beat, stabbed, and abused in the present. Especially if they're not even being physically abused, just imprisoned for half their waking hours in a classroom. Empathy is great in very small groups, but not when you're setting policy for hundreds of kids in a school, thousands in the city, or millions across the state. At that point, empathy just ends up hijacked by the worst actors to redirect attention and resources to their own pet causes.
The short answer is people stopped caring about metrics measuring learning, and instead how easy they were to game to support their politics, or make them look like a better teacher or superintendent.
And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
It is pretty hard for one parent to change things for the better, even if just for their child in one classroom. The administration and teachers have so many other things to deal with. It's much harder to change the entire school culture. You can volunteer, and you should!, but you still won't make as large an impact on your child's education as you would hope. In some ways, this is good, because there are lots of crazy parents out there who you don't want making impacts on your child's education, but it's also bad if you're not that crazy parent.
Isn't this exactly what society is built on though? Mutually beneficial interactions borne of choice, not compulsion? And isn't it the sane, rational thing to do to oppose people who compel you to join their community?
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.
I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?
