>"The smartest kids in the class had reputable externally-recognizable marks of status --- their top-ranked grades on exams and homeworks --- and thus did not need to assert their intelligence."
Having the top grades on exams and homework doesn't in any way demonstrate that those kids are the smartest in the class. Grades are correlated with intelligence to some degree, but much more strongly correlated with work-ethic and compliance.
Which is still a ridiculous point: A/A+ students are not necessarily smarter, more successful, more intelligent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it than B+/A- students. His sole defense of that assertion is
if you're so damn smart, wouldn't it take you just slightly more effort to get an A
which I cannot characterize as anything else but a total lack of any sense of what someone may want to do with his time, other than obtain high grades, combined with the unfounded accusation that they all consider themselves capable of doing better.
He completely rules out the possibility that out of numbers 5 through 15 out of a 100, five may rather want to spend their time, let's say, starting a company, practicing a sport or contributing code to some open source project.
That's when the real problem shows it's ugly head: they are made to feel like they have to excuse themselves for their grades, as anything below 'perfect' is always questioned, as the article did: "why don't you get higher grades?"
For me, the answer really was exactly as he says: because I have a fucking life out of school. However, the intention of that answer wasn't to play down the grades of others or to assert my intelligence. I won't deny they usually also have a life out of school. The intention was purely and solely: to answer the question that everyone keeps asking. I've given that answer so many times I can only think of it shouted with the expletive in it. And then grade-obsessed nitwits like this guy throw a hissy fit because they think I'm trying to trump them. No, I don't bloody care about trumping you. If I cared, I would spend my time trying to score higher grades, so I'd get into that prestigious university. I'm not sure I would succeed, but the point is: I'm not even trying to best you. God, guys like this still piss me off. They don't want to accept the fact that there may have been guys that could outdo them, but didn't bother.
> They don't want to accept the fact that there may have been guys that could outdo them, but didn't bother.
I guess I was one of these guys too. I perceived striving for best grades as inefficient use of my time. I remembered interesting things automatically, I memorized things useful for applications of interesting things with bit of effort. With the rest, I didn't bother. For much effort on my side reward would be very little if any, so I was satisfied with any grade I got, as long as it was passing grade (it was not always easy to get, lack of interest and reputation in the subject sometimes makes getting passing grade really hard).
I believe that striving for best grades can have significant mental risk because some things depend only on chance and there is nothing more stressful than seeing how your hard effort becoming pointless by silly accident of teacher being in a bad mood.
That changed a little bit in college. There I was satisfied with grades that gave me grade average high enough to get highest merit-based scholarship, because I always liked getting money for something else than my time. With this strategy I ended up as one of 10 best graduates.
Along the way, when current school topics aligned with my interests I was getting highest grades. In case of C++ course after spending week on reading interesting half of Bjarne Stroustrup's book, on tests I was pointing out the mistakes in test questions, and providing two answers, one according to intention of the question writer and other according to exact erroneous phrasing of the question. The grade I got was something like A++ (no one else got it) and it was illegal so on later occasions it was counted as A+).
When topics diverged from my interests other people were doing better. I wasn't jealous of them because I was never interested in competing with them on their ground and I was pretty sure that on grounds that were important to me they could never be significantly better than I was. When I think of this now I never actually felt good about beating them in my domain. I felt that if they were as interested in these things as I was they could achieve similar results as I did.
Hi Confusion, I totally agree 100% with all of your points. I have absolutely no problems with people who choose to devote their energies outside of their schoolwork. My gripe is with kids who don't do that well in school but then vocally brag about how smart they are in particular school topics. A contrived example would be some kid in your high school class who is a solid B student but is always bragging about how he knows the material inside-out. I think that if you want to brag about how good you are in class, then you should probably have the grades to back it up, since by definition, grades are the metric by which people judge you in a particular class. I'm in no way saying that kids who don't do well in class aren't smart ... I definitely know people who didn't get great grades but are amazing hackers.
"A/A+ students are, by definition, more successful at school than B+/A- students. That's the only sense of the phrase I meant it in."
More successful in school. There is very little value in getting high grades until the later years of high school. Working hard in middle school is a waste of time. The smartest kids would do the minimum amount of work to pass their classes and ensure they have a solid understanding of the material. Especially when you look back and remember how much of the middle school curriculum involved drawing bubble letters and pasting printed photos on to Bristol board.
Really? Walk through the curriculum starting around the 3rd grade onwards - It basically sets up a foundation for future learning in all disciplines. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic - I remember the precise instant (3rd grade) that I was introduced to the concept of a negative number. It blew my mind. And science classes theory in seventh and eights grade were awesome - if I hadn't been grinding I probably would have never learned about umbra's and penumbras, angle of reflection, etc... as well I did.
I think you get out of any experience (Sports, School, Start Ups) what you put into it. And I have to agree - the entire point of the article, that people who haven't been able to demonstrate "success" in school, do tend to be a bit more defensive than those who have. I don't know if this applies to other fields (Sports, Startups) - but it's certainly seen in schools with regards to academic achievement. (BTW, We can all agree to hate the valedectorian who not only graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, but also spent close to 30% of her final two years of high school traveling Europe, preparing for the winter olympics, and participating in the debate club)
Not by definition, because the definition of success at school isn't "getting high grades". School is not the end, it's only a means. If I had to give a single metric for success at school it would be 'education'; those who learn more are more successful at school. This isn't necessarily reflected by test scores.
It's the metric that is used to judge academic success.
Really, all of this is besides the point that the author was trying to make. You're getting caught up in his example, but ignoring his point. Grades are a metric of a kind of success. I agree that education is more important than grades, but that's not what the example was about.
I'm not trying to score rhetorical points here, but it seems like you're trying to change the subject after having one of your unconscious assumptions brought to your attention.
Everybody has them, and, er... by definition... nobody is aware of them. Most people try and forget all about them when they do become visible, but is that the ideal reaction?
I feel not that I'm trying to change the subject, but reign it back in.
I assumed people would recognize that what I meant when I said "more successful" in the context of an objective metric like grades. I hoped that pointing out that the author was more concerned about success in a general endeavor than in the specific example he used would clarify the point he tried to make. I was wrong.
True, but they hold something that is generally recognized as a mark of intelligence. Whether or not it is actually a mark of intelligence is irrelevant to his point.
And for being duped into believing this little lie, Mr. Guo has singularly proven that Stanford folks are not as smart as their reputation makes them out to be.
Fair enough, I can see how that was trollish. So I'll elaborate.
Mr. Guo exists in a world built upon a false axiom, "only the smartest make it into the top schools, and that people who don't make it into those schools are obviously not the smartest." Making it into a top school implies top grades. And since only top grades can get you into top schools, only the smartest get top grades.
Since people who have made it into top schools are the smartest, it is obvious that they do not need to demonstrate their intelligence, schooling or other such
This is the thrust of his entire argument, period. Yet anybody with access to the Internet knows that top grades correlate poorly to other measures of intelligence. Being common knowledge, perpetuating notion that top grades = top intellect is clearly a basic untruth (maybe "lie" is too trollish, dunnah).
Therefore (spelling it out formally now),
If top grades != top intellect
and top grades implies entrance into top schools
the students at top schools are not guaranteed to be persons of top intellect
Since we have now formally established that not all the people at Stanford (just using Mr. Guo's school as an exemplar here) are not of the top intellect, we know that there exists people who attended non-top schools who are of the top intellect (or did not attend post 12th grade schooling at all!).
And we also know that, using this article as an exemplar as well, that there exists people who are inclined, like Mr. Guo, to assume that people who did not attend a top school are also not of top intellect, that persons of top intellect who did not attend a top school must therefore clarify this basic truth to persons like Mr. Guo.
The problem with this of course is that Mr. Guo works off of a false axiom, so people who have tried to clarify this to him are viewed as, to use Mr. Guo's own word choice, disreputable?
wow, that is quite a stretch from what i said or implied in my article! Here is my central thesis:
"Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status."
i'm sorry that i didn't make it more clear up-front (and my intro about school grades wasn't the greatest choice), but the central tenet of my article is that i am comparing people "with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills". in other words, i'm asking you to compare identical twins, one who went to a well-known university and the other who went to a lesser-known university. i'm definitely not saying that one is smarter than the other :) quite the opposite, actually ... i'm controlling for intelligence/technical-skills
i really hope that i didn't write or imply any of what you accused me of writing, namely that i somehow feel that people who didn't make it into a well-known school are "not of the top intellect" ... if i did, please please point that out, and i will immediately take down the offending portions of that article. i don't want people mis-interpreting what was meant to be a simple statement.
Glad the author is here, so this doesn't stay one-sided! Some people here apparently think I'm trolling, but I'm simply cutting to the chase and hoping for a spirited and informed debate.
Mr. Guo, your article stands in opposition to itself. On the one hand, you try to state that "given comparable levels of intelligence or skill" and on the other "only the smartest have the highest grades". Your only example is one that does not draw a comparison of comparable persons (or rather, reaches the conclusion that an A student and a B student are not comparable or equivalent). And then you directly relate this situation of grades=intelligence to the world of adults. You don't say, "only smart people get into top schools", but the implication is pretty apparent.
Over the past few decades, largely because of the rise of the Internet, and the equalization of information access this brings about, name brand schools are finding themselves greatly diminished in reputation (it probably didn't help that our last president was mysteriously from Yale). World class research now regularly comes from lesser known schools without ridiculously large endowments. I'm not sure the same could be said 50-100 years ago. Yet an attitude persists in the "adult world" that people from tier-1 schools should start their careers higher and progress faster because they have somehow received a higher quality of education from their esteemed institutions of higher learning.
I think that this attitude is demonstrably false. In 14 years I've worked with a variety of people from a variety of educational backgrounds and I've seen virtually no difference in performance across the board. In fact, in the last two years I've had to take 2 Ivy League grads off of projects because of their failure to perform.
Understandably, many grads from these schools don't turn down these unearned opportunities (when was the last time you heard of a Harvard grad asking for a smaller starting salary because it wasn't fair?). I wouldn't. But to the folks who did not, for whatever reason (grades, opportunity, money, family, immigration, etc.), attend a name brand school, this unfairness smacks of all kinds of bad.
If I choose to ignore the elitist garbage in your post and focus only on your stated central argument, you decry their only avenue of dealing with the situation -- making noise about it. Yet you offer no other alternative except for an unstated "you shoulda gone to a better school then."
You've chosen to define this state of things as elitism, if you can find me a dictionary with a definition of elitism that matches your I'll eat my hat. You do hit the nail on the head with this however,
"Such an attitude is understandable, since alumni from top-tier schools have an implicit symbol of status from the name-recognition of their diploma, but alumni from more obscure universities often get puzzled replies of "hmmm, sorry, never heard of that place" when they mention their alma mater. Thus, in order to prove themselves as worthy colleagues, they must strive to more actively advertise and demonstrate their skills and technical competence, because their peers, superiors, and outside observers are not going to give them the benefit of the doubt."
A person saying "but I'm just as good as that guy from a name branded school!" is not elitism by any possible stretch of the word. It's a desire to seek equality and be given a fair shake. Something that, being a student two name branded schools you will never ever have to deal with. For a salient example, can you guess how immensely hard it is to even get a call back let alone a job from Google if you didn't graduate a top school? Who's elitist? The Stanford grads that don't call back the folks who graduated from xyz State University, or the people who graduated from xyz State University? These people have to make noise just to be seen beyond the brick wall of tier-1 graduated middle level managers in any organization.
But to my reading of the entirety of the article, what you seem most upset about is the declining status of the elite schools, and that people should have the temerity point this out in the real world. Instead of elitism, I think you are trying to turn this state of things into a kind of victimization. It's kind of sad really, the rest of us peons have had to get by on merit, it's time that the elite did also.
This time around you have some very interesting and well reasoned points.
But it does not diminish from the original points of the essay. People who lack visible status indicators will tend to make a lot of noice about how good they. This may be justified, or not depending on the person. It may be necessary, or not depending on the circumstances. But the tendency to do it is definitely there.
There is also a tendency, in some of these people making a lot of noise, to do it in the form of diminishing others.
A person who makes a lot of noice about how good they comes accross as at least slightly arrogant, someone who does this in the form of trying to lower others can come across as elitist.
I agree completely about people putting others down. I would call it more "bullying" than elitist. But that's just semantics.
I also agree with the claim that more disadvantaged people will make more noise to get noticed. That's because they have to.
The alternative is to simply accept the fallacy that people from elite backgrounds are simply better than you.
> There is also a tendency, in some of these people making a lot of noise, to do it in the form of diminishing others.
So likewise, what many non-elite persons perceive is that, through various overt and subtle messages, that elites broadcast that they are better than non-elites. Perhaps through acts like social exclusion or hiring discrimination. I don't think that instances of a person saying "~~~I~~~ went to Harvard, and ~~~you~~~~ didn't so nyah" are all that common (but they do happen).
I think the author gets this and does in fact rail against this practice as a form of bullying.
ok, this is your most convincing post yet. i concede defeat, on two main points ...
1.) i can now understand why my intro regarding high school grades led people to make certain assumptions about what i was trying to say; again, horrible choice of intro
2.) i don't think my definition of elitism or elitist behavior matches up with the commonly-accepted definition, so that is where lots of conflicts seem to be arising
could you please email me at the address i posted on my webpage? (i haven't figured out if you can private message on HN yet, sorry) i want to ask you something personally ... don't worry, it's nothing scary or bad :)
Live and learn. You've suffered a withering attack here, but you've continued to engage. I like that, upvoted for balls.
At the very least it was a popular and thought provoking article that warranted lots of passionate debate. Borderline trollish, but with enough elements of truth as to make for interesting forum fodder!
Email being sent if I can figure out this Internet thing with the education I received from a 2nd rate school ;)
His arguments are not built on that axiom. Never does he claim that the "only the smartest" people make it into the top schools. His argument is based on signals (such as grades and pedigree), not actual intelligence.
His claim is that some people who lack one signal (academic pedigree) will try to compensate with another signal (elitism).
"Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery."
and the content are in conflict.
Before the first paragraph is even over Mr. Guo has provided his actual claim
"the most arrogant and academically-snobby kids in the classroom were the ones who were undoubtedly smart but not the smartest. _The smartest kids in the class had reputable externally-recognizable marks of status --- their top-ranked grades on exams and homeworks --- and thus did not need to assert their intelligence._"
I'm not really sure how much more clear that needs to be made. The parallel he then draws is:
"As adults, one common external mark of status is the reputation of one's college. Just like how there are name-brand clothing lines and electronics products, there are also name-brand colleges: What college-educated person hasn't heard of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford? Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status."
The argument is clear and I stand by my statement. The elitism in the article is clear, and it's not the tier 1+n schooled folks. You'll have to recheck your receiver because the only signal I'm getting from this is, "hey state school, did I give you permission to talk? The grown ups can't hear each other over the racket you're making."
Just because it's couched in fancified language like "externally-recognizable marks of status" doesn't change what he's saying.
that beautifully sums up the thrust of my article way better than my article actually did ;)
sorry for seeming like i'm sucking up, but i think that comments on HN are amongst the highest quality i've seen on the web ... perhaps there should be an online service where an intelligent crowd reads articles and tries to summarize them succinctly in one sentence or paragraph. i think that this organically occurs with lots of articles posted on HN ... amongst the dozens of comments, there will be a few awesome summaries.
'I remember that some of the most arrogant kids were the A-/B+ students who always took the opportunity to assert that, although they did not get as high marks as the A/A+ students, they were somehow 'smarter' in other ways '
this is the author here ... since this post seems to have spawned the largest thread, hopefully i can address it at its root. i now realized that this was a horrible way to start the article, for several reasons:
1.) it makes people debate grades vs. intelligence vs. likelihood of eventual success, etc.
2.) it reminds hacker types of how schools only rewarded the teachers' pet kids who bothered doing inane homework and studying a lot for tests and didn't have proper incentives for people who liked hacking in their spare time rather than spending all their efforts trying to earn A+'s
3.) it makes people think that the point of my article is about intelligence, getting good grades, and being admitted into an elitist school
I think all of these detract from the main point of my article, which is to make a very simple claim, which i've observed to be true in my personal experiences:
"Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery."
i guess the moral of the story is that i should be more concise in my writing ... smaller attack surface ;)
Yes, bad example. Ignoring it, I would counter-argue that the only people I've ever had introduce themselves with their school appended to their names were tier-1 school grads.
I'm unsure of your definition of "elitism", "arrogance" and "snobbery". Your examples do not demonstrate any of these three on the part of the tier-1+n people.
Having the top grades on exams and homework doesn't in any way demonstrate that those kids are the smartest in the class. Grades are correlated with intelligence to some degree, but much more strongly correlated with work-ethic and compliance.