Status Traps, The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards, A Non-cynical View of Colleges and Power, Thinking Too Much is Bad for Society, The Most Important Political Dimension is Certainty
So much good stuff here… particularly the bit about over-education. Feel like I’m a walking, talking example of that hah. I’ve certainly noted to multiple friends/colleagues that I feel learning to deal with poorly defined tasks after dealing almost only with clearly defined tasks (e.g. most school tasks) was the major hurdle of my early career years hah. The political certainly and status traps bits also ring totally true. It all does, really. Great stuff, Rob - thanks!
Yeah. I think your experience is the norm for recent generations of college grads and it’s important to realize that this is a recent phenomenon. I don’t think previous generations struggled to this extent.
As colleges have got more competitive and years of schooling get longer something had to get squeezed out, and one of the big things that got squeezed out was learning to understand how to deal with the world as it works in practice.
Lots of great thoughts here Rob! I love the case you make for getting to truth through experience rather than theory, the related point of the wisdom of being willing to hold beliefs lightly, and your theory/defense of the real goal of college admissions.
I particularly loved that last point, and it was actually one I had intended to write up myself at some point because I think it's an important insight that so many people have missed. The way I was going to frame it was slightly different. At the big reunions for my school (e.g. the 25th), alumni are encouraged to submit a quick bio (usually anywhere from a paragraph to a page) about what they have been up to since graduation (or at least the last reunion) and those bios are then compiled into a book. My theory of college admissions at the school is that their real goal is to maximize that book in terms of both the impact that folks have had on the world and the breadth of that impact in terms of fields and places and communities.
And if that’s the goal, to your point, simply recruiting smart people (particularly to the extent that you’re judging intelligence based on grades and test scores) is not the right path. You’ll also want people with resources (whether that’s money or connections) and to make sure you’re drawing from people with all kinds of backgrounds as well (in terms of race, ethnicity, location, experiences, interests, etc,).
The only point in the piece I would push back on somewhat is the last section where I think you oversell the virtues of not being certain a bit. While I get the point you’re making and think you’re 100% right that it’s always important to be open to letting experience change one’s mind, I also think there are lots of time in life where the lessons one can draw from experience are ambiguous. And times when prioritizing flexibility and an openness to change can lead to a lack of consistency and/or paralysis. My formulation would be that part of wisdom is knowing when to be more open minded and when to be more certain.
I think your “optimize for alumni bios” take is right, with the nuance that they are selecting the class collectively, rather than as isolated individuals. Part of the power of a class is in their ability to help each other, which is why you need people with a varied set of things they bring to the table.
Regarding uncertainty, you are right that you don’t want paralysis, but I don’t think uncertainty has to lead to paralysis. Sometimes you have to accept that you don’t know the right thing to do, but do something anyway because it’s better than doing nothing. However, when taking such an uncertain action, it’s important to hold tight to that uncertainty, and thus find ways to limit harm if you are wrong or ways to quickly change direction if needed.
Here's what I really had in mind when I was pushing back against making "certainty" the enemy. When you try new things, you may get data that shows the new thing isn't working. I'd argue, broadly speaking, there might be three reasons for that:
1. It may just be a bad idea.
2. It may be the kind of idea that needs to run awhile before it has an impact.
3. The general idea is a good one, but there is some tweaking that is still required to make it live up to its potential.
In the first case, the org is better off if you simply end the experiment and move on. But in the second and third case, the org is better off if you stick with it. I'd suggest that "certainty" is one of the heuristics that can help you know when you're in one of those latter two scenarios.
I think people often see “moderate” as either a synonym for centrist, or being too spineless to stand up against the extremists of either side. As someone who doesn’t believe in anything and just gets pushed around by those who do.
What I’m advocating for is someone who is passionate about the need to try out ideas they think may be high value, but also passionate about making sure those things are tried out in small safe ways because they might fail.
It’s someone who will loudly resist attempts to apply dramatic untested high risk large scale changes to society, irrespective of whether they believe those changes are likely to work.
It’s someone who pushes hard to ensure our institutions are neutral and broadly trusted, even when those institutions rule against their own preferences.
That said, I think Moderate is the closest available political label to what I advocate for, so it is a label I sometimes apply to myself.
Yeah I’m sorta in the same boat, and I’ve struggled to find or come up with a better alt. Usually I frame it as “moderate but as a verb” where it’s a useful function in moderating between partisan camps. Better than centrist imo, but still a bit unsatisfying.
There is a lot here that can be applied to examine how the left-wing skew of academia operates and why it is a problem. There is probably always going to be some amount of that skew, because smarter people tend to be more socially liberal and because higher education also selects for high openness to experience which is correlated with leftist beliefs. And within limits that skew can even serve to bolster legitimacy, by pushing back against the conservative class interests of the rich and well connected for whom college also selects. But when the skew gets too extreme it undermines legitimacy instead, and also breeds a destructive certainty through echo chamber effects.
I don’t think it’s true that academia is inherently left wing. Academia today is dramatically more left skewed than it was in recent decades, and, given its long standing connections to wealth and power I can imagine there may have been eras where it was very conservative, at least by modern definitions.
I can see an argument for why intellectuals might be more willing to explore new ideas and thus be liberal, but the alliance between liberals and the left is a recent phenomenon and they are mostly orthogonal ideas (eg Stalin and Mao were left but not liberal).
I definitely agree that the growing political misalignment between colleges and the public means that they are on course to lose their legitimacy. That and the growing realization that many colleges now provide an education whose value is less than its cost.
So much good stuff here… particularly the bit about over-education. Feel like I’m a walking, talking example of that hah. I’ve certainly noted to multiple friends/colleagues that I feel learning to deal with poorly defined tasks after dealing almost only with clearly defined tasks (e.g. most school tasks) was the major hurdle of my early career years hah. The political certainly and status traps bits also ring totally true. It all does, really. Great stuff, Rob - thanks!
Yeah. I think your experience is the norm for recent generations of college grads and it’s important to realize that this is a recent phenomenon. I don’t think previous generations struggled to this extent.
As colleges have got more competitive and years of schooling get longer something had to get squeezed out, and one of the big things that got squeezed out was learning to understand how to deal with the world as it works in practice.
Lots of great thoughts here Rob! I love the case you make for getting to truth through experience rather than theory, the related point of the wisdom of being willing to hold beliefs lightly, and your theory/defense of the real goal of college admissions.
I particularly loved that last point, and it was actually one I had intended to write up myself at some point because I think it's an important insight that so many people have missed. The way I was going to frame it was slightly different. At the big reunions for my school (e.g. the 25th), alumni are encouraged to submit a quick bio (usually anywhere from a paragraph to a page) about what they have been up to since graduation (or at least the last reunion) and those bios are then compiled into a book. My theory of college admissions at the school is that their real goal is to maximize that book in terms of both the impact that folks have had on the world and the breadth of that impact in terms of fields and places and communities.
And if that’s the goal, to your point, simply recruiting smart people (particularly to the extent that you’re judging intelligence based on grades and test scores) is not the right path. You’ll also want people with resources (whether that’s money or connections) and to make sure you’re drawing from people with all kinds of backgrounds as well (in terms of race, ethnicity, location, experiences, interests, etc,).
The only point in the piece I would push back on somewhat is the last section where I think you oversell the virtues of not being certain a bit. While I get the point you’re making and think you’re 100% right that it’s always important to be open to letting experience change one’s mind, I also think there are lots of time in life where the lessons one can draw from experience are ambiguous. And times when prioritizing flexibility and an openness to change can lead to a lack of consistency and/or paralysis. My formulation would be that part of wisdom is knowing when to be more open minded and when to be more certain.
But again, really great piece!
I think your “optimize for alumni bios” take is right, with the nuance that they are selecting the class collectively, rather than as isolated individuals. Part of the power of a class is in their ability to help each other, which is why you need people with a varied set of things they bring to the table.
Regarding uncertainty, you are right that you don’t want paralysis, but I don’t think uncertainty has to lead to paralysis. Sometimes you have to accept that you don’t know the right thing to do, but do something anyway because it’s better than doing nothing. However, when taking such an uncertain action, it’s important to hold tight to that uncertainty, and thus find ways to limit harm if you are wrong or ways to quickly change direction if needed.
Here's what I really had in mind when I was pushing back against making "certainty" the enemy. When you try new things, you may get data that shows the new thing isn't working. I'd argue, broadly speaking, there might be three reasons for that:
1. It may just be a bad idea.
2. It may be the kind of idea that needs to run awhile before it has an impact.
3. The general idea is a good one, but there is some tweaking that is still required to make it live up to its potential.
In the first case, the org is better off if you simply end the experiment and move on. But in the second and third case, the org is better off if you stick with it. I'd suggest that "certainty" is one of the heuristics that can help you know when you're in one of those latter two scenarios.
Curious what your objection to moderate is as distinct from centrist?
I think people often see “moderate” as either a synonym for centrist, or being too spineless to stand up against the extremists of either side. As someone who doesn’t believe in anything and just gets pushed around by those who do.
What I’m advocating for is someone who is passionate about the need to try out ideas they think may be high value, but also passionate about making sure those things are tried out in small safe ways because they might fail.
It’s someone who will loudly resist attempts to apply dramatic untested high risk large scale changes to society, irrespective of whether they believe those changes are likely to work.
It’s someone who pushes hard to ensure our institutions are neutral and broadly trusted, even when those institutions rule against their own preferences.
That said, I think Moderate is the closest available political label to what I advocate for, so it is a label I sometimes apply to myself.
Yeah I’m sorta in the same boat, and I’ve struggled to find or come up with a better alt. Usually I frame it as “moderate but as a verb” where it’s a useful function in moderating between partisan camps. Better than centrist imo, but still a bit unsatisfying.
There is a lot here that can be applied to examine how the left-wing skew of academia operates and why it is a problem. There is probably always going to be some amount of that skew, because smarter people tend to be more socially liberal and because higher education also selects for high openness to experience which is correlated with leftist beliefs. And within limits that skew can even serve to bolster legitimacy, by pushing back against the conservative class interests of the rich and well connected for whom college also selects. But when the skew gets too extreme it undermines legitimacy instead, and also breeds a destructive certainty through echo chamber effects.
I don’t think it’s true that academia is inherently left wing. Academia today is dramatically more left skewed than it was in recent decades, and, given its long standing connections to wealth and power I can imagine there may have been eras where it was very conservative, at least by modern definitions.
I can see an argument for why intellectuals might be more willing to explore new ideas and thus be liberal, but the alliance between liberals and the left is a recent phenomenon and they are mostly orthogonal ideas (eg Stalin and Mao were left but not liberal).
I definitely agree that the growing political misalignment between colleges and the public means that they are on course to lose their legitimacy. That and the growing realization that many colleges now provide an education whose value is less than its cost.