We have the SAT and ACT, and those are objective. The wealthy still pass disproportionately due to better tutoring specifically oriented to those tests. It’s Goodhart’s law.
That's fair, but... What's the alternative? Obviously someone's going to have better academic performance if you have tutors, there's no way around. Still, if you have good academic performance - you have it.
American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic performance at all? Unis should not care about unrelated things)
The university will argue that a well-rounded student body improves the experience for everybody. IE, a college that's 100% "nerds" won't be as good as college that's 80% "nerds", 10% "smart jocks", and 10% "band geeks" (or whatever other categories you want).
I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.
In Europe, university is treated as education for adults, not your entire life. Most universities are not campus resorts like in the US, but just buildings in the city itself, students live a normal life in the city, they rent a apartment or live in a dorm, take public transit to get to places, do sport at a sport place independent of the university, etc. You can live a well rounded life that way. The university is there so you learn your specialization. Of course people make friends there, but it doesn't have to be your entire life, and the university administrators job is not to meddle with people's social lives to make them "interesting", but to allow learning.
Our oldest unis are generally "downtown" or similar - Harvard, Princeton, UVA (sort of - Charlottesville is a really small city), etc. Though most do still have their own dormitory housing, at least for underclassmen.
The large campus-style uni is fairly recent creation - many came out of the land grant system during/after the Civil War. And even as newer unis have been created, they've followed that general design (even though they aren't land grant institutions).
Universities in the US and other countries are not the same, and comparing them is not really fruitful.
US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.
No, that’s not even remotely close to what I wrote, at any level. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite, because selecting purely based on an abstract exam has nothing to do with being a real-world adult, whereas extracurriculars, internships, etc. do to some level.
And after graduation they can grind leetcode, and after that they can practice social cues to get in the management class. It's gamed tests all the way down.
> potentially more intelligent than the poorest group
It's easy to think this but its not true. There is just a ton of privilege involved in life. There are groups in India who purely tutor slum kids to the top IITs(the JEE exams in India are very hard).
On average more educated? Yes. More intelligent? Nah I see no data. Given the same access to resources I expect the kid from a poor family and a kid from a rich family to perform similarly.
I do not. Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?
And at a certain point the argument about equal access is entirely hypothetical. For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.
> Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?
Everywhere? Both in rich and poor households.
> For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.
Ah I thought the argument was more about genes(aka born smart) and not something like nutrition.
I think a good thought experiment is Formula 1. Most top F1 racers come from super rich backgrounds. Does that mean that more money == better driver? Its mostly a accessibility problem.
Well I’ll be charitable and interpret == as correlation as we are talking about averages.
From your conclusion you’re telling me wealth is completely random or the capabilities of children is completely random. Neither of those holds up to any scrutiny.
I don’t know what being born in the US has to do with the conversation.
The problem seems to be that intelligence is not entirely heritable; that just because unintelligent people fail to do well financially doesn't mean that their children are doomed to the same fate.
> Not entirely heritable? Or has no genetic correlation?
My understanding is that there is some genetic correlation but it's not a certainty; smart/rich parents can have dumbass kids and vice versa.
It's hard to quantify because a direct "IQ" measurement is fraught with issues and trying to measure by "success" has its own issues. If you've not met a lawyer/doctor/PhD that you'd put in the "dumbass" category, you probably haven't met many.
Yes. There as difference between unfair and unreal; someone who is malnourished when growing up will forever likely be weaker than someone who received a proper sequence of meals.
We should perhaps recognize that and try to compensate for it, and it's not a value judgement on the person so afflicted, but pretending it doesn't exist just confuses matters.
That's been the entire fight over the last 20+ years, does the test identify anything real and if so, what should be done with it (equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunity, e.g.).
What up call for whom? The USA is a net fossil fuel exporter. China is still heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports (as well as fertilizer produced from natural gas) and those imports would be interdicted in any major conflict. Of course the Chinese leadership is well aware of that vulnerability and taking steps to mitigate it.
The U.S. exports fossil, yes, but we import a huge amount as well because many of our refineries aren’t setup to process light sweet crude and it’s also often cheaper to buy oil, refine, and use it on the coast than it is to move it across the country from somewhere in the Dakotas.
If we had a war with China, it’d go much worse given their much greater resources and knowledge of how to hit those import routes for maximum impact.
China has virtually zero conventional capability to interdict those sea lines of communication. Their navy and air force doesn't have the range, logistics, or foreign bases necessary to accomplish that mission. They're building fast so the situation may change in a few years but not today.
They’re not going head to head in a naval battle (yet) but oil tankers aren’t hardened targets and they wouldn’t need to be in American airspace to attack ships leaving Saudi Arabi or Iraq bound for California. All you’d need would be one drone attack to shut commercial shipping down for ages since crews and owners aren’t going to jump to become military targets. I’m certain that, like like the U.S. military planners, the Chinese military has a team updating plans based on which Iranian tactics get results. If nothing else, one way to start a move on Taiwan would be some kind of diversion pulling U.S. resources away escorting shipping.
(That’s ignoring the larger economic impact of all of the other shipping which originates in China)
No, not really. If you have people watching you so closely, there’s a good chance they can watch your fingers on the keyboard, too. Maybe you’re sharing your screen for a presentation, this might be slightly ill advised, but then, you should run such things in a VM or container and use silly demo passwords.
reply