Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse - <AUTHOR> https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-windows-for-6-years-while-developing-discourse <comment><USER2> Having used windows for several years, linux for several years, and currently macos for several years (because that's what work gave me) - linux is by far the most stable and easiest to manage OS, after you get past the initial learning curve. The main reason is you can actually fix problems. You pretty much know why every single bit of software is there for and how to configure it. You google the problem and someone has released a patch, or instructions on what configuration changes need to be made. Or you can roll back to old versions of software easily.

Also you are a hero because you catch and fix production problems nobody else sees or understands because production is running linux.

If you have a problem on OSX you just get 500 people telling you to reset your pram, and really you just need to wait for the next osx update. You certainly can't rollback an osx update. Nobody knows whats wrong because nobody has access to the code. Even if you did - each update is millions of lines of code. It is crazy town.

Same for windows except there is not pram to reset. You just reboot until the next update I guess.

<comment><USER3> > linux is by far the most stable and easiest to manage OS

Nice April fools.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, this is true for me. My Arch machine runs for months with no issues. My XPS running 10 blue screens once every several weeks, and generally has issues after running too long.

To be fair it could be due to the general buggy-ness of the TB16 Thunderbolt dock.

<comment><USER3> Yeah of course, different people will have different experiences. Mine was being never able to make wifi work, random destruction of the GUI when I plugged an external monitor, difficulty to install and configure eastern languages IME, sound issues, etc. That was a very instructive period as undergraduate in informatics, but I got tired after a while to constantly fix my system instead of getting things done. Still using it as a server OS, where it shines.

<comment><USER5> I've jumped from Debian 7 to Debian 9 without issue, and the Gnome Software Center makes installing apps a point and click process (reminds me of Click N Run from Linspire...).

There are notable fit and finish issues with other distros, but from what I've seen the Debian package maintainers consistently make decisions to protect the package archive from breakage, whether that be holding back a FreeCiv point release over a buggy UI element, or stripping out non-free parts of Chromium that upstream bundles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've used Linux as my main desktop OS for about 3 years, from around 2010 to around 2013 (so maybe some things changed in the meantime).

The article says that you pay a "VM tax" by running in a Linux VM in Windows or by using WSL, but by using Linux directly you end up "paying" in other areas, for example in terms of less-than-perfect drivers (which leads to problems such as worse battery life, worse graphical performance etc). In an ideal world, laptop and GPU makers would put as much effort developing Linux drivers as they do when they create Windows drivers, but unfortunately this is not the case.

Another point is that, even if you are running Linux on your dev machine, it is often challenging to have a local environment that is as close as possible to your production one; for example where I work we have Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04 and CentOS (and with various combinations of installed packages), even if I was using a Linux laptop, I would still need containers to get all the different environments right. The only case where you could use no containers at all is if you had all of your servers running the exactly the same environment.

Finally there is the issue of some pieces of software not being available for Linux, 95% of the times you can find a Linux equivalent that works for you but, in my experience, there were still rare cases where I had to resort to Wine or some Win VM just to run some specific tool that was needed to do my job.

PS My job, at the time I was using Linux as my main desktop OS, and during the couple of years after I switched back to Windows, was about PHP, Python and Java web apps deployed on Linux servers, so my comments above should be taken in this context. Maybe in other fields of software development there are different factors to take into account.

PPS I have also tried MacOS, on the one hand it's great that Mac is UNIX, but on the other hand it's not Linux so, if you want to closely replicate your production Linux environment, you will still need VMs or containers.

<comment><USER7> I picked a Dell XPS for development and it runs linux amazingly well. Only bit that doesn't work out of the box is the fingerprint scanner but there are unofficial drivers for it.

With web development its so trivial to do everything you need on linux and almost all of the time its easier to set up on linux or mac than on windows.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, using an XPS here too. I remember when I started looking for webdev tools back when I moved to Linux as a daily driver. I was bummed that there weren't any really nice FTP clients. Turns out my file manager was a step ahead of me with ssh:// and various other niceties. It was all built in.

<comment><USER9> Been using FileZilla forever. Very convenient if you manage lots of sites

<comment><USER8> I used to use it, too. Does it still store all your server login credentials in plain text?

<comment><USER9> Lol, thanks for pointing that out as I was not aware of it. Looks like now FileZilla has support for a master password that's used to encrypt stored passwords.

<comment><USER8> Cool. Encryption is better than base64 for these things :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> WSL isn't too bad nowadays. I would go as far as saying it's very good. I've been using it for full time development for over a year now.

I've run 100,000+ line Rails apps in WSL (well technically through Docker, which I connect to through WSL) and I never noticed a slowdown that was bad enough to make me think "this sucks". It's always been pretty good. I run all sorts of Rails, Flask, Phoenix and Webpack driven apps and all of them run fast enough where I don't think twice about it.

Personally, I find the WSL set up somewhat close to native Linux in terms of the user experience. I'm not talking about I/O performance, but I mean how it feels to use the OS in general.

For example:

I spend 99% of my time in a WSL terminal using tmux + terminal Vim + ranger. So that takes care of coding and managing files.

Then I use a browser and other graphical apps (image / video editors) that run directly in Windows.

Dexpot sets up virtual screens with key binds that are comparable to how i3wm lets you switch and move windows to another screen.

Keypirinha lets you launch apps with a fuzzy finder (like dmenu but better IMO)

AutoHotkey lets you easily manage global hotkeys (just like i3 does) and more

When you put all of that together, you get a really really good development experience that also doubles for gaming and running programs that don't have a good alternative on Linux (such as Camtasia on Windows).

Then for the icing on the cake, since you're running Ubuntu 18.04 in WSL, you can provision WSL itself with the same exact configuration management scripts you would use to provision a production box. For me specifically I run all of the same Ansible roles against WSL that I do in production. I can set the whole thing up with 1 Ansible command. Plus my dotfiles also happen to work exactly how they do on my native Linux laptop so it's easy to keep things in sync and feeling the same.

This all runs from a i5 3.2ghz / 16GB of RAM / SSD / etc. $750 desktop built 5 years ago.

Even if Apple tax didn't exist I would still use this Windows / WSL set up if I weren't in a position where I could run Linux natively.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you run Linux on vanilla Intel ultrabook or Intel desktop/server hardware, it is not only blazing fast, but all the hardware works out of the box, too.

I wrote about this in the context of Lenovo X1C laptop here:

[http://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo- linux](http://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux)

I also recently built a Linux desktop from ~$950 of commodity parts (including a pair of free GPUs a crypto friend donated to me after his startup died). I use it as a devserver and a GPU rig for playing with CUDA, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

Aside from the requirement of proprietary Nvidia drivers, this whole box works perfectly in Linux too, is blazing fast, and operates silently and with low power consumption. (The case itself is bulky, but it's stationary.) I think an equivalent Mac would cost a 2-3x multiple and run less well for developer workloads.

[https://pcpartpicker.com/user/amontalenti/saved/r4rLJx](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/amontalenti/saved/r4rLJx)

Say what you will about Linux, but if you choose your hardware carefully, it truly does "just work" these days. And you can't beat having access to scriptable everything and source code everywhere. That said, I keep a Mac Mini around because there is some proprietary stuff you can't avoid in the Apple ecosystem (e.g. XCode for iOS, Safari Debugger, Keynote/Pages, ...)

</comment><comment><USER12> ? What I see when I look at that benchmark is a comparison between linux running in a VM, via WSL and natively.

AKA, VMs are slower than bare metal. News at 10.

Sure there are things windows tends to be slower at, but similarly there are things linux tends to be slower at. For general desktop usage I think you will find two things, windows does quite well, and desktop level virtualization tends to be slower than server virtualization because most desktop users will be using a virtio/emulation IO access method vs servers which tend to be punching PCIe adapters into the VMs. Either way, the overhead of additional translation layers and VM exits for various things is always going to be worse than just running on bare metal. Wether that works out to barely noticeable for compute heavy benchmarks that are TLB friendly, 2x for small packet edge case IO's, or somewhere in between is completely application dependent.

<comment><AUTHOR> WSL is not technically a VM...

The news is not the it is slower, it is how much slower it is. I found the number surprising given the prevailing wisdom out there was ... sure its slower, about 5-10% slower.

The other news is that mac is slower and it does not do any virtualising.

<comment><USER13> WSL is quite slow indeed, compared even to a low performance VM like Virtualbox w/ a bit of hardware help.

Much less to something like KVM with paravirtualization drivers, or even Hyper-V likewise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the time taken to run the test suite is _so_ critical, then how is the "winning" result of 7m55s any better?

In my experience any multi-minute operation invites a context switch or coffee break, and end up being roughly equivalent in practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely understand the concern here. If every change required an 8 minute wait it would be real sad for us.

We use a tool called `rake autospec` at Discourse which is a smart test runner. I personally like the vim integration we built.

The way it works...

1\. Run `bin/rake autospec` in a terminal 2\. I head to the code I want to change, I change the code 3\. The spec runner figures out what the right test is run and runs that. 4\. While it is busy running specs at any time it can be interrupted by saving a "*.spec" file in which case the spec runner will run the spec at the cursor

This has worked wonderfully well for us.

<comment><USER15> FYI, list formatting works best when you leave an empty line between each item.

1\. just

2\. like

3\. this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been using Linux as my main OS for over 10 years now, mainly Ubuntu.

The best part is the performance and a realistic bare metal environment. You can profile code and actually trust the results. You can't say the same for virtualizarion, containers or other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the late 90s I installed Slackware on a 386DX 40mhz with kernel 1.2.8, XFree86, elvis vi clone, etc. I've been using Linux for a long time, on and off as my main desktop. I have various Linux machines around the house, but it's not my main desktop today.

There's too much fiddling around to get it working right as a desktop. Audio has always been a ghetto. Wifi drivers are still binary blobs. Fonts, hidpi, multi monitor support, wayland, systemd are all still issues today. I really don't want my development machine to match production. Production is a stripped down image for a reason. I spend far more time writing code than running it, so the VM performance hit is a moot point.

To be fair, Windows 10 has plenty of issues of its own that need tweaking, like having the only way to disable cortana is through group policy edits. And then they reenable it on the next update, and give me some candy crush ads in my start menu. It's pretty infuriating, but still less so than manually fixing wifi drivers through USB boot drives.

</comment><comment><USER18> It is unfortunate that there is no comparison against an Ubuntu host with an Ubuntu guest.

"I was paying a pretty high tax for deciding to stick with Windows" was likely "I was paying a pretty high tax for deciding to use a VM".

I have little love for Windows, but I would prefer to see numbers that place the blame correctly.

<comment><USER19> Why? The tax is that using Windows means you have to use a VM, not that VMs are less performant on Windows

<comment><USER18> Well, I use an Ubuntu host on a Dell XPS (since it just works without extra configuration).

But I also use an Ubuntu guest VM for development so that I can shove the guest onto a different machine easily (yeah, I know I should use continuous integration, but I haven't yet).

Using a VM definitely has a big performance cost... Even though I value the benefits I accept the costs.

<comment><USER19> You might be able to use containers on Linux to achieve the same thing without the performance cost

<comment><USER18> Very likely.

But I know that in X years time I can move a copy of my development VM to run as a guest on any OS I might happen to use.

I haven't yet spent any time learning how to use containers, or what their compromises are, so for the moment I am still ignorant of that solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen > Here I am freaking out about a measly 38% perf hit when I could be running > stuff concurrently and probably be able to run our entire test suite in 2 > minutes on my current machine on Windows in a VM.

I think this is the point, given you can get an inexpensive desktop CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads, it wouldn't matter so much if you had a 20% perf tax with WSL when you have approx 12x the throughput.

You could always offload full test suites to an external CI box upon check-in and work with a subset of unit tests locally, once the suite becomes prohibitive for a single machine.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love OS X, but it's just 'slow'. I have no problem admitting that.

It's much better than it was in the PowerPC days, when (IMO) OS X was almost too slow to be usable. We have it good these days with faster graphics and 12-core CPU's and super fast SSD's...

But you give these same advantages to Windows/Linux and OS X is just handily beaten in just about every benchmark you can think of.

</comment><comment><USER21> VM will always be shit at compilation tasks. All of the existing solutions out there (including Docker) will lead to slower builds, especially if you need to build an embedded Linux distribution. Native is better, for those tasks.

The haters he's replying to are literally splitting hairs.

Wow, they shave off 3 mins to run an interpreted language test suite. This is the ABSOLUTE state of the industry right now.

<comment><USER22> > VM will always be shit at compilation tasks. All of the existing solutions > out there (including Docker)

Docker isn't a VM; it runs with the same kernel and directly on the host processor like any application.

<comment><USER23> Except the filesystem. Which is what everyone seems to forget. And that's the big thing we're talking about here in reference to Ruby and tests being slow.

<comment><USER24> Even if you mount the development directory on the host file system? This is probably necessary to be able to edit files.

In the case of Ruby maybe you should mount also the language manager directory with all the gems and the interpreter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have been using Linux as my daily driver for a little over 2 years and day to day, I haven't had practically any problems. Every once in a while, I will mess with something and then things break, but I know I can fix it. Knowing I can find a fix to any day to day problem has become absolutely crucial to me; I can't go back to chasing windows error codes.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been doing an increasing amount of Node development in WSL, and the thing that helped me the most where it regards disk performance was adding an exclusion path to Windows Defender so that it wouldn't constantly scan my WSL working tree.

Also, I get it that some kinds of testing "feel better" when done locally, but... why not have those run on a cloud VM?

</comment><comment><USER24> Ruby has always been a nightmare on Windows. Every time a new junior freelance developer is onboarded in a Rails project everybody hopes he's got a Mac or Linux laptop. A significant number of them uses Windows and we always suggest them to run a Linux VM. Some of them resist the suggestion. We make clear we're not wasting time to support their environment (we're deploying on Linux anyway) and that they are on their own. After not to much time they comply or leave. After months some of them could even buy a Mac or dual boot on Linux (Windows is good at videogames.)

Still, AFAIK VirtualBox has a problem with supporting multiple cores. Single core VM is heavily handicapped even for Ruby. Parallel testing was not in Rails but it's definitely a thing.

<comment><USER27> Maybe your company should provide the optimal hardware which everyone must use? Each employee using a similar environment is a productivity boost. And I can tell you, that if everyone would use the same system, even windows, you would have less problems.

Sounds alot simpler than letting everyone use their own environment..

<comment><USER24> Not my company (I'm a freelancer) and every freelancer brings his own laptop. Furthermore all of us work from remote, often even employees do. I've seen this happen everywhere with the small/medium customers I'm working for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It never occurred to him to run Linux on his machine, for real work, and keep Windows in a VM for when he really needs it?

Surely someone, somewhere has explained that Windows runs faster in a VM than on bare metal, because Linux is better at file systems and buffer management? Or that relying on drivers from all over makes your system less reliable than the fixed set used in the VM?

Me, I cannot imagine running MSWindows on bare metal. It just feels wrong.

</comment><comment><USER29> Curious to know why you were using VMware on Windows instead of Hyper-V? I would expect Hyper-V to be significantly faster than VMware.

<comment><USER30> I gave Hyper-V way too much of my time last tried setting up a development environment on windows (around September 2018). The Hyper-V tooling just isn't good enough for the developer use case compared to Virtualbox and VMWare, and once you enable Hyper-V, it owns the virtualization environment within Windows, meaning you can't run other hypervisors on the OS. That was a deal- breaker for me, as Docker for Windows wouldn't even run out of the box.

<comment><USER31> Docker by default runs on Hypet-V.

<comment><USER32> Did it always used to do that, wasn't it VirtualBox only in the beginning? Also, [https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization- Documentatio...](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization- Documentation/issues/945)

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure about the beginning, but it uses Hyper-V for a while. I don't know about that bug, I used it with Windows 10 Pro, I guess bugs happens, probably they will fix it soon if it's widespread. I know that you need a special Docker package (Docker Toolbox) for VirtualBox and default Docker package from their website requires Hyper-V.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Meanwhile, in ASIC/hardware testing land, we're lucky to get a regression suite done in under 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder how big a role Windows Defender, or other antivirus software, plays in the notorious inefficiency of reading and (especially) writing many small files on Windows. Sam, did you disable Windows Defender real-time protection, or add exceptions for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely disabled defender.

When I started running the spec suite in WSL, defender went way up (so I gave it a break), pretty sure stuff would have been way worse with defender on.

The prevailing recommendation though from the WSL team is to leave defender on for now. So I kind of cheated by disabling it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I added parallel tests to our app last year. My 4 core/8 thread system runs the tests pretty well with a process count of 6. The suite runs about 4 times faster, which makes a real difference

No need to wait for Rails 6 to get this boost

</comment><comment><USER36> Why do people run their server software on their desktop systems instead of, say, a proper server? Back in the days our desktop systems were VT102s, NCD X-Terminals or underpowered laptops and developing on the server through rsh/ssh or even VNC was natural. Does Ruby somehow require locally running GUI processes?

<comment><USER34> There's certainly nothing stopping you from doing Ruby or JS dev work on a remote server. I run Windows on my laptop, so when I wanted to start contributing to Discourse on the side a few months ago, I ordered a VPS at DigitalOcean and did my work there over SSH. I used SSH tunneling to access the dev HTTP server.

Edit: It helps that I use vim as my editor.

<comment><USER37> I've done similar things with pycharm. I can run pycharm locally but run a remote python process. .py files are automatically uploaded and I can debug over the network just fine. I know eclipse, and presumsbly others, can do the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> By the way, is there something like Discourse but in Go?

<comment><USER39> Why the language matters here?

<comment><USER40> I don't know on what depends, but I run a small Discourse forum... and I can tell you is a major PAIN!

I'm not a web developer (I develop mostly firmware) so I'm not into all this kind of stuff, but I know it is written in Ruby and runs in a Docker container.

It requires at least 10GB just to be able to install and 20GB just to update once in a while. It takes ages to compile. It's a PITA to update. Plus docker gets stuck with old images (not sure it's the right term) and you'll have to manually clear them.

20GB!! It's a freakin' forum software!!! Some triple A games are around 8GB.

I'm glad someone is asking for alternatives. I think all this overhead is because maybe redistributing a Ruby website it's a PITA and requires a full environment installation. And hell yeah I believe a simple test suite can take 10 minutes to run in that poorly conceived environment.

<comment><USER41> It surely doesn't requires 10GB, although it does require a significant amount of space in Multiple GB due to the way it works in Docker.

May be something could be done to the base image.

Or just try running ./launcher cleanup

<comment><USER40> I don't want to seem rude, but to my ignorant eyes and those of its users, it's a forum software that requires a 10GB hard disk to install, and 20GB to update. I know that there will be a lot of technical details that will justify (or not) why, but, hey, that's a lot for a forum and there is no sane alternative way to install it.

I've found that I'm not alone: [https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=disk%20space](https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=disk%20space)

There are entire pages of users complaining about the same or related problems.

At the end of the day, it's (almost) free... so what are we complaining for?

<comment><USER41> I know. It surely sounds silly, but my guess is that instead of having to troubleshoot thousands of different possibl configuration with different dependency and OS library. The way it is currently distributed is not just "forum" software, it is the whole OS + Database and All other Software required along with Backup etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This whole Twitter thread and blog post gave me real pause for ever wanting to work at Discourse.

<comment><USER34> Why, exactly?</comment></comment>


Career Advice and Salary Negotiations: Move Early and Move Often - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2017/01/23/career-advice-and-salary-negotiations-move-early-and-move-often/ <comment><USER2> This is nonsense

I was a manager. I cared a lot about keeping my people. I'd have fought for them if they told me they were leaving. I also wouldn't interview anyone who's average stay was around a year - that advice is awfully dangerous and can get you in a "don't bother screening" resume pile.

<comment><USER3> > I'd have fought for them if they told me they were leaving.

Thus you are confirming that they have (to threaten) to leave to get anything. ;)

<comment><USER2> No, what they have to say is "I enjoy the job, but I feel that I can get paid more elsewhere; have you considered re-leveling my comp so it reflects the value I add to the company?"

Don't need a competing offer. Don't need to threaten to leave. Just a "hey, re-level me please", and then a decent manager will either say "you're at the right level, if you can make more elsewhere go for it" or "you're right, you're under market comp, let's fix that."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the tone of the article a bit confronting, but I agree with the points.

Most of the time, raises in your company do not outpace the market pay. Also moving early and often keeps you sharp, learning new skills and focus on delivering value.

The only thing I'd add is "don't be rude" and "don't be an a __hole ".

Leave a company as if you're a senior member...with class, grace and minimal interruption to the team. Leave a trail of good will, not burned bridges.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems really extreme. Talking to another company about interviewing on the first day of a new job? There's got to be some kind of limit past which that will catch up to you.

<comment><USER3> Not really. It's just business.

You sell your services. You physically can only be at one place at once. When you get 2 offers, someone will not have you, it's _that_ simple, no surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't necessarily agree that you should move early and often, but you should absolutely be checking the market at least annually. If you care and you find that you're underpaid then you should find a new job immediately.

It's astounding how many people believe silly things about market rate compensation.

<comment><USER3> Fairly sure that changing every year would be considered often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure a large portion of every tech company's intrinsic value is the amount they are paying their employees less than market rate.

There's something about a lot of engineers' personalities that allow companies to run roughshod over them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have watched incompetent pricks do a little bit of this and jump ahead of me everytime. Unfortunately, I am a pussy. Anyone got some advice on how to harden the fuck up? I am serious.

Edit: Harden up without being a prick. I am not incompetent.

<comment><USER9> A lot of these types of articles are over-the-top in terms of "fuck you" sentiment. I have some experience moving around/negotiating higher salaries, and I think it's completely possible to do so without being an asshole. The key is to remember that it's just a business transaction -- you're providing a service, and the company is paying you for it. If you are polite and firm with your salary request, the company will take it if they think your service is worth it. If not, find another company that values your service more. Keep that in the back of your mind at all times, and don't let anyone obfuscate the situation, and you'll be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For whatever reason, it just was always just easier to go to new company that valued me more rather than try to negotiate a raise.

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome article. It helps if you imagine the voice of Ryan Gosling reading it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did this guy not spellcheck anything? The post is riddled with spelling errors.</comment>


20+ MongoDB Alternatives you should know about - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/10/30/20-mongodb-alternatives-you-should-know-about/ <comment><USER2> when you read this all in one place, it's interesting how many serious open source contenders for MongoDB are around... with solid project histories and a weight of users behind them. Worth checking out this list and then challenging yourself to add some more...

</comment><comment><USER3> All at one place. Must give it a read.</comment>


Searching Facebook drives home the privacy degradation problem - <AUTHOR> http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/

<comment><USER2> Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change settings?

<comment><USER3> Initially Facebook was private by default. It's only recently that it's changed to 'default public'. Lots of people are using a public thing, when it used to be private. It's the change that's the most important thing.

<comment><USER4> edit: double post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cobbled this together last night. It's very ugly but shows what get's leaked: <http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/>

<comment><USER6> Hey, I was thinking of doing something like this. If you're interested in collaborating, let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Inspired by <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236> (Why in the world does Facebook let me do this?)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly, most of the results of "playing hooky" are females. If I were a psychologist, I'd be thrilled about Facebook's idiotic privacy breeches.

<comment><USER8> I noticed that too. I don't think it's necessarily a sign that females are more likely to shirk responsibility. Maybe just that guys are less likely to call it "playing hooky".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twitter has it too: <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22>

I wrote a paper in grad school about people leaking info on twitter unwittingly, and finding it using queries like these. <http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER10> It's important to note that no one can 'stalk' you using this feature if they aren't your friend - you can't search by name, only content. Unless there is personally identifiable information about the person in the post itself (e.g. "I'm John Doe and I hate my boss Bob Smith") the odds are you'll never be able to find information about the person you are looking for. If you search for "rectal exam" (<http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam>) and you happen to know Groten Nils, well, that's pretty embarrassing.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky>

I know it's trendy to hate FB right now but don't underestimate the ignorance factor in all of this.

<comment><USER12> True, but also consider how those two sites evolved. When I post a tweet, I know that it is essentially the same as me taking out an ad in the paper or shouting it at people in the pub. I'm fairly careful with regards to what I post. When I started using Facebook, it was very much about communicating with the group of people you have approved as friends. Over time it has transformed into something much more public, I believe without the bulk of the userbase realising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the filter on the left.

<comment><USER14> Exactly! I was going to say these folks better expect a buyout offer for their amazing real-time search tool until I realized that what it offers has been available on Facebook itself for a while, and nobody cares. I don't mean nobody cares that people's posts are public. I mean, nobody cares to search people's posts because doing so is NOT USEFUL.

Ironic how it appears that the catalyst for what people are calling Facebook's privacy violation was the tech media's echo chamber screaming "real-time search." Yes, take the current over-hyped BS (Twitter), combine it with yesterday's insanely successful business (Google), and that is the direction things must go in. And Facebook would be wise to get on board with the inevitable or risk loosing everything. But if they overdo it and sneakily encourage their users to act like attention hungry Twitter users (aka journalists), then they risk loosing everything via a backlash from violated users. Oh, and we're still waiting for either them or Twitter or Google to make bazillions with real-time search because won't that just be so amazing.

...right. I suppose that dismissing this concept now could be a bit premature, but, come on. It's been around for a while and has gone nowhere. Maybe when Facebook realizes that there's no money in this real-time search nonsense, they'll default everyone back to private. Of course, then the story will be that they rudely interrupted their attention hungry users' abilities to act like exhibitionists. And that is why Twitter will always have an edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these people on the web isn't helping anything.

If you wanted to be classy, you'd leave out the names and/or put rectangles over their eyes. As it is now, you're at least as much an asshole as Zuckerberg.

<comment><AUTHOR> We briefly added these measures, but after thinking it over we've decided to disable them.

From a technical standpoint they're a fig leaf. This isn't a complex server- side app, it's a minimal UI on top of the JSON results Facebook returns for these searches: [http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=po...](http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=post) . This is frankly the least scary use of this data. For example, it would be trivial to start crawling this data and building your own indices to enable far more invasive searches.

Our goal is to draw attention to this so that people become outraged and Facebook changes their privacy settings. The security community has been having this conversation for a while (more info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure> ) and the only reason not to disclose a security or privacy problem is to give the company involved time and resources to fix the system.

This is not the case here. Facebook made this privacy-affecting change quite deliberately, and I think it's clear that they did so with full knowledge of the implications. If there is not an outcry, this will not be fixed. Right now, from Facebook's perspective, the system is working as intended. The longer it stays this way the worse the privacy breach becomes.

<comment><USER16> Here's an example of the fig leaf in action: [http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test...](http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&classy=1)

We decided the redactions reduce the impact without actually offering any privacy at all. (That's up to Facebook and the users).

<comment><USER15> "Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit. Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never seen it done by publicly sharing the spoils of using that exploit.

Did you try publicizing it without the full identifying data available and measuring the response? Did you consider a strategy of escalating outrageousness, instead of going straight for this course of action?

What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to rouse them to action?

I'm sorry to be so harsh in a public forum, but when someone takes it upon himself to say that the affected lives are going to suffer for a good cause, then he'd better accompany the resulting campaign with a very thorough -- and thoroughly-vetted -- piece of argument explaining exactly why the ethical balance is in his favor. Two guys deciding they'd get more pageviews by going with plan A, and leaving the moral debate for blog commenters after the fact is not a thorough vetting.

There were already numerous forces at play which could potentially result in FB getting things straight. Your app won't have accomplished anything that wouldn't otherwise have been accomplished, except perhaps to cause a few more people to suffer.

<comment><USER3> > What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to > rouse them to action?

You mean contacting 98% of facebook's users?!?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ <comment><USER3> The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity, so I began to read the article. It's been a long ..year...and I am super tired, so I am not going to manage to actually read the whole thing.

But, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I turned down a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities of my home state. I think I made the right call and I think I understand the impetus behind the writing of this article.

In a nutshell, if education is empowering, but pursuing that education actually narrows your life choices, then perhaps there is some flaw somewhere. For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder and this may come at great personal cost.

I was in my late 40s before I really understood how incredibly upper class my mother's values are. We didn't have much money when I was a kid -- or so I thought, though it turns out that is not as accurate as I believed at the time -- and I never thought of myself as _upper class._

It took me a lot of years of intentionally walking away from this deeply rooted expectation in order to really reclaim my life for myself in a way that allows me to get what I want, not for me to become what society expects me to be.

So while I get that most people are not going to understand that there is a genuine cost involved and will simply sneer at the idea that there is any down side, as someone who recognized that downside at a young age and _walked away_ , I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people and it does harm them and it does definitely harm their ability to be good leaders for _the common man._

<comment><USER4> "the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice"

Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.

Thats why an elite education is an advantage.

The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ... "you incapable of talking to people who aren't like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?

<comment><USER5> _> Thats why an elite education is an advantage._

The author isn't saying that an elite education offers no advantage. He's saying that it has downsides as well. It's not 100% advantageous, and yet we tend to think of it as so.

 _> They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?_

It certainly does a better job than isolating yourself within a very narrow band of culture. In my experience, that's just how cultural experience works.

If you spend all your time hanging out with rich, smart, successful people, it's only going to make it harder for you to identify with people who aren't. If you spend all of your time hanging out with white people, you're more likely to feel awkward when you go to the black part of town. Etc. And the opposites are also true.

<comment><USER6> Any school will have a culture. Those that pride themselves on diversity tend to have one narrow kind of variety, and extreme monoculture on other axes - <USER2> else have a bunch of subcultural groups that don't really talk to each other. There's a kind of fundamental conservation: for people to be able to communicate and work together requires a certain level of cultural commonality.

So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.

<comment><USER3> One criticism the article makes is that people with elite educations are expected to be leaders of the entire country (or community or other group), yet they often do not understand the common man at all. I think this is both valid and note worthy. It goes a long way towards explaining the discontent of "the 99 percent."

Rules made by elite are often rules made for the benefit of the elite as well. They often completely overlook the needs of the rest of the people and these rules may benefit the elite at the expense of the masses.

It is one of the reasons I walked away from my scholarship. I am unwilling to exercise power in that manner.

<comment><USER6> I think the idea that there's this homogenous "common man" is bogus. If you pick your leaders from 1% of the population then they won't represent everyone - but that's true whichever 1% of the population you pick, and leaders by definition are a minority of the populace. If you picked, say, the employees of a particular steelworks to be leaders, rather than Yale graduates, you wouldn't end up with a group that was any more representative.

<comment><USER3> My concern is for how power gets exercised in a harmful manner such that it actively victimizes the most vulnerable members of society. As a mother, this is the opposite of what I understood my role to be.

I don't care about diversity in leadership. I care about leadership that doesn't flush the whole system down the toilet so thoroughly as to cut even their own throats in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I graduated from one of the top universities in my country (top 50 in the world) and we learned pretty much exactly the same material as they did at MIT.

In reality I don't think there is any significant difference in terms of education quality between the top #1 university and #100 for any given field.

But the difference in terms of opportunities after finishing MIT vs finishing some other good university is massive. It seems that if an investor or prospective employer hears the word 'MIT', 'Harvard', 'Stanford' or 'Yale' when you make a pitch, somehow you're considered to be much smarter than the rest.

I think it's partially due to this elitist mindset. 'Elites' seem to think that people who went to an elite college are many times smarter than everyone else - But the real difference is actually social connectivity.

People who went to an elite institution are closer to capital - This gives them more influence. They are more likely to become investors and employers themselves. Their elitist world view (rooted in the false perception that they make up an intellectually distinct group) means that they are more likely to hire/fund people who also studied at elite universities.

Elites think that people like them congregate around knowledge, but in reality, they congregate around financial capital disguised as knowledge.

<comment><USER8> I went to Berkeley for CS and knew people that went to MIT and Stanford, and I don't agree. You're right the curriculum is the same. _Everything else_ is different. Just one example: lots of undergrads do research. They get to work (albeit basically as trainees) in some of the top CS labs in the world.

<comment><USER9> I've long espoused what jondubois says above and many people have told me what you say here in response. That might be true but now that I'm in a position to see lots of new hires it doesn't seem to make a difference, at least not for CS grads. We hire a bunch of MIT grads and they seem to have roughly the same distribution of success as all of the other new hires. I'll grant you that this is anecdata but it is the one situation where I have a lot of experience where the connection angle does _not_ exist.

<comment><USER10> It might depend on what you are hiring them for. If it's for research the elites might do better. But if it's for software engineering there might not be a difference.

<comment><USER9> That's possible, I can only speak to standard SWE type roles, and in those situations the inter-person variance is larger than the inter-institution variance.

<comment><USER8> Many of the top students at Berkeley, Stanford, MIT don't get standard SWE roles. They go to quant finance and make 300k straight out of undergrad. They go to PhD programs. They start a startup with YC. They do Google APM or something similar. They work as analysts in a VC firm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Much of this resonated with me.

One of the biggest lessons of my Ivy-league education was, paradoxically, that it wasn't sufficient (or even necessary). At least not for the goals I wanted.

If you want access to the elite Wall St. or consulting jobs, then yes, you need it. Once you're in, it's almost impossible to be kicked out. Finish, interview, and you're on the path.

But I had longstanding doubts about the state of my actual education. Despite numerous engineering classes, I couldn't, for example, work out i^i in my head instantly.

Imagine someone asked you "Roughly, what do you think 2^512 to be?"

"I don't know exactly, but it's an enormous positive number, probably more than the atoms in the universe."

Ok. You should spit that out instantly. Now imagine someone asks "Roughly, what do you think i^i is?"

Is it positive? Negative? Real? Imaginary? Close to 1.0? Microscopic? Even if you eventually work it out after a minute, does your long delay mean you understood exponents or imaginary numbers? Is this something that should be solidified before, say, studying the Fourier Transform?

Despite scoring well in classes taught by famous professors, I couldn't answer such basic questions. This was literally middle school operations (exponents) used with high-school parameters (imaginary numbers). I was stuck -- and it didn't seem like anyone thought this a reasonable thing to understand.

It led me on a journey of self-education, but I needed to see firsthand that even in an Ivy-league environment, the basics could still be missed. It ended the fantasy that things were transformatively different in some other place -- it was up to me to fill the gaps.

ps. If you want to work out i^i in your head: [https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive- understanding...](https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive- understanding-of-eulers-formula/)

<comment><USER12> The link you provided seems to omit the fact that i^i is multi-valued, which is a consequence of a fundamental property of the logarithm.

<comment><USER11> That's true, let's just go with the principal value for now :).

(I hadn't studied complex analysis when I wrote that post, learning it now. The various possibilities for the multi-valued solution follow a pattern however.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These aren't the disadvantages of an elite education, it's the disadvantages of not having sufficient breadth of experiences with people from a sufficient breadth of social-economic backgrounds.

Get your kids to do extracurriculars where they'll meet kids from lower-income households. It'll make them able to relate to them and understand them better.

<comment><USER14> Yup. I go to an ivy and many of my best friends are construction workers or service workers who will likely never attend college. It's because I wasn't sheltered (nor particularly wealthy as a kid).

And when you're there, talk to people. Not just ones who will help you climb the social ladder in whatever elite clubs and orgs you want to join. People of all stripes. It's a much more diverse group in every way than the author describes.

Honestly it sounds like the author was elitist and sheltered as a kid. And now they've realised this, but have decided to blame it on their university rather than deal with the fact that it was their own personal fault.

<comment><USER9> As with many things I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.

On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing _that_ " when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And this is why Trump's win was so confusing for many citizens if the US--too stuck in their bubble to understand the rest of the world and its happenings. See also Nassim Taleb's essay on the Intellectual Yet Idiot class: [https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211...](https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e2d0577)

<comment><USER16> The alleged confusion presumes that only elites voted for Democrats. But if you look at the voting trends, urban areas tend to vote Democrat and it is a far stretch to presume that there is no working class living in urban areas. In fact I'd wager there are far more working class people living in urban areas than in rural areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy and linguistics from an elite university. My parents owned and auto parts store in a small town, which was next door to my grandparents' bakery. Based on my experience, it seems this guys' problem is a boring backstory; no university can or should make up for the fact that you don't regularly mix with non-university types.

</comment><comment><USER18> This was a well-written article. A lot of people are hating on it as a "poor little rich kid" argument, but I didn't see that at all.

He put his point at the end, and man is it a good one:

> _The disadvantage of an elite education is that it's given us the elite we > have, and the elite we're going to have._

I mean, just look at the crap Peter Thiel does in broad daylight, like funding lawsuits for vendetta-by-proxy and researching the blood of young people as a youth treatment. It's like Old Testament, incur the wrath-of-God type stuff (the blood, not the lawsuit), and the only thing that happens is Sam Biddle writes a screed and we go about our business.

<comment><USER19> I assume you mean Thiel funding the downing of Gawker after their scurrilous behavior and attempts to justify anything under the First Amemdment, then that one actually has my full support.

As for the rest, to quote Dennis Hopper (IIRC) "I'm not crazy. I'm rich. Rich people are eccentric".

<comment><USER18> I'm criticizing his means more than his ends in that particular example.

If I were on my game, I would have brought up Palantir and how they're helping roll out the infrastructure of our present and future police state.

<comment><USER20> Fosh. Dude is a scumbag. You know that meeting he just put together for/with Trump, with all the tech. leaders, centered around tech. employment? You know, the one with people like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Ginni Rometty, Brian Krzanich...and Alex Karp.

Hmm, let's see.

Amazon employs 250k+ people; Alphabet employs 60k+; Facebook employs 15k+; Musk's companies employ 30k+; IBM employs 350k+; Intel employs 100k+; ... Palantir employs around 2000, but Alex Karp got to go to that meeting. I wonder who Palantir's biggest shareholder is...hmm?

P.S. The meeting also had Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Chuck Robbins (Cisco), and Safra Catz (Oracle)..and all three of Trump's children - who took seats from companies like HP, Dell, all telecomms, Xerox, and more. Seriously: fuck Peter Thiel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the key mistake this piece made is assuming that having an elite education stops you from being culturally and socially aware beyond your class. Sure, many top colleges don't teach this, but as someone who grew up in a family with under $20K income who goes to a pretty good private school, I've seen a very distinct difference in some of my classmates. The education isn't the problem, the bubble is.

I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the issue at stake here is the nature of higher education in the US: specifically, what are its putative goals?

Is it a place for intellectual growth and experience gaining for its own sake, or is it primarily for grooming & career preparation?

With tuition costs as they are, I'd argue that college is necessarily a career investment, almost entirely. And to view it any other way is either naively Romantic or somewhat deluded.

If I could really guarantee career success, social status, and great wealth, just by attending a school--I would.

If these schools really do grant entry to coveted and lucrative positions, and that's what they're selling to potential applicants, I don't see a problem. That's the product, and as products go, that's pretty darn good.

Personally, I think if elite education as entry-way to the upperclass--of and for itself--is an issue, then you're attending one of these schools for the wrong reasons.

Right now, it is often pretended that the goal of college is to learn, to grow, and to 'get an education'. This may have been true in the past, but today it is not. The goal of college is to prepare yourself for the work force, and any other view is somewhat financially irresponsible, whether your family has the money to blow, or not.

Moreover: much of the most important learning in life (intellectual and otherwise) happens outside of academia. It always has and always will. Schools _can 't_ do it all. If you aren't already intellectually curious, 4 years at Stanford--just by itself--won't change that. But if I can find a school that will be worth the investment of time and money for my career, one that will help me build a comfortable life for myself and support my family--then I think that investment is worthwhile, and I'll be happy to make it any day.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would think that it goes without saying that higher education is not the 'be all end all' in overall 'life' education.

While I don't believe the author is directly incorrect in his claims of of university behavior/culture, I feel like most of the 'disadvantages' he lists are of his own decisions, whereas for a lot of people they are forced.

'Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn't that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn't I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they're all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn't it beneath me?'

There's nothing preventing the author from being a teach aside from his own mental barriers that he can overcome himself - I'm sure if he applied, most school boards would leap at the chance of having him. For others though, that simply isn't the case, and they have real, hard, economic/environmental barriers.

<comment><USER24> Sure, but I think that the self imposed barriers the author talks about may be more common in ivy league graduates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Before this gets flagged to oblivion, I have one criticism and two defenses of the article.

As a criticism, this article doesn't address the sciences. The availability of research money is a major reason to go to an elite science institution. If you want to do science, the best thing is to _do_ it, and that usually means email a lab and asking to work there. More labs with more money probably means better opportunities.[0]

In the first defense, consider whether there's anything in this article that might also apply outside of elite colleges.

For instance:

 _But it isn't just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn't go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren't worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were "the best and the brightest," as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic "Oh," when people told me they went to a less prestigious college._

This resonates so much with what Daniel Ellsberg wrote to a young Henry Kissinger regarding levels of top-secret access:

 _Then, after you 've started reading all this daily intelligence input ... you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools. ... it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances._ [1]

Finally, this article absolutely nails many of the patterns I have observed while at elite universities. For instance:

 _(If I'd gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say "in Boston" when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.)_ reminds me of when an acquaintence mentioned he was going to law school 'In Palo Alto'.

Or, one night at a party when I overheard a friend (future Rhodes scholar) say 'You know you're at <institution> when you use the term statistical variance at a theatre party!' Never mind that they'd used it incorrectly, it was emblematic to say the least.

[0](Please don't take this comment the wrong way - there are best-in-field professors at less-than-elite universities, but not as consistently). [1][http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel- ellsber...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg- limitations-knowledge)

<comment><USER26> My brother went to Yale and this does not seem consistent at all. Maybe the author had shitty friends.

<comment><USER25> I don't mean that people at elite institutions are mostly shitty, or even those who've said these things are shitty - I have great friends from my time in school. I hope I did not paint a picture of snobbish assholes who do nothing but sit around and talk about how great they were. I didn't want to be defensive and write a whole paragraph about how much I value the friends and discussions I had in school. I miss my college all the time, and I think there was something special there. It really was an extraordinary place, in large part because of those around me.

However, I did still see these patterns, in others, and in myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One thing about some of those elite institutions, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Yale, teh area south of UC-Berkeley, are that they find themselves in the middle of not well doing urban centers. You could call them ghettos. You have a lot of privileged kids who have their first contact with unprivileged or people who have fallen out of the middle class. Most of them choose to ignore it, but a few take notable action to improve the situation.

</comment><comment><USER28> Since the education talked about is quite far out of my experience[1], I am a bit concerned that any education could so influence a person that they cannot make small talk with someone else. This actually sounds like an isolation problem or a total need not to be embarrassed. I know some folks are shy and suffer real problems, but this isn't it. It just sounds like someone who has lived with a sect of some sort for a long time. I just have a tough time believing the education did it.

1) sent in the applications with the fees that I couldn't really afford and never even got a letter back. I figured it was a sign.

</comment><comment><USER29> Making small talk is a skill, just like any other. You don't need to skip college to figure out how to small talk.

but the rest of the article is pretty interesting: the sense of entitlement, the one dimensional view of intelligence, and the SAT and prep track required to get to it all.

Somehow, this article reminded me of Catch in the Rye - especially the main character and his experiences in a prep school for college.

<comment><USER30> It's not just a skill. If you've been mostly around people of the upper class, and in such schools as well – as the article says – you might be able to hold small talk with people from other countries, but not with people from your own country's lower class.

There's an entirely different way of life there, entirely different life experiences, which lead to entirely different priorities, things you think about, and so on.

I've been in both circles due to family, people from the very bottom, and people from the very top, and you can't just say "making small talk is just a skill".

And the other things you mention are also artifacts of this education: You only see this one perspective of life, which is so very different from what many other people experience, that you never even consider what their life might look like.

Smalltalk, like any communication, requires that you have a mental model of the person you talk with, but if you share none of their experiences, you can't build such a mental model.

Although I wouldn't recommend skipping college, I definitely recommend people to at least try to find a way with which they can experience the life through the eyes of a person of another social class at least once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Summer 2008, and widely criticized from then to now. I wonder if a professor of English can ever have the same perspective as a professor of biology or a professor of mathematics. I don't think he has made the case that higher education that can properly be called "elite" is actually disadvantageous.

[https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s- ne...](https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s-new- manifesto-aa3bd2fa7cdf)

<comment><USER25> I don't think he made that case, either. But it doesn't stop some of his observations from being thought provoking.

I do agree that a science professor would likely have an entirely different perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is > priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

The speech that the blog was paying homage to when it picked a name.

* The American Scholar || [http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm](http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm)

</comment><comment><USER33> Brits figured this shit out a long time ago: you talk about the weather.

<comment><USER3> Brits also are much more okay with embracing the idea that there are separate classes. Americans like to think we are better than that and (like to imagine that we) treat all people in some idealized egalitarian fashion. In practice, it is a lot, lot harder to treat everyone equally well and try to ignore class divides than to have protocols in place for bridging the gap between people explicitly of different classes.

<comment><USER34> It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes. Some years back a blogger tried to cook up a taxonomy of our class system. Since we don't have words to describe them he adopted archaic Indian terms instead. Brahmins are the NY/CA elite, Vaisyas are the Trump voting worker caste, etc.

[https://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes...](https://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-of-united-states.html)

Other writers have recognized and described it too: [http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html](http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html)

Even our very own Michael O. Church: [https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia- Political-Agnostics/mess...](https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political- Agnostics/messages/boards/thread/49570124)

I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.

It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.

<comment><USER35> The fear of recognizing a caste system is that once you use words to describe something, the words themselves become a tool to reinforce and then codify that system.

I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.

<comment><USER12> On the contrary, without the words to describe such structures, they remain hidden from discourse and direct criticism. This protects the implicit structures by rendering them unassailable by democratic processes.

<comment><USER33> I am half remembering an issue with feminism and hierarchies; groups would naturally form hierarchies anyway, but without any formalism or recognition of them, the effects were made far more insidious

<comment><USER34> I think this is what you are referring to: [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > We were "the best and the brightest"

I always have to laugh when I see that phrase used by people who clearly don't know the derogatory connotations that it has carried since Halberstam's book of the same title.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed." Might just be one of the most entitled statements I've ever read.

<comment><USER38>
      I used to dream of being a rich man
      Yeah, I swore I'd have it all some day
      Once you taste it you will find
      That it isn't worth a dime
      'Till you're free enough to give it away
      - Randy Stonehill

      He who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.
      - J. R. R. Tolkein

You have a valid point that, for the less well off, hearing rich people whine about how hard it is to be rich is really grating. But there is also the flip side - wealth really can make you a slave to your money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Poor sap. Really, I think you can do both, but you have to supplement the education with actual experience (like travel, volunteering, and normal jobs) and not buy into the hocus-pocus businesstalk mumbo-jumbo. At least, if you want to be normal. If you want to be in business, by all means, concede yourself to the Ivy monolith.

</comment><comment><USER40> What BS. This guy can't talk to a plumber and it's the fault of elite colleges? Pleeese!

</comment><comment><USER41> Existence in a bubble is almost always a disadvantage.

</comment><comment><USER42> I would say that the upper class of each country has a distinct subculture. And now those subcultures have somehow converged into a global subculture of the rich.

A golf club membership for example can cost $100,000. Some people will probably never save up that much, and if they did, they would never spend it in a golf club membership. But for some it's completely normal and part of their everyday lives.

Same with schools, same with restaurants, etc... by being strictly exclusive you set yourself apart from the rest and miss out on a lot of things.

</comment><comment><USER43> As someone who went to an "elite" institution, I wonder why all education can't be elite. In the past, there were physical limitations -- only so many students could fit in a lecture hall, on a campus etc. So the optimal arrangement at the time was to try to match the highest-potential students with the most qualified educators -- a system that could be gamed, requires imperfect approximations, but the best that was available at the time.

Now, with today's technology, the best educators in the world can become accessible, on a read-only basis, to anyone. This is what we're starting to see, with the biggest brand-name universities exploring how to monetize such a system via MOOC's. When MOOC's mature, a lot of today's university admissions rituals will no longer make sense.

Take SATs for example -- a high school-agnostic measure of a student's capabilities. If instead, there were a standardized set of MOOC's, whose grading systems were trustworthy, then instead of approximating a student's ability to learn new material via a general standardized test, the course material itself is standardized, so SATs become redundant.

I can't wait to see where MOOC's go in the coming years, and "elite" education earn its name through means other than its exclusivity.

<comment><USER44> Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction. Elite is about who is instructed. By definition, you can't have a broad-based, democratic elite.

<comment><USER43> > Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction.

If you read the article, I think the author would disagree, as he refers to Yale and Columbia, not himself, as an elite education.

Here's a thought experiment. If Harvard's professors were swapped out for high school teachers, "elite" students would be less inclined to attend, and over several years, the quality of students at Harvard would almost certainly drop.

Conversely, if someone created a university with all the world's most renowned lecturers, in several years, "elite" students would likely be yearning to attend.

And I'm not clear on what you mean by "democratic elite." There would still be elite students. Two things would be different:

1) Their designation could be determined by cleaner data than was possible in a pre-MOOC world. In the current world, there are few clean baselines on which to evaluate students from different high schools, for example, which is one of the main reasons standardized tests like the SAT exist.

2) If we assume that a better lecturer will help increase a student's knowledge, regardless of the student's quality, then every student's knowledge could be maximized in the post-MOOC world, not just the small fraction that are able to gain entry to elite institutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Cult-like dedication toward conformity and disengagement from the real world.

If they were selling daisies at the airport they'd be "rescued" and medicated.

</comment><comment><USER46> TL;DR:

Going to an elite school

1\. denies you the opportunity to empathize with anyone beyond a narrow spectrum of socioeconomics and culture

2\. anoints you with a sense of self-worth and entitlement that is, if earned at all, only founded on a narrow set of skills: analytic ability and hard work

3\. admits you into the class of seductive "entitled mediocrity", which allows you to fail spectacularly with essentially no real repercussions

4\. constraints you, via social pressure, to a narrow set of "prestigious" career paths, among which you might not find the one that is truly right for you

5\. shelters you from failure and encourages the idea that it is unacceptable, leaving you less likely to take on risk which might be necessary for growth and fulfillment

6\. "is profoundly anti-intellectual", because students are encouraged more to acquire power and all that is necessary for it than cultivation of one's intellect, which requires such slothful indulgences as sitting in solitude, journaling, or even making time to have a relationship with a close friend

TL;DR for the TL;DR: elite schools' "real purpose is to reproduce the class system", instead of to grow their students' minds.

I'll add that when I read Deresiewicz's article in the New Republic and then went to his talk on my undergrad institution's campus, his tone was markedly more bitter than it is here in 2008. I suppose the situation has not improved in his eyes.

<comment><USER47> Hm. I went to Stanford. Famous for diverse, risk-taking non-mediocre graduates. I guess its the exception that proves the rule?

<comment><USER48> I went to Stanford, and I disagree. Sure, there are exceptions, but most fellow alumni I know are very boring.

For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:

\- have an "interesting" hobby \- work out at the gym \- hang out with friends at the bar or club \- work on their career \- start a "start-up" \- travel \- ... other very self-serving pursuits

Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex- stanford-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford- professor-i-was-pushed-out-after-reporting-sexual-harassment)

And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something about this. Enough is enough.

<comment><USER49> What's wrong or boring about any of the things you mentioned? What would you do differently?

<comment><USER48> There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem?

So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc

And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?

<comment><USER50> Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.

<comment><USER48> I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity helpful over the long-term.

<comment><USER50> > I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any > significant way with an extra $100.

The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.

What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.

Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.

So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on _their_ utility function).

The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.

Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.

At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.

<comment><USER48> Re: "It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function)."

You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.

Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."

I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.

Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."

I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.

There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.

But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In The Devil Wears Prada, Emily is told "a million would kill for a position like yours" when demurrs about her troubles. The author should be thankful they were able to get a nice education, even though it may come short in common sense. You can pick that up later if you want to.

</comment><comment><USER52> " _Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate._ "

Wasn't Bush II a Yale graduate?

<comment><USER53> Yale and Harvard Business School.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> My question to people that disagree with the article - I don't go to an elite school, ranked about 55 in CS - what can I do to make myself elite? Or do I not have upward class mobility at all?

</comment><comment><USER38> That first paragraph is a perfect expression of the last election - the Ivy League guy can't figure out how to talk to the plumber, _even when they 're in the same room_.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's funny. When I first read this article it must have left a strong impression for me to have recalled it now, in the wake of the election. I see someone else felt similarly.

I also remember a HN comment on it saying the blame for writer's inability to communicate across the class divide was more likely a profound lack of social skills. A point of view I'm still not entirely sure I agree or disagree with.

<comment><USER56> > in the wake of the election. I see someone else felt similarly.

I think that's exactly why everyone is on about "liberal hubris."

It's because people like you who are so self-absorbed that you write articles about how you're too educated to talk to plumbers and how you sympathize with others who feel the same way.

When you discount everyone who disagrees with you for being "uneducated" and gullible, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me that many would accuse you overwhelming hubris.

<comment><USER55> I didn't write the article (nor as far as I know, anything like it) so you're reading rather a lot into my comment. I wasn't even commenting on the article's own view point necessarily, but rather the degree of alienation between the two Americas it exhibited back in 2008.

I'll have to track down the original HN thread, it'd make some interesting reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education than not.

It's just that understanding of others is relatively rare in the first place among all humans. It's just way more annoying from elites because they tend to think they're very open minded, even when they are not.

<comment><USER28> > Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education > than not.

In my experience, it is independent of education. I've dealt with the social service people early in my career and encountered people with true empathy (along with folks who had no business giving directions much less life advice). You find these folks in many careers and at many educational levels. If anything the focus required for intensive education might push people away from the understanding of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> _" I also never learned that there are smart people who aren't "smart.""_

Rule of thumb for me, _" ^Street smarts^, will kick ^smart, smarts^ arse, most times."_ Important to remember this if you live by _" 'wit', not name"_.

</comment><comment><USER59> There is something maddening about the sort of discourse in which the expensively educated try to impress one another by doing penance for their educations and advantages. Also, does the plumber really care whether he has a conversation with the professor?

</comment><comment><USER60> "As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists."

Now there is a useful quote to carry around in your head.

</comment><comment><USER61> AKA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority)

</comment><comment><USER62> as someone whose parents never went to college, and I went halfway through highschool from the nations top 50 worst highschools (time magazine did an article on that) to a boarding school on scholarship and then got scholarship to a private top ranked institution (not ivy so "second tier" because top 20 universities instead of just ivy), and while I wouldnt redo the past for a second, to be catapulted into a completely different world like this literally overnight while driving home from boarding school to my poor parents fighting and my mom dealing with alcholism and stressing about how to pay the $50 application fee just to apply to college, and pivot between that everyday really does make you see how disparate the world is.

I loved my boarding school because above all the normalcy led to emotional stability so kids could focus on themselves instead of drama. very little drama, very little dating. But everyone was actually very nice and happy. At the same time I felt like an alien even if noone intended it, because it was very obvious 98% of the students there had no clue what an elite system they were in. It also made it difficult to deal with conversations outside of school, like say going to my parents friends house for dinner. "oh you go to THAT school, good for your for being on scholarship. I bet the kids there are spoiled brats. how do you DEAL WITH THEM!?" and i would awkwardly have to explain that they were the nicest people I had ever met, and people went out of their way to make me feel included.

It was like switching between two alternate realities everyday, when the entire population of each world you pivoted between had no idea the other existed, and if it was mentioned, each world mentioned the other in immediate disdain, while perhaps the boarding school world had the more appropriate and politically polished "oh" to anyone who was not at our school. It was not even disdain just kind of like, a blankness in being able to relate to the outside world, but it was not because they were horrible or mean, just that we were all very busy, and to be clear, i much preferred the elite world I lived in, because everyone was so nice and I did feel more at home there than anywhere else in the world.

The gates and doors I had at my own elite beautiful campus of a boarding school were by far the nicest buildings i had ever been in, and it made me feel safe and loved and protected, a world that took care of me and cared about me more than anyone else ever had in the world.

This has been an advantage for me going forward. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering and ComputerScience, I also happen to be female, so being an alien/minority in almost every aspect has become normal for me.

But I can say ive adjusted so much better in the "real world" where competition is high in engineering and software dev, and noone is coddling you. Alot of my friends who took the same majors as me and went to get a job after their Beachelors like I did, had severe adaptation problems and it almost seemed childish to me but I realized I had lived my whole life in lower middle class life, I could carry on a conversation with anyone, and I was not afraid of venturing outside of my comfort zone. That may be a little bit gratiuitous, obviously I dont speak every language and things do scare me and I deal with the imposter syndrome almost daily but in general my ability and willingness to talk to anyone I meet while I'm out, and be creative in the jobs I want and understand complex economic and social impacts of the industries I work is much more developed.

Ultimately the key to evolution is adaptation and I would say I have more emotional adaptability to people and have a more intuitive understanding of economic impacts that have caused so much strife between upper and lower class, the dissapearing middle class, in a more human way.

Because while each of these worlds seem to be (in my opinion) more curious and therefore scared or clueless about the other world which they don't understand, inherently more judgmental without meaning to be, how i see each one is with personal memories of friends, real people, christmas dinners with the poor neighbors and also the incredibly rich girl I knew in boarding school who now interns at Louis Vuitton, and when other people assume the worst about her, I remember how her family let me live at their house when my parents were going through rough times, and her parents treated me as one of their own, and never made me feel inadequate, took my mind of horrible situations at home by bringing me along with their families to fundraisers and elaborate parties where I had a neverending choice of designer gowns to choose from "my closet is your closet" so in no way I feel left out. I remember her genorosity more than her evasive richness, I remember her heart to give and inclusiveness more than I remember her designer clothes, I remember her sense of humour more than I remember her aloofness to the daily grind of the outside world.

And to the real world I grew up in, I remember the extreme struggles of my parents as children and have grace for their inadequacies emotional and financial raising me, I remember the frustration of the neighbor who had been laid off due to a series of globalizing optimizations in his industry that were beyond his time and energy and education to understand, and how it culminated in judgement and frustration in an assumption at dinner about the kids at my school.

I try to remember the humanity in these people and it is much easier to do when you have personal experiences to associate on both ends of the spectrum.

I definitely think everyone could stand more to put themselves outside of their comfort zone, and habitat for humanity on a Saturday for a resume booster is not exactly going to provide the intimate and emotional experiences needed to understand how complex and divided we are as a nation, and just how deep cultural influences play into our prejudices against the unknown.

</comment><comment><USER63> Note that this article is from 2008.

</comment><comment><USER64> Looks like all those years of education didn't help this author learn how to write short, concise paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER65> I feel like I am in a weird, interesting situation. I grew up as a complete redneck, rural, appalachian hillbilly, despite all efforts of my jumped-up grandmother to try to instill some European class. I proudly wore my Haines' T-shirts and Carharts pants, with steel-toed, kevlar-lined chainsaw boots for years... I graduated high school in such a Beverly Hillbullies environment, then got accepted, against my expectations, at Dartmouth (they must have been low on the rural white boy quota that year...) I showed up in Hanover, NH, my first day with my pickup, my chainsaw, my rifle & shotgun, and a full set or mechanic's tools.

It was a pretty impressive example of culture shock. I'm better for having escaped the Franklin County, Maine, bubble and experiencing it, but it took some adjusting.

</comment><comment><USER66> The intentions behind the first paragraph of the article are undoubtedly good, but it reads a lot like "Boo hoo, I can't engage in small talk with this pleb because I'm too educated for him.".

</comment><comment><USER67> edited

<comment><USER68> > I love when the elite romanticize the lives of the prole. It's super easy to > think "Yeah, $750 apartment, a bit for food, go out for a beer once in > awhile, work 9-5, great!" Until you realize that unless you play a perfect > hand with every dime, the slightest expense can cripple you at a moments > notice.

"Not to be rich" doesn't necessarily mean "precariously afloat."

I choose to interpret that line charitably, and take it to mean that many high impact roles in society (especially various roles in education) do not pay richly, so having the luxury to deprioritize income should mean that today's young Americans might be better equipped to focus on social impact first.

Edit: I saw that you edited your post and removed what you originally said. That's too bad. I would much prefer that we try to have a productive discussion than to just drop a curtain on the conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> wonder how many potential uber/facebook founders there could have been which instead decided to graduate and work at a big company for the prestige.

</comment><comment><USER70> This article is utter rubbish. Anyone who possesses an elite education will never suffer in their life. They're in the upper-echelon of society. I have no pity for them and they are not at a disadvantage.

Go ahead an ask anyone accepted into Yale if they'd trade it off for the same major at po-dunk State U.

What do you think their response will be?

Don't be daft. This is trash.

<comment><USER71> When I was on the Harvard tour, the guide was an Ivy League groupie -- she had applied and failed to get into Harvard, went to a good "backup school", (I think Case Western) and finally transferred into Harvard in her sophomore year -- without transferring any credits.

It made an impression on me. I checked out the 2nd tier of school and found a bunch of white bread people from Jersey looking forward to a career in ibanking or medicine.

I ended up in a good state school with real people and no debt. I lost the opportunity to work at McKinsey or whatever, but I consider that a plus.

<comment><USER68> I hope you don't mind if I challenge you on your very last sentence. Why do you consider losing the opportunity a plus?

<comment><USER71> Not at all. At that time in my life, I would have been attracted to that kind of gig, and having been a customer working with those kinds of firms, I wouldn't have liked it.

Fundamentally, the best thing hat I learned about in college was myself. Surrounding myself with type-As on some track would have stifled that. Honestly, I'm really happy with how life has turned out this far!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> The Disadvantage of a an Elite Education is the possibility of a Trump election.

</comment><comment><USER73> The solution is near. The "elite" will be a lot less smug when their jobs also get replaced by technology. No need for melodramatic navel-gazing.

Anyone notice that some the most "elite" schools are total no-shows in AI research?

<comment><USER74> Unfortunately, this is the wrong conclusion -- the jobs of the elite are precisely those that don't get replaced by technology. Automation only affects those jobs are systematic and repeatable.

The elite typically hold jobs in consulting, finance, management, government, etc. that require a lot of word-smithing and people skills.

The big blind spot for technologists is thinking that technology is central to everything. It is not. If you look at how society is organized, it's the folks with the people skills who are on top. People who are good with technology work for them.

<comment><USER73> Would you care to place a bet on which jobs will be replaced by technology?

Banks haves acres of class A office space filled with people preparing powerpoints to show each other. Those jobs will go away.

And those are the people who hire management consultants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If it weren't for the 1% (smartest not wealthiest) we'd still be living in caves, we'd have no cure for disease, we'd have no internet (or Hacker News!). I, for one, am extremely thankful for elite/ivy educations and for what these institutions and their graduates have made possible for the rest of humanity. If the only price we pay is that they don't know how to talk to dumb people, that's a price I feel is worth paying.</comment>