Post: #1

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-s...ads-2013-5

Thomas Friedman wrote in the NYT that top school grads will have to compete with lower tier applicants (lower tier in terms of paper qualifications).

Yale student responds in hilarious fashion.

I went to one of these schools. Lots of entitled assholes who aren't as smart as they think they are.

Post: #2

On the last day I was required to go to High School senior year, my astronomy teacher showed us a video of an Ivy League (Harvard) graduation. During the video 23 graduates were asked to draw Earth's orbit around the sun. Three of them got it right. After the video he told us that as we enter adulthood we were going to meet many people. Some of those people will be more credentialed than we are, but that doesn't mean that they are smarter than us.

Here is an excerpt from the video he showed us. I can't seem to find a longer version.

Post: #3

Anyone notice the typo in the Yale grad's response?

Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate.

Too funny

Post: #4

Gus Lubin is trolling.

The Yale grad's comment is a thoughtful and well-reasoned response to the original op-ed in the Times. The comment offers an alternative perspective with precise and nuanced (though unproven) points.

Characterizations like Actually, We Really Are Better Than Other People or "a harrowing, first-person glance into Yale's meritocratic myth" (IvyGate) are willful mis-characterizations of what was actually written. Their goal is to push your buttons and make you hate the Yale grad. Hating is easy and gets pageviews. Lubin does this by retardifying the issue into a binary question of "are Yale students better people?" and framing the commenter as supremely arrogant. Note that "better person?" isn't even the question asked by Friedman in the original editorial. Lubin is changing the subject to be about Yale hubris, a pointless topic likely to get people fired up but nothing else. Friedman's editorial was specifically talking about employment. IvyGate, meanwhile, targets smug self-righteous know-it-alls who want to feel good about themselves for being better than this Yale jackass.

Neither of them appear interested in legitimate discussion. Neither of them are doing anything to encourage YOU, the reader, to arrive at a reasonable conclusion yourself, besides linking to the source material directly. They just want to push your buttons. Lubin wants to inspire hate. IvyGate wants to inspire indignation.

Post: #5

Boil the question down to, "Are Yale grads smarter on average than students at less prestigious colleges, like University of Iowa?"

It'd be hard to see why the answer would be NO. SAT scores, as they correlate with IQ, predict work productivity pretty well.

Yale isn't the be-all end-all, but when that's the only factor on which to discriminate, university test score averages are a good one to choose, all else equal.

Post: #6

(05-30-2013 07:09 PM)teh_skeeze Wrote:  On the last day I was required to go to High School senior year, my astronomy teacher showed us a video of an Ivy League (Harvard) graduation. During the video 23 graduates were asked to draw Earth's orbit around the sun. Three of them got it right. After the video he told us that as we enter adulthood we were going to meet many people. Some of those people will be more credentialed than we are, but that doesn't mean that they are smarter than us.

Here is an excerpt from the video he showed us. I can't seem to find a longer version.

On the spot verbal quizzes like that aren't always a great test of scientific knowledge. There is social pressure to give a conversational answer that makes sense based on whatever is in your head at the moment and we don't get to see the raw footage that was taken, only the final, edited product.

Incidentally Harvard students these days might still be ignorant about the orbit of the earth, but most of them are smart enough not to allow themselves to be filmed and interviewed randomly.