I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for.

We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.

Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).

Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.

I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.

Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't

Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.

> private schools can run how they want...

This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.

There are no resources for those who don’t progress, as there already aren’t enough teachers for the existing K-12 workload, and existing teachers are overloaded in the aggregate.

This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone.

Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10.

https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241276512

> The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be?

Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt

They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it.

Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.

> You need to give these people something to do

Yes. But not as a first-order priority. Fixing the incentives in the schooling system can take priority over figuring out what to do with every single person passing through it. (Also, a market where a third of students fail to graduate high school will find use for that labor.)

(I realize this is an ungenerous and blunt take that lacks some amount of empathy)

I have worked in fortune 500 companies for 15 years, and my observation is that there is an alarming amount of people (engineering) who work in these companies are completely inept in their domain of expertise.

What they seem to get by on is a complete adherence to hierarchy: do not ask questions, do not push back on requests, do not engage in capability mindset, just execute on whatever slop is getting jammed down the throat of middle management.

Now, as someone who is on "the leadership team", I see this as generally widespread across many different orgs.

These folks obviously serve some function: which is to churn out whatever the whims are of the executive leadership team based on the Current Business Strategy.

So what do we do with these folks? Let them keep doing it. We could satisfy these roles with the standard factory style highschool education followed by an associates -like degree, e.g. a two year rule following program that introduces the domain and jargon that you're going to be in.

High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)

Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.

Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.

> What do you plan to do with the people who don't pass though?

Remedial classes. Or, realistically, unskilled labor.

Like, what do we do with these kids now? The same thing, except after we’ve saddled them with a meaningless diploma and a pile of debt.

They are still there either way. They don't suddenly become smarter and/or hard working because we pretend.

If anything, it simply increases the pool of people who realize you don't need to try.

Ironic because it is the people who push for just passing everyone that are actually doing it to just "make the problem go away", in reality.

We hope the social redistribution that would have to be there to help those that fail, and those employed to teach them, is less expensive than every citizen forced to sacrifice 8 years of prime life time and tens of thousands of dollars.

Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.

You can't make people more knowledgeable by not attempting to measure their knowledge. You can maybe try to improve things for subsequent generations. But issuing a false credential won't solve the problem.

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https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS...

The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.

People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.

And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.

In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure.

That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.

> Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.

Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.

I'm a lapsed English teacher, and I don't completely disagree with you: some of the Old Standards could be removed without losing anything, and there are contemporary texts that aren't but should be included in high school and college curricula.

However, the value of the Canon° is three-fold:

1) There are stories and ideas that are culturally important. Students need to be made familiar with them, and know where they came from.

2) The themes in the Old Stuff are not unrelateable. Shakespeare wrote about sex and death and jealousy and power, and the tension between individuals and society. Those are all perfectly familiar to anyone. One of my favorite assignments, when I taught a college lit course, was to read Beowulf, and then (during mid-term week, to give them a break) watch Jaws, because they're the exact same story. It's important to recognize common humanity in people who look and dress and talk and believe differently than you do. Using The Old Stuff to expand that skill side-steps many of the reflexive reactions students bring to contemporary literature.

3) Students need to be challenged to read hard texts. You're on HN, so I expect you recognize the value and pleasure of understanding something that was previously beyond you. Yes, there is contemporary writing that also works - I assigned more than some of my colleagues - but reading the classics hits all three of these points, so it's still worth doing.

All that said, there are way too many Humanities teachers who are just awful, and put people off reading rather than the reverse. I suspect that you may have encountered some of them, and that's a damn shame.

°To anyone reading over our shoulders in this conversation: don't @ me over this. I'm well aware of the problems with the notion, but it's still the best layman's term for the idea under discussion. I'm a broad-tent guy, though: whatever you think oughta be included is probably fine with me.

Citation needed for American public high schools that have a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum.

Why would you pay 10s of thousands of dollars to get a credential everyone knows is meaningless? The first ChatGPT grads are just now entering the workforce. I have a son entering his junior year of high school. Who knows if a degree will be worth even the time investment 5 years from now.

If an employer really valued the credential, they would supply it.

That’s my point. It is only so expensive because it is a gate to earning money. The concept that everybody should go to college and the Federal Pell grants and funding to that effect is what causes college to be expensive.

So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.

Why wouldn't employers value it?

A student populace not taught financial literacy and memed they have to go to college to succeed. High schools hiring "advisors" whose entire job is to maximize the college application rates to make the school look good.

My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off.

Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.

The comment you were replying to was about school kids, not foreign students in post secondary programs looking for work/immigrant visas.

Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out.

Source: former F1 visa masters student here

You’re an obnoxious, pretentious prick

So your solution for the system failing a person is to punish the person but reward the powerful people engaged in the bad behavior. The ones who brainwashed the kids into thinking that this is what they're supposed to do.

> 2. Their college’s accreditation should be investigated

> 3. Same with their HS

really, what kind of moronic garbage is this? "investigating" a school's accreditation because one of their graduates was... annoying on social media? you're literally acting like a r_tarded child, shut up

> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.

In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.

My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.

> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies

The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.

> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.

Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.

The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!

That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms.

Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.

> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it

A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.

Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.

If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.

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It's an attention issue. We have these phones with constant dopamine hits. We were getting it a little bit on the web before the rise of smartphones, but it's just out of control now. We have 100 apps constantly vying for our attention and giving us endless things to scroll through.

The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.

I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.

IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it:

https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...

> because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning?

Someone isn’t doing their job. And we can’t fire the parents. Tackling teachers’ unions seems like a necessary difficult step if we want to take this seriously. Alternatively: we keep letting public education deteriorate until so much of the population opts out of it that killing it outright becomes politically possible.

Someone ran the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution through an AI detector and apparently our country was founded by an AI.

To the degree that AIs are good at re-creating the style of the training data, you would expect there to be non-AI-generated text that would "look like" AI output.

They use, unwittingly, proxies for "AI" stylometry, with no specific or explicable features they can point to and say "Look! That is evidence that the text is written by AI", as if there were such features in the first place. The best they can do is validate the very lazy one-shot patterns that humans should be able to highlight in the first place.

Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.

Its unfair to dump all the blame on teachers. Yes, some teachers could make a difference (and some do), inspire students but that’s also a match made in haven, students need be receptive to learning something that is arduous at first. Id blame most of it on how technology is weaponized/ financialized to steal attention and fill it with junk.