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Comment by nimchimpsky | Hacker News Reader

"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?

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> 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.

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 - or 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.

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.

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.

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.

> a choice not psychologically available

I feel like you missed his argument by about 3 words.

Its a difference between possibly not seeing a choice and not having a choice.

Not psychologically.

No it is not different, it is the same thing IMO.

The superficial meaning is unawareness of benefits of the choice, hence not recognizing the choice for what it is.

Well said... sometimes choosing to be poor brings more wealth: the world-class, millionaire skateboarder comes to mind. I would have preferred the "narrowing" of an elite Stanford education myself. Still trying to escape my State Schoolitis.

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