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Comment by chancho | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, that's kind of strange. There's so many important socio-political dilemmas for young people to grapple with these days, why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict? Shouldn't young people be forgiven for holding the unequivocal yet naive belief that we shouldn't kill each other, or even threaten to? I mean, if they're equivocating on nukes when they're a fresh-faced 22, what will they be equivocating on when they're a grizzled 55 and at the reins of some real power?

get's to bottom of article, reads that author represented NM in the house...back up to the byline...

Fucking Heather Wilson. Should have known...

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"why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict?"

From the article:

"A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral."

http://www.globalzero.org/en/about-campaign : "Global Zero members believe that the only way to eliminate the nuclear threat — including proliferation and nuclear terrorism — is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, secure all nuclear materials and eliminate all nuclear weapons: global zero."

This is not a criticism of a random student. This is someone who has devoted significant effort to a political campaign that they appear to have not actually thought about.

This is not particularly unusual. Find some partisan for a cause, and ask them for just a moment to suspend snark and judgment and just recite the dominant arguments of the other side, and a couple of key bits of evidence for the other side. I haven't tried this, but I rather suspect few partisans could pass this test. (But how can you have a good opinion if you don't even know the arguments the other side has?)

The author's complaints always focused on students who didn't seem to have an opinion about the ramifications of their own areas of interest.

For instance, the student who was asked about nuclear weapons was "a student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university"; surely someone so involved in the issue should be able to comment on the probably outcome of their stated goal.

Likewise, "a young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year" should probably be able to discuss why it's worth doing what they'll be doing (i.e. potentially killing people for America).

I can't comment on the answers to these questions, or how accurate the author's recounting of their responses was (perhaps they were just idealistic, not ignorant of the arguments)... but I think if you're applying for a Rhodes Scholarship you should be able to discuss the consequences of your beliefs and actions.

We must have read different articles. The one I read didn't fault the students, first of all. She merely pointed out that they had been prepared with a narrow focus and weren't demonstrating interest in or thinking about larger frame issues.

If you've considered the issue of the use of nuclear weapons and have either the opinion that it's never justified, or that it is in certain situations, that's one thing. But then when discussing the issue you wouldn't really be equivocating, would you? Equivocation and the problems the author reported in candidates were evidence the students simply hadn't thought about important questions related to the their fields of interest. And yes, I think that's a cause for concern if the trend is increasing.

Here's what the article said: A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral.

Since when does thought equal equivocation? Thoughtless action is irresponsible no matter what motivates it. The author also faulted a student who signed up to kill for the government without wondering whether there was anything worth killing for.

The only thing I disagree with in the article is the one-sided concentration on the students who are just eager to do what they're told. What about the ones who are more thoughtful? Who are they, where do they come from, and why are they different from their Ritalin-addled robot achiever peers?

The problem is anyone actually considering whether they should do what they are told has probably at some point wondered whether they should be good students, and at the Rhodes Scholar level of competition it doesn't take very many semesters of not-straight-As to not be in the running anymore. Selecting for straight-As and the ideal academic is, to be fair, selecting for exactly the kind of person the author decries.

I'm not saying no straight-A student is a thinker, just that at some point a thinker has probably found some reason to end up not getting straight-As for a semester. Maybe not even a good reason. Just a reason.

To get a Rhodes scholarship, you don't just have to do well academically, you also need to be an enthusiastic sportsman and participate in a bunch of extracurricular activities -- i.e. be an obsessive CV-builder. And indeed, since the actual cash value of a Rhodes scholarship isn't all that large, the main reason to want one is to get another shiny achievement for your already-extensive CV to impress even more people.

The kind of students who are competitive for Rhodes scholarships are thus exactly the sort of students who do things in order to build up their CVs rather than because they are particularly passionate about them.

A Rhodes scholarship selection committee member complaining that kids nowadays are thoughtless hardworking achievement drones is like a football coach complaining that students nowadays spend too much time in the gym. It may or may not be true in general, but it's obviously true of the subset you're interacting with.

It's also a reinforcing spiral. Getting into a Model UN conference at high school, improves your chances of joining the state debate team, which improves your chances of getting into an honours society, which improves your chances of going to that Future Leaders seminar, which ...

I called it "The CV circuit". The only way to win was to get onto it first. I think Americans have worked this out more completely than we have (in New York they send toddlers to prep school to get them into the best kindergartens).

She offers no evidence that the student hasn't thought long and hard about nuclear weapons. I wonder if she reached that conclusion because he disagrees with her. As if saying "If he supports Global Zero then he couldn't have considered these things."

I assume this is based on a real student whom she interviewed, and that he was unable to satisfactorily justify his belief system when challenged on it.

This kind of thing doesn't surprise me -- the students with the most strongly held political opinions are often those who have thought about the issues the least.

That's because when we talk about "strongly held beliefs" we're talking about an emotional and not rational attachment to the idea. Emotionally-held ideas are not examined as they are tied up in self-image.

She isn't trying to make a case against those specific students. They might not even exist exactly as she described them. She merely used three examples to illustrate her argument, and she included one vaguely "conservative" example (the student willing to kill for the government) to balance two "liberal" examples. That's pretty good for a former Republican officeholder writing in the Washington Post. There is only the faintest whiff of partisanship here; don't let it distract you from her argument.

> "If he supports Global Zero then he couldn't have considered these things."

Millions of pounds of Soviet armor rolling across the Eurasian steppe and into Germany.

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