Leopold Aschenbrenner: existential risk and German culture
thendobetter.com
thendobetter.com
"People say the ivy leagues should admit more people. I actually think they should admit less... there is too much variability in the ability of the students"
He goes on to suggest it would have been a better experience if only the top 10% were admitted. Better, because it would have made his peer group more ideal. He says this without equivocation or qualification, lol. I almost admire the brazen egocentrism.
Most CNRS labs are attached to university departments and their researchers teach in standard university courses.
It would be more useful to consider them as parts of the host department.
He’s not talking about institutions though. He’s talking about universities.
It’s not like it’s any great mystery why German and French universities don’t rank highly either. For France it’s because all universities bar the grandes écoles have always been of more or less similar selectivity, and given that all professors are civil servants on the same pay scale there’s no way to change that either. You might accidentally get a great department but you’re not going to get a great university that way.
Germany had great universities, universities with world spanning reputations, like Göttingen and Heidelberg. Then after 1968 there was a deliberate policy of leveling, so that every university is more or less of similar quality. It worked. All US Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale. So little prestige attaches to which university you attended in Germany that for several of their Supreme Court justices the specific university they attended isn’t even mentioned on the Supreme Court website.
Contrast this with a system where you aren't tied to your department and can go to classes wherever. In practice there are ways around that in Europe, but it's either niche "elite" programs or pushing "special cases" through university bureaucracy. Also, the whole spirit of the system probably increases mental siloization of the departments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society
The research absolutely impacts teaching to a great extent. We are only humans after all, and I don't have a separate brain for teaching and for research. If you separate your best researchers in research institutes, you're going to seriously limit the flow of knowledge to your bachelor and master students. And those students are your future researchers.
Well, Aschenbrenner did go to Columbia for college, so he put his money where his mouth is. Presumably Helmut Kohl's sons—who went to Harvard and MIT for college, and not FU-Berlin or Heidelberg or TU-Munich or ETH Zurich or Oxbridge—agree.
Aschenbrenner seems to suffer a little from not feeling accepted in his home country. His argument seems to be mostly that his "elite" intelligence was not properly recognized, so he feels that places who celebrate that/him are better than those who don't.
In general, contemporary German culture does not like taking risks or people who stand out. You can see that in casual conversations with people, in the way their bureaucracy works, in the kinds of things that they promote or not. Outside of Berlin, that it, which as a city itself is a stand-out, where people come from their small village because they felt they don't fit in.
“… Germany feels poorer than the US.”
Rural Franconia feels richer than East Texas outside the Houston metro area.
Mr. Aschenbrenner's education is incomplete until he works for a year outside of NY/Boston/Bay Area, supporting himself only on that income.
By the way, I recommend all of Ben Yeoh's podcast chats ( https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh ), thoughtful in a similar way to Lex Fridman and the AI podcast, or Russ Roberts of EconTalk.
I don't think that's a great plug tbh.
I believe that difference is $200k annually. I mean obviously free public universities in Germany will be a lot less selective than paid US elite universities.
"They really, really, really hate anyone that deviates from the norm. This is just my constant experience in Germany which is why I had to leave because I did deviate from the norm."
My experience has been exactly the opposite. Germans will try to show their individualism with odd little quirks like flower decoration and exotic hobbies. On the flip side, just try getting respect from US bankers if you're not wearing their pre-approved "business suit uniform". In Germany, you're usually OK visiting a bank in shorts and t-shirt.
"Germany feels a lot poorer than the United States"
I can agree to this one. Rich people in Germany are a lot more hesitant to be flashy about showing off their expensive car, etc. I'm not sure it is a bad thing, though. I would want rich people to pretend to be normal just so that society feels fairer for everyone (even if it is factually wrong).
"If you look at German billionaires, they all have inherited wealth, where the US billionaires which they... "
There's this club around the Rocket Internet and Project A people who have all become at least 10% billionaires from their own startup exits, some even with US funds like Sequoia or Tiger. But in general yes, there's a lot of inherited old wealth in Europe. But did Trump, for example, really become rich by working himself?
BTW, he seems to whine a lot about the lack of European / German quality research. Again, my guess would be it's more about a different way of presenting it.
MP3 and MP4 and MPEG-H are all from Fraunhofer in Germany. It's just that MPEG-H is usually branded as "Dolby Atmos". If you're a small European company and you want to enter the US market, it many cases it's easiest to have a local reseller. That way, it appears to be an US product.