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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

This is just so beautifully written it brings a tear to my eye. It explains their rationale, points to evidence, acknowledges shortcomings or gaps in knowledge, and shows empathy for those affected. Worth reading just for its pedagogical value, plus it's on an important topic near and dear to many hearts.

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100%! As a parent of a child about to go through the college admissions process (with his heart set on MIT--of course), I want him to read this particularly for the later part of the article: "...you are also not your MIT application..." The acceptance rate is so low, that it should not be used as a measure of self-worth and accomplishment.

I'm a technologist who wanted to attend MIT but, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread, didn't make the cut. I've still had the opportunity to work for the US federal government, unicorn startups, and a detector team at the LHC. As you said, "The acceptance rate is so low, that it should not be used as a measure of self-worth and accomplishment.", and enjoyable, meaningful work can still be accomplished without the MIT experience (although if they get in, also good, I wish them well and hope they're accepted).

Likewise I know people who went to MIT and are now working shitty low paying jobs in unrelated fields of study and generally have failed to get their life together in reasonable time.

... the natural extension of you are not your MIT admission, is that your MIT admission is not you. Do you know they don't have their life together? What if they wanted something different than you? The tone of this comment sucks.

My read is that you can usually get here if you just fight long enough, lol. I didn't get in for undergrad or grad school, but am here doing a postdoc. My advisor here was also rejected for grad school and undergrad. In the end it's really, really important to remember it's just a school. It's a really good school with a good engineering/science culture, and I'm enjoying my time here a lot, but people make it out to be much more than it is. I think I did -- not that I'm disappointed.

As the parent of a student who was just rejected from MIT... I wonder if the reinstatement of the SAT requirement came too late. I'll never really know, but it is possible.

If their score wasn't in the 99% percentile it probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference.

'Heart set' attitude is irrational.

The most successful people I know as a class are the ones who turned down Harvard or MIT and went to a state school or somewhere private with incentives instead.

Granted, nobody does this anymore because credentialism is now an uncontrollable monster.

Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority you tend to need to have bulletproof justification if you want to get away with it.

Then again, with these sorts of things you can never be sure how much the tail wags the dog.

> Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority

I don't think they are though. I think there would be massively popular and wide support for this. You're seeing it in SF right now as the school board is being overthrown for trying to ruin the school system in the name of "equity" or some other garbage reason. The people finally found out and organized.

All this woke stuff today is actually very unpopular and it's why you see Democrats trying to separate themselves from it and make progressives own it. It's even unpopular with the arbitrary groups it claims it helps.

Most people want to be good people and treat others with respect and woke ideology sounds good on the surface ("anti-racist", sure sounds great!) until you get past the formal meaning and into the actual meaning. Sort of like how Democratic Republic of Korea sounds great until you actually read into it.

The problem is that the wokes tend to be loud. A small, vocal group can really ruin your day on Twitter (unavoidable for a leader these days). The only ones willing to speak against them are the hard-right Fox-News Q-anon types. The folks who may be against them but are otherwise reasonable tend to stay quiet until they reach the anonymous safety of the voting booth lest they be similarly targeted.

Then again the MIT Dean of Admissions hasn't been cancelled yet so maybe we're strawmanning.

It's not so much that they are loud but that they are well organized. A small but well organized group will always have an outsized voice compared to the unorganized majority. It's why there's always a minority of elites in just about every type of social situation from a classroom to a country.

Of course, the Woke's aren't just a subculture but embedded deep into our elite universities and prestigious media organizations. But even there, they are a small but well organized group that can be rooted out and disposed of. It just takes organization and a bit of bravery and soon the masses will outwardly support the reaction to Wokeness.

I think I get where you are going with this, can you expand a little bit on the wagging the dog part? I am not familiar with that term. I get what it means, having looked it up, but being new to the concept I want to make sure I understand the context of that segment of the comment correctly.

The actions of big prestigious institutions like MIT have an effect on opinion. So if MIT starts doing something tons of people will just knee jerk take their side on whatever the thing is. So another few institutions might follow suit and it might snowball and standard testing could become back in fashion as fast as it went out of fashion.

That's a great point. However, you're using the idiom of the tail wagging the dog incorrectly. The tail wagging the dog usually means something important or influential being controlled by something less so. In other words, the tail would be wagging the dog if I wrote a blog post that made people change their opinions on the SAT.

The movement to shit-can standardized tests was far bigger than MIT or any one institution and was part of a broader political trend whereby these sorts of institutions have been adopting particular positions. Hence MIT is the tail in this case.

Ah ok thank you for taking a moment to help me understand that. Having looked up the term and re-read the comment, I see what was meant.

It’s also important to note that they try to make clear that they’re describing their own situation and not providing a blanket statement.

thanks!

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