Faking It (The Undereducation of an Overachiever) | Hacker News Reader

Faking It (The Undereducation of an Overachiever)

nytimes.com

31 pointsvillageidiot14 comments

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut

Wow, sounds like me, only more pathological.

I spent almost my entire school career seeing how much I could get away with, writing fake personal essays, falsifying scientific "evidence" (as if 7th grade science fairs matter), manufacturing fake "drafts" which were really my first and final version but deliberately messed up, doing my homework as the teacher came around to collect it. Manufacturing saccharine, bullshit, fake answers that teachers always swallowed. Reusing essays from freshman year of HS for university English class. (Haha.)

I rebelled against being forced to do so many stupid things, that it became a game. Nobody ever noticed, so I realized that I couldn't respect or listen to people I could fool and conquer so easily.

You can do it in non-liberal arts. It's still easy.

The trick is, you have to be smart enough to do the real work to fake it. You don't necessarily have to know the given facts, though.

Ouch.

shrug I'm more well-adjusted than almost anyone else, now.

Institutionalized schooling just hobbles anyone who doesn't fit the mold, one way or another.

Taking it seriously is one way. Taking nothing seriously is another.

Sounds more like someone who needs to be special.

I was the same way in highschool. ;)

Honestly, I wanted somebody to catch me so I could find someone I could trust and respect. I needed somebody like that in my life.

But it never happened. Go figure.

I don't get why this is on HN.

We have methods to kill Paula Beans in their tracks. Liberal arts does not.

Is this anything new?

Well, I'd never read it before, so it was new to me. And it was an interesting story, and I expect there to be conversation about the value of metrics when any metric can be faked. The first thought I had after reading this was "What matters at all statistically speaking if none of the facts can be trusted?" How do we know that pagerank or daily hits means anything when they can be as effectively bullshitted?

The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion. But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.

> The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion.

Actually, the "physical arts" have another test - it either works or it doesn't.

> But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.

Nope - they call you racist, Republican, fascist, etc., and you lose.

I'm of the mindset that you never lose when the other person resorts to calling you names. If somebody's called out for their bullshit, then they've lost.

That's nice, but it's not how liberal arts, or politics for that matter, work.

But it is how they work. Each person is able to choose their own idols. Disagreement is expected. You have aesthetic extremists who will tell you T. S. Eliot is a terrible poet, or that E. E. Cummings is modernist garbage. I personally think that Dickinson is overrated; I know a literary enthusiast who doesn't really think Shakespeare is particularly brilliant. That's all acceptable.

The idea of the liberal arts is that they're not rankable collectively. While there's an objective bad to be found, good is to some degree subjective, and each person can decide what they value. So you're allowed to value deconstructionism if you'd like, or state that meaninglessness is the point of art, and I'm allowed to disagree with you and call your work bullshit.

Where did politics come in? Are you legitimately trying to make a point, or are you just trying to blindly spew your dislike of the liberal arts? If so, tell me so I can directly address that instead of making tangential arguments.

It's a review of the book by the guy who wrote two articles from the Atlantic article that were popular on HN recently: [http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/kirn] [http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking]

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