cs137 (u/cs137) - Readit News

cs137 commented on People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/pseudolus

frognumber · 3 years ago

Elite schools want people from the power class. A lot of this is explicitly baked into admissions. Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.). This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.

There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.

cs137 · 3 years ago

> Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.).

I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.

My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.

> This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.

This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.

cs137 commented on Hybrid work is doomed theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/pseudolus

zeckalpha · 3 years ago

This author's writing style is hard to read at first: do they support in-person work or remote work? Unclear.

Their last few sentences clarified the whole thing for me. The office is an institution separate from where it is physically, and management will work to recreate it (possibly in a new form).

cs137 · 3 years ago

There's a certain rhetorical device being employed here where a hopeless situation is being presented, followed by an intimation that, if workers fight for it, things can be different.

He's right, on the whole. The Office, the institution, gives executives a sense of place and purpose. What fun is it to be in charge if you can't make people squirm? It's not about money for these people (they have enough). It's about power. Of course they want their favorite toy back.

This being said, the Soviet system didn't fall immediately after Chernobyl and neither will global capitalism after Covid-19, but the process seems to be starting. It's possible that things will fall right back where they were; it's also possible that there will be opportunities to force change. I don't think we're even halfway through the Covid era, even if (as I hope) the worst of the disease itself is over.

cs137 commented on Hybrid work is doomed theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/pseudolus

cs137 · 3 years ago

> But to get there, office workers must organize, and take the goals and power of the Office into account. It does not want to be flexible, and it cares little for efficiency. If the Office makes concessions, they will be minor, or they will take time; hybrid work is not a revolution.

This is the central point, I think. The office can be changed, but it won't emerge through the gradual processes (invariably, out of a worker's favor) preferred by capitalism. The bastards in charge didn't even want remote work in March 2020; it will take a nasty motherfucker of a fight to get anything from them.

The problem is that five-day-per-week WFH is mostly a dead end. It can work if you have an independent, international reputation (of the kind that no employer, except in academia, wants a worker ever to get... and that, if you have, you will constantly be accused of favoring over your assigned duties) but otherwise, it's going to put you at a ceiling. If you're WFH all the time, there will be no investment in your career; you will not be perceived as a "go-getter" or a "high potential worker. You are just trading time for money, which no one really respects. Of course, 90% of y'all aren't going to get managerial investment in your career even if you do go into the office, but the fact that the creeping mutual disengagement isn't acknowledged is what keeps you in a job.

At the same time, spending 40+ hours per week in an office where managers (sometimes unintentionally, often deliberately) fuck with your fight-or-flight mechanisms is extremely unhealthy. So, five days per week of ass-in-chair is no good either. And for half of the population, the long-term illnesses it causes cancel out the benefits. Will it go away? Maybe. I'm worried, though.

I think WFH always be something you have to negotiate for. It'll always be "a privilege". (Reminder: under capitalism, housing and food are privileges.) You'll have to do what people did before 2020: start out on 5 ass-in-chair days, perform well, scale up (you're implicitly allowed one day/week of WFH per year) and perform better on your WFH days (feel free to down-moderate your performance on in-office days). That strategy will remain open, and the public sector may move to a more forgiving structure... but private-sector managers are always going to want, at least, the "right" to demand 5 ass-in-chair days as, if nothing else, a way to punish perceived low performers.

I hope I'm wrong. On the outside, I'm an athletic and good-looking middle-aged man, but I'm invisibly disabled (PTSD, digestive issues, Ashkenazi risk factors for even more serious diseases related to stress, etc.) and, while I should be able to live a pretty good life if I can avoid pointless [1] stress, ten years more of standard corporate culture would almost certainly kill me. I fucking hate corporate capitalism and would fight in a war to end it. Realistically, though, I don't think the office is going anywhere. RTO-ers will get the promotions and they'll make the new rules, and if the last fifty years are any indicator, the new rules will be engineered to seem like improvements but be subtly worse than the old ones.

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[1] The funny thing about stress is that real stress is a lot less damaging to the body than the low-level dysphoric stress of office life. Being in a life-threatening situation isn't nearly as damaging as spending thousands of hours surrounded by people who have malevolent intentions (i.e., a willingness to deprive you of income, even for the slightest personal benefit) but being able to do nothing about it. It's being trapped that fucks people up.

cs137 commented on Every complex idea has a million stupid cousins apxhard.substack.com/p/ev... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mikewarot · 3 years ago

Complex idea - we're running out of easy to reach oil, the amount infrastructure, labor, and energy required to extract a barrel of oil out of the ground will eventually make it counterproductive to drill new wells.

  Strawmen used to cut the idea down:
    Oh, you're talking about climate change
    The price will just go up
    Oh, that's just politics, you don't know the truth
    Technology will solve the problem
    etc., etc.

We here at HN are specialists at picking apart examples. It's a feature when it comes to weeding out con artists and crackpots. It's a bug when it comes to actually discovering new things that haven't been communicated perfectly.

We need to keep this in mind, and try not to be too blind to new facts or ideas.

cs137 · 3 years ago

This. The other issue with peak oil is that people have been predicting it since 2005 (if not earlier) and the general picture has been, and still is:

    * we don't fully know when oil production will peak, because it's based on human behavior.
    * when we do pass peak oil, we won't know for a few years that we have. (It's possible that the 2019 local max was "the peak"; it's also possible that it was related to COVID-19 more than oil scarcity.)
    * very few of the issues caused will be attributed to "peak oil" at the time. Instead, they'll be blamed on state collapses, policy failures, economic depressions, and resource wars that will all be indirectly related to peak oil. 
    * peak oil is not necessarily a bad thing (although it probably will be, because the global system is already fragile and nearly universally despised) if we can find replacements in time--unfortunately, we're decades behind where we should be with nuclear energy, which for all its flaws is nevertheless the greenest energy source we've found thus far.

To the outside observer, "peak oil" seems like one of those things people have been worried about forever but that has not yet come to be and thus "never will".

cs137 commented on How do you respond to a one-character email from your boss's boss's boss? (2018) inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/5-... · Posted by u/notpushkin

aarghh · 3 years ago

I'd be tempted to respond with "Use your words, Jeff". But then I am a mere minion.

cs137 · 3 years ago

Unfortunately, people like us who respond to that sort of thing like a normal human (as opposed to a brainwashed corporate drone who lives in terror of the master's displeasure) tend not to do well in the corporate world.

The trick of corporate survival, as observed in those who can actually hack it, is extreme compartmentalization. They become two people: one who watches the abuse from a distance as if it were happening to someone else, and then a normal self that is functional enough to do the grocery shopping without bursting into tears. The problem is that very few people can sustain this compartmentalization (also known as: dissociation) for more than a few years. It tends to play out badly (memory issues, alexithymia, autoimmunity) in the long term.

cs137 commented on Historical language records show surge of cognitive distortion in recent decades pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas... · Posted by u/gumby

fallingknife · 3 years ago

In my experience no one is more miserable than the upper middle class. For some reason most aren't able to figure out they actually are rich.

cs137 · 3 years ago

Because they're not. One bad professional turn, health problem, or lawsuit and they are thrown out like garbage.

They're detested by both sides. The regular poor proletarians see them as kapos (and, quite often, it's the case) who have sold them down the river in order to get themselves temporarily pampered. The upper class, of course, has no respect for them. They've rejected their own tribe (the proletariat, the 99.9%) in the hopes of ascending into a new tribe that will almost certainly never actually accept them.

cs137 commented on Historical language records show surge of cognitive distortion in recent decades pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas... · Posted by u/gumby

cs137 · 3 years ago

The good news is that some of this is publication bias, not a devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don't know; we have no record of what they actually thought.

Therefore, we aren't necessarily in uncharted territory when it comes to lousy public mental health; it's possible that we were worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data, because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at all.

This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then, publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This establishes with high confidence that public mental health has worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest, we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately unstable status).

Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class, no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War) who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who believed their educational credentials and professional networks (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears about.