
So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering - luu
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/14/so-much-of-academia-is-about-connections-and-reputation-laundering/
======
kbos87
So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular
holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”,
meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an
insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly
average at what you do.

The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think
this person likes, respects, and would vouch for me? Everything else aside,
that’s what people optimize for when they choose who to promote, respond to
reference requests, and generally in who they engage with at work.

Oftentimes It seems like it may not even be a conscious behavior, they just
know that’s who they have a gut feeling about.

I definitely wish this wasn’t the way of the world, as someone who isn’t a
natural when it comes to building relationships in a professional setting. But
I also don’t let it get me down. It’s an element of human nature that’s hidden
many layers deep in the workplace.

When I finally faced this fact and started devoting some of the time I
previously spent on hard skills, I realized it was far and away the more
impactful way to allocate my resources.

~~~
vivekd
Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of
law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't
imagine other places being much different.

I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to
work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing,
you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields like
law, academia, politics, and even the corporate world where the results and
methods are more abstract and given to opinion.

Unfortunately much of the world is run by people who excel in the abstract
fields rather than the technical ones.

~~~
giantDinosaur
I don't think it's true that computers are great at exposing this. Software
ranges from the concrete (does this button do anything) to the abstract (does
this statistical program have an off by one error that's invisible to
customers other than returning somewhat wrong results?). I think there's two
competing definitions of 'work' in software - 'it works' as in 'allows for
use' which can compete with the 'implements properly'. Computers and code will
brutally expose the former, since it simply will not allow you to do something
if it's broken. They don't necessarily expose the latter.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I don't buy your arguments - at all. At the end of the day people have strong
expectation about what software should do. If it doesn't do that, they will
quickly notice. If they don't notice (now or in the future) things like your
"off by one" errors, then that requirement wasn't likely that important to
begin with.

Now, I've seen plenty of "demo-ware" software that has been presented as
something that was much more than it actually was, but again, stuff like that
always falls over, riddled with bugs and crumbling under load, when it gets
substantial use.

Some things you really can't fake, and software engineering is one of them.

~~~
tangjurine
Let's say you have a for loop that is supposed to run once, but some
"programmer" calls it a hundred times. The program still works, but it's a lot
slower.

Input lag on devices has doubled or tripled from the 1980s while clock speeds
have increased drastically. Reddit and Hackernews do essentially the same
task, yet Hackernews' load times are almost instant while Reddit takes more
than a second to load at times.

It's true that you can't fake a minimum viable product, but it seems to me
there is a long way from that to actually making something good.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
We've outsourced the cost of development from the developer to the user.

Noone wants to write low level code because learning it costs money, so
instead we just throw more hardware at the problem until it goes away...

~~~
toomuchtodo
Sort of. Would a user use all of that compute if it all wasn’t wasted?
Probably not. What we’ve done is “inflate away” (similar to fiat and central
bank policy) the need for additional human developer time through Moore’s law.
We all pay for this through annual tech spend, which keeps the advancement
treadmill running.

Human time is expensive, so it makes sense to throw anything cheaper at the
problem first.

------
viburnum
Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five
universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their
research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately
tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies.
In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the
citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible
that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I
wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support
whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.

~~~
roenxi
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous
incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to
constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase
government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to
push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players.

I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists
to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect
pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending
environment would be absolute economic powerhouses.

That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to
people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.

~~~
rayiner
> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably
> permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses.

Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful,
innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve
Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has
plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc.

I don't like the implications of that, but I see little evidence pointing in
the other direction.

~~~
roenxi
Steve Jobs didn't own Apple; he'd apparently sold his entire stake around the
time he was ousted in 1985 [0].

Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about
day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-
day management gets appointed/fired.

But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see
why it would do badly.

[0] [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/steve-jobs-original-
apple...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/steve-jobs-original-apple-stock-
would-be-worth-66-billion-today-2016-4?nojs=1)

~~~
rayiner
> But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see
> why it would do badly.

There are concrete examples of worker-dominated organizations: schools, public
transit entities, etc., where powerful worker unions dominate policy. They are
almost universally unsuccessful, as worker interests take precedence over
delivering a product to the consumer.

~~~
roenxi
But none of those things are worker owned either; they are generally owned by
the public. The success or failure of a school or public transport entity has
nearly no impact on the success or failure of the workers (short of
catastrophic mismanagement, anyway).

I suppose we have trailed things like worker ownership in early stage startups
with high equity compensation. That might be evidence that it works well.
Letting workers capture most of the value they create would be at least as
interesting experiment for me than Universal Basic Income; but I think UBI has
much more coverage as a political idea.

------
chrisseaton
Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal
abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate
through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous
Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point
across. Everyone should be embarrassed.

~~~
tqi
Definitely agree, this whole affair has a real rashamon vibe to it. it feels
like everyone involved (the article, philipson, and furman) are talking past
each other. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees forecasting and curve
fitting are different things, and that a cubic fit (red line, allegedly) would
be a bad representation of what the future will hold. The disagreement seems
to be:

\- furman believes (or claims to believe) the original tweet was being
deceitful by presenting a curve fit as a curve fit but leaving enough
ambiguity that casual viewers might interpret it as a prediction of future
deaths dropping to 0 by mid may

\- philipson believes (or claims to believe) furman thinks that curve fitting
and forecasting are the same thing, does not address whether the original
tweet was attempting to be coy or deceitful

\- article believes (or claims to believe) that philipson believes that a
curve fit actually is a good prediction of the future, then goes super wide
with it to make some vaguely related point about academia

I believe no one is lying or stupid, but everyone is finding the worst
possible interpretation of events so they can dunk on each other.

~~~
Gatsky
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon)

"Rashomon (羅生門, Rashōmon) is a 1950 Jidaigeki psychological thriller/crime
film directed by Akira Kurosawa...

The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing
subjective, alternative, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same
incident."

Now that is an esoteric reference!

~~~
tprice7
It's one of the most famous Japanese films, top ten perhaps.

------
mcnamaratw
It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs
time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that
people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time.

At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.

~~~
Animats
Um, yes.

The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus
epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data
for anything but deaths very good.

This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and
wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now
and that point? I dunno.

~~~
cco
> This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up
> and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between
> now and that point? I dunno.

This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few
weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open
up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.

~~~
pjc50
The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test
all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it
works; see South Korea and New Zealand.

The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population
infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage
suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.

~~~
cco
This could be a naive question, but everything I've heard is that
coronaviruses don't disappear, they just sorta integrate and mutate into our
normal "known set" that we deal with year-to-year.

If that is true, doesn't the strategy taken by SK and NZ put them at continued
risk for a another outbreak if the virus sneaks back in? Without a vaccine,
and then significant uptake by the population yearly, doesn't the risk of
covid-19, and its mutations, come back every year?

~~~
pjc50
We do eventually require a vaccine or similar.

SK and NZ can "end" the outbreak. The "herd immunity" strategy will simply
continue it straight through the whole year, with a lot more deaths.

------
sytelus
This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML
research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does
workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers
get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area
chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was
done by one student? I call it _favor economy_. You invite X to be your
workshop speaker and then you get to be speaker in X's workshop. You add X as
co-author in your paper even if X has no real contribution and then expect
that X does same for you. This leads to people bragging about having 16 papers
in NeurIPS which indicates how deep there are in this favor economy. If you
are unwilling to be participant in this favor economy, your citation count,
number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those
who are. The honesty and ethics are perhaps all time low in the history of
modern scientific research.

~~~
euix
Putting people on the author list who made no contributions to the paper is
known as academic fraud. I am surprised this is allowed.

~~~
sytelus
1 student and 4+ "advisors" aren't uncommon these days. They would show up in
meetings, put their attendance and claim their spots. So one can argue its not
really "fraud".

------
a0w49tjaw4jrt
Headline and article content don't line up very well. Actual (short) body of
article makes the point that when people in positions of power don't have
significant training in statistics, it isn't surprising that they don't
understand statistics. But that they do need to understand how much they don't
understand. The article says next to nothing about gaming of professional
achievement in academia.

~~~
koheripbal
I can offer one small anecdote that maybe reinforces some of the criticisms of
academic circles.

A long while ago, I worked in IT in the admissions department of a top-5 ivy
league school. While there I became good friends with many of the admissions
officers for the undergraduate and MBA programs.

It's an open secret that admissions are highly influenced by who you know, but
what I was stunned by was the overwhelming percentage of each incoming class
owes its entry to the connections of their parents.

I had always assumed it was some small single digit percentage, but the first
time I saw "the list", I was dumbfounded. There is a list of students each
year that is sent from the Dean of admissions to admissions department
containing the students that must be admitted. The process for rejecting one
of those students required the admissions officer to submit a report outlining
why - an incredibly rare occurrence.

The admissions officers rationalize this as a necessary evil, and cover
themselves by pointing to the special attention they pay to diversity
candidates. "If I see one more white, indian or asian kid from the upper-east
side with a perfect GPA, I'm just going to throw the app out the window" was a
quote that stuck in my mind.

The list was a collection of applicants who were the children of staff,
professors, administrators, and financial or political benefactors.
Surprisingly, children of alumni (even those who donated regularly) were not
in the group unless they really made an effort over the years and had someone
at the school who could call the Dean personally.

It sort of bothered me because it made me realize that someone like myself - a
good student, non-diversity, with good EC activities was competing for a tiny
tiny portion of the admissions slots for any top school.

Is it really so much to ask to have a transparent and level playing field in
college admissions?

------
dasudasu
This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying
goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's
probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a
way.

~~~
User23
It’s difficult for me to take any discussion of imposter syndrome seriously
that doesn’t consider the possibility the subject feels like an imposter
because he is. Having been personally acquainted with several such imposters
and having never seen such a discussion I’m left to conclude the entire
concept is deeply unserious.

Edit: sibling is making much the same point. The concept is only useful if
actual imposters can be identified.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You can't have impostor syndrome if you _don 't care_ about your ability to do
your job.

Likewise if you believe - probably correctly - that your failures don't matter
because you can bullshit and bluster your way through them. And if that
doesn't work, a quick word with your sponsors will sort out your problems.

Impostor syndrome is the opposite - caring about quality, feeling you fall
short (because quality is hard), and relying on substance not superficiality
to get ahead.

~~~
User23
There are at least three dimensions here: Feels like imposter, is imposter,
and cares. I'm not going to enumerate all 8 values since that's trivial, but
realize my point is that conflating the first two dimensions is what makes the
exercise intellectually empty. There are people who feel like imposters (or
aren't), are imposters (or aren't), and still don't care about their ability
to do their job.

I'm still quite skeptical, but even this simple conversation is far deeper
than any discussion I've seen on the subject. I would never have bothered to
think about the caring dimension if you hadn't mentioned it.

------
Myrmornis
Most of the top comments in this thread are badly missing the point. This is
probably partly due to the title -- the point here is not whether connections
and reputation are important.

The point is that at the very highest levels of US government, when they have
brought in an academic advisors from elite universities, they have ended up
presenting absurdly wrong child-like nonsense as their best attempt at
analyzing Covid-19 data.

Rather few people in this thread have managed to get beyond the title and the
slightly opaque columbia.edu blog post to see this. An exception is ahdeanz.

It is an extremely depressing and valid point. Yes, human connections will
always be important, but we MUST as sensible democracies, ensure that when
science needs to be done, it is not left to the those who have been so
involved in the world of human politics and dinner-party-approved
conversational topics that they can't even vaguely think about something
technical.

I expect he has many flaws, but Dominic Cummings in the UK Conservative party
is on the right side of history here, in wishing for a new era in which
politics is not dominated by those with law and humanities degrees.

[https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-
project-2/](https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/)

------
SZJX
I wonder how many commenters actually read the article posted here. The
validity of this general statement is something worth debating, for sure, but
in this particular case, it doesn't seem like that Chairman Phillipson
"doesn't know what he's talking about", as the author seems to be suggesting.
But rather, he's trying to defend his political position, for some political
aims (remember that he's a politician now, instead of an academic publishing a
paper). It would be quite untenable (though of course not impossible), for a
chairman to join force with opinions bashing the results published by his own
agency, especially when some clear political antagonism exists.

In many situations, it's not that the person doesn't know what they're talking
about or is "bluffing", but that they are deliberately presenting a position
that fits their current role and benefits them in some way. I totally agree
that the former does happen, but those two things are really distinct, and if
the author conflates those two and throws out a blanket claim that "stats is
hard", it's not really helpful.

------
starpilot
A moving average would make sense, but cubic fit? WTF? In epidemiology, is
there a theoretical basis for death rates to follow any type of polynomial
trend with time? If you measure say, drag force vs. airspeed at finite
intervals, sure, use a second-order fit. Drag varies with the square of speed,
theory predicts that relation. But there isn't such for death rates, is there?

~~~
gowld
The article explains that cubic models are backed by the theory that Excel
built-in functions exist for a reason.

------
scythe
I'm just going to comment on the graph, not the tweets. The graph shows three
predictions from IHME.

One, the blue line, is a model from 3/27\. It matches the data _okay_.

The second, the yellow line, is a model from 4/5\. The agreement of this line
is _much worse_ , and the fact that the model did worse with more data is not
promising.

The third, the teal line, is a model from 5/4\. The data (black) _ends_ at
5/4\. So the agreement of the teal line with the black line is not a
prediction _at all_.

The red line, a cubic fit, is totally irrelevant. By "cubic fit" I infer that
they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. Fitting a simple model like
that to a complex time series without some motivation for _why_ that model was
chosen is the mathematical equivalent of treating tuberculosis with mercury.

My point is: it sure doesn't _look_ like the models are doing a good job of
predicting death rates. And that's just from the graph used to advertise them.

~~~
CrazyStat
> By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter.

It's literally just ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d, optimize a, b, c, and d to minimize
some loss function (probably L2).

~~~
gowld
And since cubics can't be nearly flat over two disjoint intervals separated by
an extrenum, they added an unlabelled nonsensical bell curve continuation to
the to the end where a cubic would predict the case rate plummeting to
negative infinity

~~~
em500
Not really, they just fitted the cubic to log-deaths and exponentiated them
again.

~~~
CrazyStat
Cubic has to go to +infinity on either the right or left. Exponentiating
doesn't help with that.

~~~
em500
exp(-infinity) = 0

~~~
CrazyStat
And exp(+infinity) = +infinity, so it has to go to +infinity on one side.

~~~
em500
Yes, on the right side,
[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/16/what-a-
dif...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/16/what-a-difference-a-
month-makes-polynomial-extrapolation-edition/)

So in addition to log-exp to prevent projections going negative, they clipped
the end date at 4 Aug to prevent it from going back up to +inf

------
anjc
>What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he
doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to
think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t.

Does this make sense to anybody? The author is "struck" that somebody is
"willing" to talk about something they believe they understand? The only
annoying thing about academia is that it seems to attract smug, selfish people
like this.

------
naveen99
Reputation is just a derivative on people. Just likes options price risk on
the stocks and commodities, reputation prices risk of the person. academia is
kind of like a rating agency on people’s reputations. Rating agencies can
misprice risk like anyone else but only in retrospect.

------
api
Doesn't this apply to almost any large bureaucratic organization or system?

~~~
anonymousML123
I've worked on multiple teams at large companies. Tech teams lead by hacker
types would make sure to respect and reward technical competence, even if
relationships did still matter a whole lot.

On the other hand, I've recently worked in "machine learning" teams led by
academic snake oil salesmen who publish lots of papers in ML journals and have
fancy PhDs. They often regard coding and technical delivery as "grunt work"
and do nothing but play corrupt politics, delivering little value. I have a
hard time believing the fact that they came from academia has nothing to do
with that, although I guess it may be similarly bad under other non-technical
leadership and impostors.

~~~
api
Sounds like academia, government, and most of the business world.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering"

[...]

>"2\. Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent,
successful, well-connected bluffers."

------
daemonk
Basically: smoothing data != model forecast

It's a fair point. But what should have a discussion turned into playground
name calling.

~~~
Myrmornis
No, that's what I thought at first, but that's not it. See my post elsewhere
in this thread.

------
chadlavi
s/academia/every career/g

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Does the _s /_ here mean _substitute_?

What is the _/ g_ in this context?

Is this the _regular expression_ flag for _global search_?

Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.

~~~
ip26
You're either joshing with us or you have a bright undiscovered future ahead
of you in regexp's- given your apparent intuition for them.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I was kinda hoping I’d read HN for a decade or so then get a job as senior
software engineer or systems architect, without all the intervening effort ;)

~~~
jagannathtech
So I'm not alone with my genius idea.... dang

------
nixpulvis
Rather than popping off on academia, why not attack the real issue, which is
lack of proper testing.

No models, forecasts, fittings, or prophecies mean anything with heavily
biased data. I'm unaware of a solid method to counteract this problem.

If my understanding is correct, we need population-wide testing to get a good
basis for predictions of the future. Something which, unless I crawled under a
rock again, we simply haven't come close to achieving (at least in my neck of
the woods).

------
aazaa
Point 2 in the conclusion states:

> Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent,
> successful, well-connected bluffers. The striking thing is not that a
> decorated professor and A/Chairman @WhiteHouseCEA made a statistical error,
> nor should we be surprised that a prominent academic in economics (or any
> other field) doesn’t understand statistics. What’s striking is that the
> professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by
> his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what
> he’s talking about when he doesn’t.

The first sentence sounds like it's going to lead to something about bluffers,
but the remainder looks like a re-iteration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A
little surprising to not see it mentioned in the article or comments.

> In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in
> which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is
> related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the
> inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-
> awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their
> competence or incompetence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect)

------
oneiftwo
> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia

This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated
over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons:

1\. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of
anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of
upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit.

2\. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to
bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing
our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the
pipeline effectively shrinks.

3\. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular
sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread
misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news"
sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This
makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit.

It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that
incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were
too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or
our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony
capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis.

Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?

~~~
ahelwer
What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies?
I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern
in the media before I was old enough to remember or something?

Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your
approach to life.

~~~
oneiftwo
>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your
approach to life.

It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally
every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e.
evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward
everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on
noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are
not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins
anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.

What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being
taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive
dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true
winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.

Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain
and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society
increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of
childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and
all of society suffers.

~~~
gdulli
Maybe what the other commenter is getting at is that there's no criticism of
society you couldn't find some way to project onto some act of parenting or
other.

But drawing a line from your pet peeve about the world to one occasional event
out of thousands in a kid's life is disproportionate and reductive.

Children fail and children fail to get their way all the time, in hundreds of
daily struggles. A few school contests they don't even necessarily find
important shouldn't be assumed to move the needle. If a kid grows up rich,
that's something that colors their every experience and is more likely to
shape a lifelong attitude about what they're entitled to. But that still
doesn't mean you have to stereotype them.

------
freefriedrice
Academia? Shoot... senior hiring in the tech world is the same thing. If you
don't have buddies, gooooood luuuuck.

