MyGiftedLife.org

Here are the first few paragraphs of the article and after that my opinion and I think it is GT related.


www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/the-s...essful-entrepreneurs

"In a recent blog post, Ross Douthat describes the “trouble with meritocracy,” or our belief that the best and brightest (as measured by their SAT scores and GPA) should all attend the same elite universities:

(quote from another blog post douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/the...le-with-meritocracy/ )Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging.

The obvious rejoinder to any critique of meritocracy is that, like democracy, it’s the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. Nevertheless, I think it’s still worth considering ways in which our meritocratic institutions – I’m looking at you, Harvard – can improve their outcomes and help mitigate the very real problem of social homogenization."

The rest of the article mentions a study where it was shown that at a cocktail party, that professionals socialized with other professionals of the same field. Another study mentions a sample of entrepreneurs who when surveyed, said that their contacts were homogeneous. They had the same interests and background. The next two paragraphs discuss another group of entrepeneurs whose contacts were from varied backgrounds. The discovery was that they were more innovative than the other group with homogeneous networks.

And here is the last paragraph of the article:

"And this returns us to meritocracy. It’s not enough to simply take the smartest kids and make them smarter. What’s just as important is teaching these young people to seek out strangers, to resist the tug of self-similarity and homogenization. Diversity can seem like a such a vague and wishy-washy aspiration, but it comes with measurable benefits. To the extent our meritocratic institutions diminish our social diversity – are your college buddies just like you? – they might actually make us less likely to succeed. Perhaps Bill Gates knew what he was doing when he dropped out of Harvard."

Basically my opinion is that skimming the best and the brightest is not a bad thing, nor is taking the smartest kids and making them smarter. My view is based on the experience of not being skimmed off the top for most of my early academic experience. I am living proof of the psychological toll it takes on a smart person who doesn't get to be around other smart people, and then when finally given the opportunity, can't measure up to the best and brightest and am somewhere near the middle.

My belief is that until a child is old enough, say late teens or early 20's, they SHOULD be around people similar to them, especially if they are smart, because how can you appreciate diversity in others when you haven't clearly defined your own identity?

That is why I am in favor of gifted education, or at the very least, congregating all the smart kids into one classroom or one school.

Now the argument gets a little convoluted because with both gifted education and schools like Harvard, issues that are more related to social class and less related to ability come into play. But I have to disagree that whether it is elementary school or college, we should strive to NOT group the smart people together, instead we should be doing a better job of identifying who really IS smart and make sure no one who is is left out and no one who isn't is let in.

I promised myself I would not get into some of the more social issues on this forum, but I will just say that the argument in this article against meritocracy is a red herring because it assumes we actually have a meritocracy. The thousands if not millions of unidentified gifted people who never find out or don't find out until well into their adulthoods, not to mention the fact that many of them, including myself, are not accomplished in any field, or economically successful, is proof that we do not HAVE a meritocracy.

There can be a debate as to whether we SHOULD, and if so, how to improve it so that the top achievers are in fact the most capable, but to say we SHOULDN'T HAVE ONE is going to make forums like this one more numerous and more necessary.

I think the problem discussed in the article is not smart people being with smart people, but smart people being with smart people in places where they are fed the same party line. It's not the congregation but the indoctrination and the creation of a cohesive social group. "I'm in with the in-crowd. I go where the in-crowd goes."

I read somewhere recently that 60% of gifted students drop out of college. Given the perspective advanced in this article, it's no surprise. I guarantee you that Bill Gates is surrounded by the smart people he should be. They're just not all churned out by Ivy League institutions.

So how do you make education more like dialogue and less like brainwashing? How do you foster relationships with the outside community? How do you foster interdisciplinary communication and collaboration? It's got to start much earlier than university, though it would be an improvement even if only higher education managed to do so. Even if you didn't get that in college, how do you broaden your circle now?

That leads to even more questions. Such as, "If smart people allow themselves to be indoctrinated, are they really that smart?" I went to University of Oklahoma, and University of Cincinnati, not exactly intellectual hothouses. And, especially in the Political Science classes I took, but in other ones too, there was a lot of questioning of the professors, whose lessons usually consisted of explaining what the status quo was. If the students at schools like Harvard really are the high-caliber that we are led to believe they are, I would expect and suspect that they too would question authority, despite being groomed to one day become authority.

I actually do not see the problem with cohesive social groups. In fact, the main reason that we have less than optimal conditions for many Americans is because those who are negatively affected by things being the way they are do not coalesce as a group.

Not having had the experience, being a part of a group of smart people who basically see the world the same way would be desirable.

I was looking for an exact quote in my old Social Inequality textbook, but I couldn't find it. But what it said was that even with what they termed "the power elite" having the same educational background and participating in the same social circles, they still were not like the Borg Collective, to borrow from Star Trek. They have disagreements among themselves. The answer to your three questions was also touched on in the same book. It basically talked about how most of the people, including Bill Gates, who have a lot of power in our society, come from privileged backgrounds. Other people, although capable, do not actually get the chance to show what they know to people who can open doors from them. But that goes back to the article that I posted, the author of which doesn't believe that you should take smart people from diverse backgrounds and group them together. The other thing the Social Inequality book mentioned was self-selection. In other words, people who feel as you do that it is congregating smart people and then brainwashing them would never agree to participate in the first place even if they were able to, not to mention people who don't think they're qualified despite never trying.

That could also have something to do with the 60% gifted people who drop out of college. Courses and majors are highly structured. You can't usually design your own major or your own courses. And those who are gifted and creative seem to hate structure. I like structure so I never had a problem with college. My problems come when there isn't a clear roadmap. But I'd be more quick to believe that that percentage has more to do with the fact that nowadays you don't have to be that smart to get into most colleges, and students mostly just party and drink, as opposed to the issues addressed in the article.

As for your last question in your post, my answer for myself is "Move to Chicago." Cincinnati is too small, too conservative, too everything-that's-bad-about-living-in-a-big-city-and-not-enough-about-what's-good.

First, I do have to mention that anyone can be brain-washed. It isn't just an observation that anyone can be broken given enough time and effort, it's that virtually everyone is already indoctrinated to some extent. We're born social but non-socialised animals. We have organic routines in our brains to mimic others and fit in.

If you want to watch primate social behaviour, watch young children. Rhythmic hooting, location calls, dominance displays, it's all there. And so is mimicry, right down to the smallest most insignificant part of the behaviour of the adults around them.

Almost all of us spend the first years of our lives being indoctrinated enough so that we don't wind up in institutions or the subject of tabloid headlines about wolf-children.

Now I'm not getting out the tinfoil hat here, I'm stating the pure fact which looks different from this perspective. Formalised education by state and church is simply a way for these organisations to control what we're indoctrinated with.

It's only natural (though not for the best, in my opinion) that the majority of people continue their mimicry and fitting in beyond the initial indoctrination and identify with more and more particular and specific primate troops. Group identity becomes self-identity. Many rate themselves on how elite an organisation they can gain a tribal identity from, like the country club or snobby charitable societies. This developmental mechanism is just too easily used in my opinion in a crowded society with an artificially prolonged adolescence.

And indeed all sorts of social institutions use fitting in and group identity to engineer social structures the way they want them. Universities still wind up with the "right" people, bureaucrats are indeed much the same world-wide, career politicians can't be told apart unless you already know what party they represent. The social classes have very little vertical movement, the social order is tighly regulated. The degree of social cohesion in societies is demonstrated not by conscious decisions, but by the majority being taught to think the same, behave within the code and have the same preferences. A sudden upsurge in the amount of critical thinking across the population, no matter how much it's desirable in individuals, would shake society to its core. In my opinion, it might do some good.

But as far as socialising with peers, rjridley, I think human beings need good exposure to both peers and diversity while growing up if we want to maximise their ability to have a strong identity and appreciate diversity. A lack of enough exposure to enough different people is likely to create fear and distrust, and I do think this pertains to social groups of almost any sort, not just race, religion, disability or gender identity.

As for meritocracy, it's a nice ideal, a bit like democracy or even socialism -- they all might have great benefits when they're actually achieved, they haven't yet actually been achieved in large societies (small tribes tend to naturally use them effectively!), but have been replaced by half-measures that use the names. A "democracy in a republic" is not a democracy, it is a compromised attempt at one which has serious flaws. Socialism would work if a country were actually composed of cooperatively-minded people; instead communism or social-democracy attempt to borrow the name to mask other systems. So of course I'm suspicious of a meritocracy controlled by social, academic and political elite.

And now I'm going to shut up, because I sound very elitist. But since it's just observations of sociology, perhaps I'm just violating the appearance of egalitarianism.

Let's not confuse meritocracy with the plutocracy that attempts to control the licencing of people that will lead society. Make no mistake: in the classroom of a reputable university or college, the professor/instructor has free rein to teach what he likes, within the context of the subject matter for that course. Most professors in my experience (within faculties of Arts and Sciences, Engineering) don't just teach the accepted dogma - they take pains to also bring up the importance of the opposition to that dogma, even if the admin of the school wouldn't want them to (profs regularly do little confidential asides to inform their students anyway). I have been told they also do this in Medicine. I have no opinions about how it is in Law or Business, but I'd bet they would be necessarily more closed-minded in those fields.

In science, rule by merit requires persuading others in the field through objective proof to a minimum 95% certainty - the "better" universities require 98% or better. Just because you haven't managed to persuade a bunch of experts that their current idea is wrong doesn't mean they're out to squash you. They just need more evidence to let go of their older ideas.

Where democracy is rule by majority of opinion, meritocracy is rule by proof. Its virtue is that ANYONE can gain respect, providing they can get their idea heard. The trouble is, unless one is already in with the crowd, you're not likely to be viewed as someone who has ideas to consider. You just have to try a harder to be heard. I think it's fair to consider it the price you have to pay for skipping classes.

I find it quite ironic that where democracy professes to rule by the majority, it turns out to be really a hierarchical aristocracy (vertical power arrangement), and the true power of the individual is to be found in the meritocracy. Anyone can invent or discover something of import on their own and still get kudos from academia. Meritocracy suffers from not having dictators at the top to make decisions, but it certainly has a more horizontal arrangement of power. The notion of dictators at the "top" of a meritocracy is quite ridiculous if you only are considering the academics and not the aristocracy that would control them along with the populace at large. Both democracies and meritocracies have their uses, and they should complement each other instead of conflicting.

As for indoctrination, I don't consider that my years in post-sec indoctrinated me much. If someone is creative to begin with and they get through it, they come out of it with that same passion for challenge and change. On the other hand, I think there are more and more people entering post-sec who aren't up to what it takes and don't have this open-mindedness. They are getting in simply because they've got money or publicity to toss around for the institution. Where I live, you can't get into college via sports scholarship or celebrity status. You still must have the mental capacity for the work, and if you don't, you're easily gone within a year or at best, two.

Addendum: One reason why the public sees only the dogma stance is that all the public usually wants to bother with is expert consensus (dogma), and when it wants to bother with attacking dogma, it's more often than not, a case of anti-intellectualism. You can't know the debates unless you go to class or otherwise study on your own enough to read about the opposing viewpoints. It's easy to trash a system by using its weaknesses and dismissing its strengths, but is it fair?

Get this now: Intellectuals don't control the world, which is controlled by a global plutocracy. The best the intelligencia can do is advise, and they don't get heard if it doesn't affect the financial bottom line in a positive way. Of course, the plutocracy likes to consider themselves part of the intellectual set, but if they really were, do you really think the world would be in such a mess, and why would the most senior of intellectuals be despondant about the human condition and the ecological status of the globe? I rest my case.

Iconoclast, where is the line between "socialization" and "brainwashing?" It sounds like an argument could be made that all socialization is brainwashing or indoctrination.