Through my time at Stanford, I picked up many beliefs that, crucially, I did not notice. I won’t say all of the beliefs are wrong, but they are certainly beliefs, choices of opinion about the world and our place in it. My foolishness was letting them creep in, and automatically accepting them (mis-categorizing them as realities) instead of weighing them and deciding which to keep and which to drop.
I don’t know which of these have changed with the next generation of students, but I found it helpful to write these down for myself and my peers as a snapshot in time.
- that you need to change the world (with every emphasis - that you need to change the world. that you need to change the world. that you need to change the world. that you need to change the world.)
- scale of impact (only big matters, so small feels almost useless)
- utilitarianism (ends justifies the means), which I experienced as a subtle creep (so many CS concepts in AI, CSPs, all about optimizing and that required weighting different outcomes) https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1407728000989282307?s=20
- subtle creep of prestige/status - subtle because Stanford will point your ambition to status or power, but not character or ability (sin of omission)
- subtle creep of selfishness
- fast tempo (feel like you're doing something wrong if your day isn't packed)
- feeling like everyone is too busy to care for you
- don't talk about your family (somehow, shameful? to say or ask what people’s parents do, or about siblings who weren’t at Stanford)
- archetype of the strong independent woman as the only positive one for women
- It’s not worth saying the unpopular things I believe are true (’I believe this, but it’s not my ‘core thing’ so I won’t say it because no good can come of it’). Note, when people rationalize their self-censorship at Stanford, sometimes the person they are talking to is actually just using the tools available to them to express and cement power. By staying silent, you are acquiescing to their power play, which actually increases their power.
- act like social class is non-existent outside of money, which means that all sorts of class markers are treated as objective (i.e. Beyonce music is good, all country music sucks), instead of the more accurate: elites here like Beyonce and hate country music, but to distance myself from the shame of being an elite, while still being an elite (anyone with a Stanford degree is basically an elite), I’ll rip on rich people while copying their taste
- stable family not seen as crucial
- Absolutist conviction that every form of hierarchy and privilege is evil on the face of it. This is simply assumed, and never demonstrated. It is a baseline, a foundational presupposition (from dougwils.com)
- Career before family, status before relationship (I need to be high status before I enter a relationship, because I’m going to become super successful and only then will I be able to get someone worthy of me. Also using ‘I want to focus on my career before getting into a relationship’ as cover for ‘no one thinks I’m an amazing potential partner now, so instead of working on my actual character let me throw myself at work for validation there’)
- Trust in elitism (but never calling it that), technocracy over democracy
→ William Buckley (a world governed 500 names picked at random from a phone book would be much better than 500 members of Harvard faculty)
These two quotes about elites also hit pretty hard, because they perfectly described dynamics that had otherwise left me so stumped (and I hated that I myself had done all the things mentioned, for the very reasons mentioned):
“This is what being an elite is about, after all. It’s not about money, although money plays a crucial role. It’s not even about education, though education plays a large role as well. It’s more about the set of behaviors and dispositions that indicate a person to be a member of the elite — which center around wanting to change the world. Recall we discussed the leveling and importance game: Wanting to change the world hits the sweet spot because it shows how important one is (you can afford worrying about the planet and not your rent), while also highlighting one’s empathy (wanting to take care of the less fortunate). Which is the whole point of being an elite. It’s what separates a person from simply being a bourgeois. Aristocrats want to *matter*. Bourgeoisie just want comfort and safety. Meanwhile proletariats just want to put food on the table.” -Erik Torenberg (link)
“while the university does indeed turn some meaningful number of kids from poor or working class families into middle class or upper middle class professionals, its primary function is not to dismantle the social hierarchy, but to reproduce it. It does so by glorifying the cultural tastes and moral virtues of the upper middle class and celebrating them as the universal, transcendent values of civilization rather than as the arbitrary, parochial preferences they objectively are”“The goal of the doctrine of intersectionality is not the classless society — not even in the Laschian sense of the phrase, let alone the Marxist one. Its ambitions are, as its corporate spokespersons make clear, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” And by that they mean diversity, equity and inclusion in the ranks of the elite.” → DEI only reinforces the paradigm of an elite. (All the special vocabulary is literally just to signal “I'm better than you”) -Leighton Woodhouse (link)