Stanford will point your ambition to status or power, but not character or ability act like class is non-existent outside of money, which means that all sorts of class markers are treated as objective (i.e. enjoying Beyonce music) 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.
- that you need to change the world
- scale of impact (only big matters, so small feels almost useless)
- utilitarianism (ends justifies the means)
- subtle creep of utilitarianism (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 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
- archetype of the strong independent woman
- post-rationalizing self-censorship
- stable family not seen as crucial
- the one constant is an 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 their baseline, their foundational presupposition (from dougwils.com)
- from Glen:
- Valoration / career before family, status before relationship
- Trust in elitism (wording?), 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)
“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.”
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/the-hypocrisy-of-elites
“the 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.
https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-circulation-of-the-elites
All the special vocabulary is literally just to signal “I'm better than you”