Thank you for yet another very enlightening post. I actually have an example from my job that shows it is indeed very much possible to act against these red queen races. I teach at in a university program in computer science, which next year will accept 590 new students (up from 550 this year) but gets around 3000 applicants. In practice, 245 of the positions are reserved for Dutch-speaking applicants but the number of those applicants is below the maximum, so it is more like almost 3000 candidates competing for around 345 positions. Since this is a European university, the main selection is done through a "cognitive skills test" (which IMHO is already much better than whatever it is American universities are doing, but I digress). Until recently, the procedure was to simply rank all the candidates according to their test scores and pick the best ones. But this created a kind of red queen race, in that some students studied *very very* hard for exactly the kind of questions they would get at this entrance exam. Our data on the actual success rates of these students showed that beyond a certain threshold, the test scores were essentially noise and had zero predictive power on the actual success rates of these applicants in their studies. So eventually some people recognized that this was creating extra work for everyone and fostered a very competitive atmosphere compared to before (when the selection was less strict).
So this year the admission committee made a heroic decision to kill the red queen by changing the procedure to instead take all students who pass the threshold and do a random selection from those. (Well not quite: there candidates are divided into three buckets and the first bucket has basically guaranteed entrance, and the second bucket is selected randomly.) When I first heard about this I was a bit offended that we would resort to a lottery for such an important decision, but after thinking about it I now believe it was a very good and brave thing to try. I already heard that the aerospace program might introduce the same policy. Let's hope other universities take notice and follow suit.
Actually this answers an important question that was not really asked in the post: if you remove most ways of discerning between candidates, what will you use instead to select who to let in? The answer that our selection committee came up with is "randomness", but I'm curious if there's other ways that would also avoid the red queen effect or if this is essentially the only way to actually do it.
I think there might be better ways than randomness, but off the top of my head I can't think of any that are as difficult to game? If it's really, actually true that once you pass the threshold there's nothing else to do, I think that takes the pressure off.
You told people that they could search for the tl;dr if they want to skip to it. Was this an intentional choice? A "sure, you can skip to the end, but I'm not going to make it too easy as to encourage you to read what comes before."
Oh, lol, it just hadn't occurred to me that it being a header meant I could link. I'll consider whether I should add it in or just leave the trivial inconvenience. Thanks!
I think this kind of regulation is a very good idea. But practically, politically, calling it a tax is a terrible idea. There's a significant fraction of the population who will mindlessly oppose anything with that name (even while celebrating other equivalent policies that also begin with "t"...).
Call it "let kids be kids", "let people work" (i.e. don't require college degrees for no reason), "popping the elite bubble" (everyone loves a dig at the Ivies), etc
(Disclaimer - I will probably be replying to multiple of your posts over next few hours. Hope that is fine. Normally I don't comment on random blogs because low value use of my time, but I will make an exception today because I felt like, also your blog is important for the world IMO.)
> In the case of college applications, what this would look like is creating a whitelist of “things we allow public institutions to use as discriminators,” with the items on that whitelist carefully selected so as to ameliorate (as much as possible) the red queen race dynamics. It would exclude categories of information which will tend to drive applicants to exhaustion—such as, for instance, any consideration of extracurriculars beyond a student’s chosen most-impressive first two.
I literally did not understand how your proposed solution reduces the arms race?
In India where I live, many colleges just use a single metric called JEE ranking for admission, which is a merit-based exam taken by the country, and this does not make the arms race any less intense. Since there is only one metric, people put even more effort into optimising for this metric, including attending coaching centres for many years, skipping all aspects of life besides preparing for JEE for atleast two years, and so on.
"this does not make the arms race any less intense" is false; the stuff you listed IS less intense than what happens in other places (such as much of Japan or the upper/competitive academic echelons in America).
Do you have proof? Not just the short term effects (like what is the suicide rate or clinical depression rate during the coaching exam prep) but also longterm effects (like what is the culture and mindset of such a place 20 years later, what type of leadership do they elect to govern technological progress 20 years later).
Actually it is a bit more complicated, I'm sure someone can make an argument that the whole reason Silicon Valley is quickly turning into an AI death cult is because many people there decided that even building weapons of mass destruction is a better way to live life than the hell of trying to enter into the traditional systems of education or academia or parenting.
n=1 anecdotal datapoint that shouldn't count for too much, but JEE preparation was one out of multiple factors that pushed me into a half life worse than death, such that even 8 years later, when I am significantly happier as a person, I can still in full honesty say that Samuel as a 17 year old may have been justified in committing suicide than trying to grow to become 25 years old like he is now. And I am significantly happier today, my life has more meaning, I have friends, I have more money and free time and so on.
I am aware my experience was worse than the average JEE aspirant, but also, are you sure you have good data on how bad it really is in India?
Thank you for yet another very enlightening post. I actually have an example from my job that shows it is indeed very much possible to act against these red queen races. I teach at in a university program in computer science, which next year will accept 590 new students (up from 550 this year) but gets around 3000 applicants. In practice, 245 of the positions are reserved for Dutch-speaking applicants but the number of those applicants is below the maximum, so it is more like almost 3000 candidates competing for around 345 positions. Since this is a European university, the main selection is done through a "cognitive skills test" (which IMHO is already much better than whatever it is American universities are doing, but I digress). Until recently, the procedure was to simply rank all the candidates according to their test scores and pick the best ones. But this created a kind of red queen race, in that some students studied *very very* hard for exactly the kind of questions they would get at this entrance exam. Our data on the actual success rates of these students showed that beyond a certain threshold, the test scores were essentially noise and had zero predictive power on the actual success rates of these applicants in their studies. So eventually some people recognized that this was creating extra work for everyone and fostered a very competitive atmosphere compared to before (when the selection was less strict).
So this year the admission committee made a heroic decision to kill the red queen by changing the procedure to instead take all students who pass the threshold and do a random selection from those. (Well not quite: there candidates are divided into three buckets and the first bucket has basically guaranteed entrance, and the second bucket is selected randomly.) When I first heard about this I was a bit offended that we would resort to a lottery for such an important decision, but after thinking about it I now believe it was a very good and brave thing to try. I already heard that the aerospace program might introduce the same policy. Let's hope other universities take notice and follow suit.
Here's the link with all the information about our selection procedure, should anyone be interested: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/onderwijs/opleidingen/bachelors/computer-science-and-engineering/bachelor-of-computer-science-and-engineering/from-application-to-enrollment/selection-procedure
Actually this answers an important question that was not really asked in the post: if you remove most ways of discerning between candidates, what will you use instead to select who to let in? The answer that our selection committee came up with is "randomness", but I'm curious if there's other ways that would also avoid the red queen effect or if this is essentially the only way to actually do it.
I think there might be better ways than randomness, but off the top of my head I can't think of any that are as difficult to game? If it's really, actually true that once you pass the threshold there's nothing else to do, I think that takes the pressure off.
Also thank you for the excellent example!
What I wish for is people starting more universities which are aiming at supplying excellent educations, but the incentives don't encourage this.
A formatting question, if you don't mind.
The way you've set up this post, you can link to the tl;dr: https://homosabiens.substack.com/i/165645566/v-tldr
You told people that they could search for the tl;dr if they want to skip to it. Was this an intentional choice? A "sure, you can skip to the end, but I'm not going to make it too easy as to encourage you to read what comes before."
Oh, lol, it just hadn't occurred to me that it being a header meant I could link. I'll consider whether I should add it in or just leave the trivial inconvenience. Thanks!
I think this kind of regulation is a very good idea. But practically, politically, calling it a tax is a terrible idea. There's a significant fraction of the population who will mindlessly oppose anything with that name (even while celebrating other equivalent policies that also begin with "t"...).
Call it "let kids be kids", "let people work" (i.e. don't require college degrees for no reason), "popping the elite bubble" (everyone loves a dig at the Ivies), etc
(Disclaimer - I will probably be replying to multiple of your posts over next few hours. Hope that is fine. Normally I don't comment on random blogs because low value use of my time, but I will make an exception today because I felt like, also your blog is important for the world IMO.)
> In the case of college applications, what this would look like is creating a whitelist of “things we allow public institutions to use as discriminators,” with the items on that whitelist carefully selected so as to ameliorate (as much as possible) the red queen race dynamics. It would exclude categories of information which will tend to drive applicants to exhaustion—such as, for instance, any consideration of extracurriculars beyond a student’s chosen most-impressive first two.
I literally did not understand how your proposed solution reduces the arms race?
In India where I live, many colleges just use a single metric called JEE ranking for admission, which is a merit-based exam taken by the country, and this does not make the arms race any less intense. Since there is only one metric, people put even more effort into optimising for this metric, including attending coaching centres for many years, skipping all aspects of life besides preparing for JEE for atleast two years, and so on.
"this does not make the arms race any less intense" is false; the stuff you listed IS less intense than what happens in other places (such as much of Japan or the upper/competitive academic echelons in America).
Oh
Do you have proof? Not just the short term effects (like what is the suicide rate or clinical depression rate during the coaching exam prep) but also longterm effects (like what is the culture and mindset of such a place 20 years later, what type of leadership do they elect to govern technological progress 20 years later).
I know the comparison I have proposed is a bit apples to oranges.
Japan and America are significantly more wealthy per capita than India so they're likely to do better for that reason alone.
Actually it is a bit more complicated, I'm sure someone can make an argument that the whole reason Silicon Valley is quickly turning into an AI death cult is because many people there decided that even building weapons of mass destruction is a better way to live life than the hell of trying to enter into the traditional systems of education or academia or parenting.
In any case, yes, I want your proof.
n=1 anecdotal datapoint that shouldn't count for too much, but JEE preparation was one out of multiple factors that pushed me into a half life worse than death, such that even 8 years later, when I am significantly happier as a person, I can still in full honesty say that Samuel as a 17 year old may have been justified in committing suicide than trying to grow to become 25 years old like he is now. And I am significantly happier today, my life has more meaning, I have friends, I have more money and free time and so on.
I am aware my experience was worse than the average JEE aspirant, but also, are you sure you have good data on how bad it really is in India?