The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
It’s not that this essay is wrong. It’s just that it’s a rehash of what Hotel Concierge covered better and in more depth in The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment, and it’s dangerously misleading advertising for the VC fund / cult Graham started, Y-Combinator, which is the current apex predator of the real-life Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment.
I don’t think the essays say the same thing. Paul Graham claims that school in particular encourages hacking tests, and that the spirit of hacking tests is bad for many real-world problems. Hotel Concierge equates the will to do well on tests with perfectionism, and thinks that this helps a lot with success in all parts of life, but causes misery for the perfectionists. The distinction between hackable tests and non-hackable tests is neither emphasized nor necessary for the latter, while it’s central to the former.
Graham’s implying that at least for the vast majority of person-test combinations, the spirit of passing tests is hacking them:
I don’t see how, specifically, to distinguish this sort of thing from what Hotel Concierge is saying, unless you think Hotel Concierge is against trying at anything. As far as I can tell Hotel Concierge isn’t saying you shouldn’t try to be happy, or achieve outcomes you care about via delayed gratification, or be smart, or learn a lot, just that it’s a problem when people are pushed to optimize for performing simulacra of those things.
I’m not sure what you mean with “the spirit of passing tests is hacking them”. Do you mean that the tests were intentionally designed to be hackable? Because it seems like Graham is very much not saying that:
I’m less confident of what Hotel Concierge’s point is (partly because it’s a damn long essay with many distinct points), but at least the end of it I’d summarize as: “Success correlates with misery, because too much perfectionism contributes to both, and it’s a problem when people are pushed and selected towards being too perfectionist”. Some relevant passages:
So they’re saying that a little TDTPT is good for you, but many people have too much, and that’s bad for their mental health. Looking at that last paragraph, the examples aren’t particularly connected to the hackability of tests, as far as I can tell. That there are important tests which are testing arbitrary things certainly contribute to the problem, since being perfectionist about meaningless work is less productive and more likely to lead to burnout, but it’s not essential to the point, and it’s not something that Hotel Concierge emphasizes.
I think I agree with the background assumptions implied in your comment (assuming that I am divining them correctly), but I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to with the ‘misleading’ bit. Can you say more about what you find misleading about this essay?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ypXHnS3vWeDRmDsK9/approval-extraction-advertised-as-production
Currently writing this up at more length, I invite anyone to remind me if I forget to post a link here within a week. The short version is that Graham is implying that his behavior is aligned with the values of his essay—people are likely to trust Y-Combinator to help them learn to do real things, since it’s a Paul Graham creation and he wrote this essay—while in fact he is doing the opposite and set up the world’s best, most prestigious school for Succeeding by Passing Tests.
I have just learned of Startup School, which would seem to be strong evidence for your view.
This essay hits close to home. It feels personal.
When I was in school my aim was to learn as much as I could while still getting decent grades. I sacrificed perfect grades in my pursuit of learning.
Now I recognize I have an unusually high curiosity, but back then I found it bizarrely Orwellian how much emphasis my classmates put on grades. I didn’t mind that they weren’t at school to learn. I hated how school got in the way of my actual learning because it was designed with the assumption that students aren’t there to learn. I’ve always had a hard time communicating this frustration.
This explains why I did worst at the broadest subjects like foreign languages. I prefer to learn this way but going to school forced me to read the assigned reading over the most educational material. I enjoyed my degree in physics and mathematics because the good books finally converged with the assigned reading.
This is why I took as few liberal arts classes as I could in college. I got marked down in a philosophy paper for endorsing the idea that ancient philosophers’ ought to test their claims against experiment and real-world evidence.
It was years after graduating college before I could write for fun. I didn’t even write essays in college. This was damage from high school.
I think this is insightful and generalizable.
I found it a surprisingly fresh take, given so many shared starting assumptions. I really enjoy reading someone thinking aloud for themselves, even on a topic that’s been talked about so much. And a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.
I really liked this essay.
This, however, is entirely excessive optimism.