it really doesn't matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you're aiming to get into.

That's a bit my point, but not entirely. I think that 10 or 20 years later, the specifics of what high schoolers did will almost never matter. (General high school work ethic and direction/ambition in life likely does matter, if only because it will correlate, in most people, with adult work ethic and ambition). To a lesser degree, 10 or 20 years down the road, it probably doesn't matter whether a student got into their top choice or second-or-third choice college. College admissions depend on a lot of random factors, like whether you were sick on the day of a high school exam worth 40% of your grade, and more time passing flattens out this randomness. Students with good work ethic and a strong direction in life will probably end up where they want to be anyway, once 10-20 years have passed. Students who don't really know what they want to do still won't know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college. Good work ethic and ambition is correlated with getting into prestigious colleges, but I would argue that there's less causation there than this article seems to imply.

This is just my impression, though, and I'm generally not that ambitious. It might be different for people at higher level of driven-ness and/or with different, more academic-based goals.

Vaniver: I said "it surprises me how much..." because I expect to agree with most LW posts, and I'm slightly surprised every time I don't agree. It's a good surprise.

One thing that's unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.

As for how and how much undergraduate institution attended impacts life outcomes, I'll be writing about the subject at great length in the future, but in response to your reaction that it doesn't matter, for now, consider the following:

1. According to a survey of 1.2 million graduates of US colleges, the median mid-career incomes of colleges are $137k – $120k (#1-#5), $120k — $108k (#6 – #20), and $108k – $99k (#21 – #50). There's an obvious confounding factor of ability bias, but correlation is still evidence of some degree of causation.
2. If you're going into academia, the status of the professors who write your graduate school admissions recommendation is higher if you go to a more prestigious school.
3. Anecdotally, finance and management consulting firms recruit disproportionately from Harvard, Yale and Princeton
4. If Sergei Brin and Larry Page hadn't gone to Stanford CS graduate school, they may not have met and may not have started Google. Similarly, if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't gone to Harvard undergraduate, he may not have had as strong programmer friends to start Facebook with (and conversely, the early employees of Facebook wouldn't have had the opportunity to work with him).

Does anyone think they could win as the AI if the logs were going to be published? (assume anonymity for the AI player, but not for the gatekeeper)

It looks to me like you're making the sophisticated point that some facts vary in usefulness. I agree.

The point being made by Gradgrind is much more basic: children should focus on Fact over Fancy. As an example, he refuses to teach his children fairy tales, deciding that they should learn science instead. (Unfortunately, Dickens presents science as dull collections in cabinets, and so the children are rather put out by this.)

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.

--Mr. Gradgrind, from Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

The character is portrayed as a villain, but this quote struck me as fair (if you take a less confused view of "Facts" than Gradgrind).

Re inbox zero: this paper seems to suggest it's a waste of time (and my experience concurs). How complicated is your folder structure?

Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they're huge, at least when you're working with things that natural selection hasn't optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).

when trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the difference between “person” and “person with pencil and paper” is vast.

Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009

Yes, I think external review by AI experts would be good, though we'd need to find people who show the ability to change their mind in response to evidence, and people who are willing to actually listen to and work through the arguments with us. I say more about this here.

I'm actually doing this. I don't feel suicidal (never would) but I do feel that people around me were so different that if I stay here, my Self will implode socially.

A suggestion for people who are at the point where moving seems like a decent alternative: In OKCupid, the match-making website, there is a long set of questions you can respond about yourself. If you fill those up (say 90 out of hundreds) you can ask the algorithm to find people who are high matches to you as Friend, and high matches to your romantically (correlated but distinct measurements).

If you ask the match making algorithm for those who are similar everywhere, you'll see where you may fit in better. The vast majority of people that show 90% or more correlation with me are concentrated in 2 areas of the world, New York city and California (SF Bay in particular), this is one of the indicators I choose for where I'll try to live.