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All of phaed's Comments + Replies

December Monthly Bragging Thread
phaed40

Aced all my classes in my first quarter at Stanford, took up blogging (again!) and used (social) pre-commitment techniques to stick with it, finished a timeboxing analysis and found some interesting patterns in how I manage my time, started deliberately tracking short- and long-term goals and established systems with which to track these resolutions, and began a segmented sleep experiment (and will continue for a week or more based on how things go).

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High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions
phaed20

Great point. I think my interpretation of the word in this context has drifted from the norm because I've built such a philosophy around it. How else can we describe the manifestation of "passion" that I wrote about? Is "focused ambition" any better of a way to name this?

"I liked band enough to stick with it for a couple years, and that's an Activity, and I can write something convincing about my passion for it. Therefore I can't quit band now that I've stopped liking it because then what would I look passionate about?"

Her... (read more)

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High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions
phaed30

I favor efficiency of discourse over tact

You'll notice "efficiency of discourse" is not my strong suit with this topic. My apologies—I have a lot to blather about that has been held in for too long. I've bolded the occasional important phrase to help the LW-skimmers of the future parse through my dense stuff. :)

I should amend my preface before continuing: I'm writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling b... (read more)

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-1Eliezer Yudkowsky
I affirm your wise decision not to be much moved by the force of this question - People Are Crazy, The World Is Mad.
High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions
phaed140

Preface: I graduated from one of the top public high schools in Arizona and will be starting classes at Stanford in just a few weeks.

It's been my experience that the overwhelming majority of AP / honors students (the top performers at a US high school) are more preoccupied with the signaling effects of any given activity than its immediate or long-term effects on human capital growth. In the AP classes in which I was involved, I'd estimate 50–75% of the students enrolled in the class not based on genuine interest but rather driven by the will to "be a... (read more)

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Ishaan190

You're speaking from anecdotal life experience. My anecdotal life experience tends to disagree with several of the points you have made.

I'm writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling benefits of an opportunity belong to this class

Bad assumption, even when only taking into account similar schools and demographics to the one you attended. I did make exactly this sort of cost-benefit calculation in high school and... (read more)

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5Eliezer Yudkowsky
Your English teachers may be bleeping awful. Go to your library and obtain worn-looking books on how-to-write which have been authored by successful authors. (Beware that how-to-write books in the used bookstore may have been passed on for a reason; check to see if they were written by English teachers.)
kalium100

I wish to point out that the emphasis on "passion" as an admission criterion is destructive. Every high school student has heard that they have to show "passion" in something in order to get into a good college. The normal manifestation of this is not "I like knitting and will open an Etsy shop and teach classes." It is "I liked band enough to stick with it for a couple years, and that's an Activity, and I can write something convincing about my passion for it. Therefore I can't quit band now that I've stopped liking it b... (read more)

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6JonahS
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed comment. I'd be interested in corresponding or speaking if you'd like — I can be reached at jsinick@gmail.com. As a general disclaimer, I favor efficiency of discourse over tact, and so sometimes I inadvertently come across as dismissive — if I say anything that gives that impression, please don't take it personally — it's my default mode of operation, and doesn't correspond to my having a negative assessment of my interlocutors. Some of my questions are in part rhetorical in nature, but I don't intend them to carry connotations of the type "the answer to this question should be obvious." I would have thought that getting into the top 1% of a high school class would require at least some choices that compromised personal development for the sake of signaling. Did you never encounter such choices? Why do you think that the admissions officers were telling the truth? What information did you get from your classmates that gave you this impression? According to Stanford's profile of the class of 2013, 7% of applicants who got a 4.0+ GPA were admitted, while only 1% of applicants with a GPA of <= 3.7 were admitted. Under some weak assumptions, in order for this to be consistent with written responses playing the dominant role, the odds of people in the in the latter group having sufficiently good written responses would have to be 7x the odds of people in the former group. Do you believe that this is the case? Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it's so poorly optimized for college admissions?
My daily reflection routine
phaed00

I've been writing a journal/diary-style daily reflection since Aug 1 as part of a quantified self project.

Interesting, could you elaborate on this "quantified self project?" How do you plan to analyze these entries quantitatively?

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1Brillyant
The project is tracking my diet, exercise, sleep, mood, productivity and a couple other misc. items. I'm not sure exactly how to use the daily text entries yet, or if I'll use them in any direct quantified sense at all. One possibility is to run keyword searches to look for correlations between increased/decreased mood and the presence of increased frequency of certain items within any given day's/week's entry(s) (e.g. "my boss", "work", "girlfriend"). More than that though, I wanted to have a day-by-day narrative account available to check against my "harder" data to help provide clarity and answer questions in regard to interesting trends and correlations I observe.