The French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes argued that almost all new writing is made through creative combinations and rearrangements of existing texts. I don’t believe that he’s entirely correct (unless you count the life-narrative created by our individual experiences of the world as a text), but his thesis would almost certainly apply to this essay, which mashes up and riffs on ideas from two of the 21st century’s more cogent and insightful books for popular audiences: Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days (2017) and Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness (2001).
Kids These Days is a detailed material, cultural, and political analysis of US millennials’ generational experience and how it has shaped us. Here, I’ll be dealing with what I think is the book’s most useful and innovative intellectual contribution, Harris’s analysis of how American childhood and adolescence became high-stakes labor-intensive periods of human capital investment which both exhaust young students and dictate the future course of their lives.
In Harris’s analysis, both a carrot and a stick raised the stakes for American students. The most important carrot, in his view, is students’ (and their parents’) ambition to attend the US’s most exclusive and prestigious colleges and universities. These schools use a mix of criteria (including grades, test scores, extracurricular achievements, student diversity, and a desire to maintain relationships with donors and alumni) to determine who to admit. Students whose parents aren’t wealthy enough to simply buy their way into schools have to make their way through what some friends and I call the cursus honorum (an ironic reference to the series of offices that young patricians in the Roman Republic had to hold in order to have a shot at the consulate). To excel in the cursus honorum, students must consistently achieve high marks in the most difficult-looking courses their school has to offer (the more AP and IB exams they complete with high scores, the better), score well on standardized tests (in particular, the SAT or ACT and multiple SAT-IIs related to their biggest academic strengths), and develop an impressive resume of extracurricular achievements (some students are able to do this by achieving one surprising and distinctive thing, but most diversify, participating in an array of sports, academic competitions, artistic ensembles, and volunteer activities.) The most successful performers in the cursus get access to America’s most prestigious universities (ie: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, MIT, Caltech, and Stanford) whose graduates have relatively easy paths into especially lucrative or influential fields like management consulting, politics, high-end software engineering, tech entrepreneurship, investment banking, and buy-side finance. They’re also likely to win scholarships that seriously reduce the debt they would incur attending prestigious liberal arts colleges, high-tier private universities, and flagship state schools, whose best graduates still retain some access to the highest-end fields and also make up a disproportionate share of the US’s doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, published writers, programmers, scientists, managers, and engineers.
I went to a selective math/science-focused charter high school and then attended a selective private university, so I and many of my friends passed through the cursus honorum. It’s a brutal road. On most days, I woke up at 6 AM, and I didn’t get home from school and extracurricular activities until after 5 PM. After that, I usually spent an hour or more doing homework. Extracurriculars often ate into my weekends, which I also used to complete most of my longer-term, more involved assignments. I participated in some activities because I enjoyed them or because they made it easier for me spend time with friends, but almost every organized thing I did outside of regular school hours was also resume and college application-friendly; in that sense, my extracurriculars were part of my overall human capital-building adolescent job. As a 16-year-old, I had a 70-hour workweek. A lot of my peers at school (especially my AP classmates) worked even longer hours. I had optimized my ability to finish homework during the school day (by figuring out which would allow me to surreptitiously work while only paying partial attention to lectures), I was only a one-season athlete, I wasn’t trying to master a brutally competitive musical instrument like the piano or violin, and my parents were not aggressively pressuring me to compete (I did that to myself without much prompting). A lot of my peers didn’t have those relative advantages. I once complained about being grumpy because I only got about 6-7 hours of sleep (well below the nine and a half hours that researchers think that teenagers need); many of my classmates expressed their envy that I got that much. I fared fairly well on the cursus honorum (I was second in my class, I won two major national academic competitions, and I attended a top-20 US university on a major merit scholarship), but my peers’ outcomes varied a great deal, even among those who worked much harder than I did.
Harris’s work also examines the “sticks” which school administrators, bureaucrats, and police use to make young people work and invest in their own human capital. Changes in school policy from the 1990s onward introduced zero-tolerance policies which automatically suspended or expelled students for a variety of offenses, brought police officers into schools to control student behavior with force, and used the criminal justice system to punish infractions which used to be handled through in-school disciplinary measures. I got to see this side of the coin in person too. I returned from Switzerland to the US at age 13 and started eighth grade at a public middle school with a pretty even mix of better-off suburban kids and poorer kids from inner-city Wilmington. Most of the teachers there were thoughtful and kind, but I was really shocked by how much school administrators treated kids like they were prisoners, with constant surveillance (sometimes including random locker searches), frequent threats of punishment, tight control over our movement (even going to the bathroom was highly regulated!), and a sort of generalized presumption that we were prone to misbehavior and not to be trusted. Poor black kids and kids with psychological issues got singled out for especially harsh treatment because authorities assumed (either consciously or unconsciously) that they were more likely to stray from the path in some way and needed harsher measures to keep them in line. It was relatively easy for these students to receive disciplinary sanctions that could derail their academic careers.
Now, let’s turn to Fooled by Randomness. Taleb’s main arguments, derived from both his formal study of probability and the behavioral science and his years of experience working as a trader, are:
1: In many arenas of human competition, it’s difficult or impossible to tell whether success comes from skill or random chance (in the short run, it’s hard to tell whether a trader is a genius or a “lucky idiot”; Taleb offers many examples of “hot” traders whose portfolios imploded when they failed to anticipate and plan for the possibility of rare events.)
2: Human brains and emotions– including those of people who work in the world of random chance all the time– are not well-equipped to deal with probabilities. We round high probabilities to certainties, discount the probability of rare events, react more strongly to the likelihood of a small loss than the probability of a much larger gain, attribute far too much significance to “noise” (small changes which don’t reveal anything about the world), and discount the enormous role of chance in our own and others’ success.
3: A wise person should accept both the role of randomness in life and his own epistemic limitations. Taleb, speaking of how he manages his own failings (Fooled by Randomness has a wise and charming humility that Taleb’s later works, which deal with similar ideas, lack; he sadly seems to have acquired the pomposity and arrogance that his younger self disdained) poetically suggests that like Odysseus’s men passing, his readers should put wax in their ears to limit the consequences of their irrational behavior, employ strategies which allow them to profit from unforseen rare events (rather than being destroyed by them), and adopt a philosophical outlook which helps them face chance’s effects with dignity.
Millennials and those who have observed their childhoods with care might notice that the processes which make millennial adolescence so high-stakes and intolerant of failure are very noisy and frequently shaped by random events. Like the investors who think that a “lucky idiot” trader is a genius, college admissions officers, employers, and other authority figures who make decisions which depend on these processes are frequently fooled by randomness. High-stakes adolescence is doubly cruel and exhausting because it’s so arbitrary.
Let us consider the stations of the cursus honorum in this light. A low-enough grade in one or two classes can easily derail a student’s chances of getting into a good college. Many of these poor performances stem from random events rather than a student’s inherent (or cultivated) diligence and intelligence. A parent’s layoff or arrest might force the unfortunate soul into a time-consuming after-school job which leaves relatively little time for study and sleep. A messy divorce or a family member’s addiction might make it a lot harder to focus on homework and projects. A teacher might grade assignments with unfair brutality. In classes with high-stakes midterm or final exams, an illness or a poor night of sleep might crater performance, especially in quantitative subjects with multi-step problems which propagate and compound arithmetic errors. The first outburst of an unrecognized but treatable bout of depression or bipolar disorder (which frequently appear in one’s high school years) might make a student temporarily incapable of doing effective work. It’s easy for proud honor students to be blithely unaware that the only thing separating them from many of their lower-ranked peers is a random calamity. Differences in grade point rankings at the top of the scale, which can make or break a given student’s chances at getting admission to selective schools or competitive scholarship packages, are also noisy. Often, the only difference between say, a class’s top-ranked student and its fifteenth-ranked is that the former got 94s in a few classes where the latter scored 92s. It’s hard to argue that this difference gives you much meaningful information about the difference in their abilities.
Extracurriculars are probably an even bigger source of noise. Even one’s ability to participate might be subject to random events (many of the crises I mentioned in the last paragraph might also prevent students from doing after-school activities.) Levels of achievement in many competitions are determined in part by noise; in my senior year of high school, I led a quizbowl team to two national championships, but in both competitions, my team won critical matches by the margin of a single question (or less!) I know all too well that my seemingly impressive achievement would have been impossible without a fair amount of luck. Many seemingly more unique and impressive achievements are the outcome of events which are even more random; high school students who produce especially impressive high-end science projects are usually only able to do so because their parents (or some other friendly authority figures) give them access to a lab. Most students never have access to that sort of tools which would help them to build high-end functional robots or conduct research in materials science, as the winners of the latest Intel International Science and Engineering Fair did. The vast majority of high schoolers, no matter how industrious, intelligent, or scientifically-minded are effectively ruled out of the highest levels of competition before they would even begin to have a chance to start working on a project. Other impressive achievements, like prestigious internships, likewise frequently depend on attending the right school or having the right family connections. These achievements sometimes tell us something about a student’s capabilities (any quizbowl champion or ISEF winner is likely to be much more diligent and intelligent than the average high schooler), but they don’t actually reveal all that much about how students with the flashiest EC achievements differ from other smart and conscientious kids.
Surprisingly, standardized testing might be the domain that’s least affected by such randomness. Of course, the conditions of any single test day might significantly affect a student’s performance, but the SAT and ACT both permit students to retake them multiple times, a forgiving feature that other aspects of the cursus honorum lack.
The punitive measures that raise the stakes of adolescence are probably even more affected by randomness than the intense competition at the high end. This is because many of the offenses which school administrators and police can harshly punish teenagers for are actually very common behavior. A majority of teenagers and college students drink underage, smoke marijuana, shoplift small items, skip school, or get into physical fights at some point in their young lives. Most of them never face any sort of serious consequences for these ubiquitous offenses. A lot of teenagers simply avoid getting caught, and in many cases, authority figures choose to turn a blind eye or offer a warning rather than bringing the full weight of the law on their heads.
The kids who do get punished for these things, then, aren’t necessarily all that different from their peers– they just had the bad luck of both getting caught and getting punished for something that a lot of their peers do, but get away with. They can find themselves suspended or expelled from school, sent to juvenile detention facilities, or saddled with a punishing criminal record for some offense which many of us have committed, but few of us are ever punished for. They suffer enormous consequences not because they’re different from their peers, but because they’re unlucky.
College admissions personnel, employers, school administrators, and police all make enormously consequential decisions about young people’s lives on the basis of noisy processes which they see as much more meritocratic, deterministic, and definitive than they actually are. I think that institutions should institutionalize rules which force decision-makers to acknowledge the probabilistic generators of students’ life outcomes and distribute rewards and punishments which are less sensitive to random events. High-end colleges and universities should use a randomized, probabilistic process to select their student bodies, moderately weighting different students’ chances of admission based on scores, grades, and ECs rather than making absolute choices. (A limit on the maximum weight of extracurriculars would also help colleges avoid overweighting flashy-but-random accomplishments and help discourage exhausting and excessive resume-building; state governments could write this sort of measure into law for flagship state universities). If companies are hiring for entry-level positions with relatively few good predictors of performance, they should consider randomly selecting a sample of applicants to interview from among the pool of qualified candidates, then randomly choosing new hires from the pool of those who pass their interviews. (This might have the added benefit of speeding up and reducing the cost of the hiring process.) Classes should have plenty of assessment items rather than a small number of high-stakes exams, and allow students to drop the sort of low outlier scores that bad random events can produce. Lenient treatment and forgiveness of crimes that a lot of the teenage population commits should be institutionalized, at least for the first few offenses. Zero tolerance policies at schools, which have no proven positive effect on student behavior, and which end up propagating the effects of random events, should be abolished.
These changes would probably make adolescence could become much less fragile, stressful, and miserable. It would probably do at least a little to mitigate the effects of discrimination (which produces some of the random external events that can derail students’ lives). And it might make our society more egalitarian by making the role that random chance plays in determining who gets to go to schools like the Ivies and Stanford much more explicit.
Cosmic Atlas 