2) Note that Gladwell has some data on good lawyers having a low LSAT.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) November 8, 2022
And, of course,https://t.co/QnGPLVOTiQ
November 8, 2022
"Simply, an Ivy League education can hide incompetence for a very, very long time."
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I love Taleb, super interesting thinker.
If you got a smart person in your family, some out-of-the-box thinker, they might enjoy this.
He's well-respected in financial circles for calling the 2008 real estate crash. Very provocative guy. You're not going to agree with everything he writes. But he's like Althouse -- someone who inspires thought.
As a hiring manager in Boston for ten years, I very quickly learned to toss the Harvard, Yale and Brown degreed candidates right in the trash. It saved everyone involved a tremendous amount of time and money. It wasn’t the consistently huge disconnect between credentials versus knowledge and skills which was the primary problem - although that was definitely a problem. It was the unbelievable sense of entitlement.
Give me a hungry state school grad every time. Every. Time.
4:20 AM: Blood Moon hidden in the shadow of Trump Tower.
Ivy League brand names indeed open many doors, but then the degree-holders with room-sized egos push everyone out of the room.
"Pardon me, I must take a rest upon my laurels."
Arrogance is ignorance.
“You don’t hit with your face.” Yogi Berra
Yah, I remember that style of essay from my college days. It’s bs that sounds clever…like that guy who went around proclaiming he was happy to see a female pilot on his flight because that meant she must be a great pilot. In a related story: airlines are desperate for any warm body to become a new pilot and their hiring practices have gone full woke…
It doesn't help that law firms are at least as interested in how a new attorney will look on the firm bio as they are in whether that person is up to the job (lots of Harvard and Yale on staff justifies higher fees). With a high-enough ranked school on your resume, you don't need to be good.
The big question when picking a law school was, should I go to a lower ranked school where I will make law review, or a higher ranked school where I'll be just one of the crowd? I still don't know which was the right choice--I went to the higher ranked school, graduated in the middle of my class, practiced with a small firm for a few years, and then decided not to be a lawyer anymore because I wasn't doing the kind of law I wanted.
Back in my days as a hiring manager I made it a rule when doing college hires (i.e. people very recently graduated or about to graduate) not even to look someone from an Ivy. In my experience too many felt that their credentials as an Ivy grad meant they didn’t have to prove themselves. No. you can’t coast on the fact that you got accepted at an Ivy.
Taleb is an interesting man. He is also a very strong man. Dead-lifting is his specialty. Another famous weightlifting intellectual was Oliver Sacks, the neurologist. He was the California record holder for squats back in the 1960's at one time. No small feat!
I hired a physician assistant who had graduated from Yale. Well credentialed, but he had a fixed idea that he was going to find THE case of carnitine deficiency (1/40,000) in my practice. When I spoke to him about cutting back on unnecessary testing he quit.
Left wing "prestigious" credentialism is wrecking our country. But it probably created a lot of virtue signaling Tesla customers who now suffer from buyers remorse. It's not limited to the Ivy League. I can think of a Big 10 school right here in Wisconsin pumping out the same bullshit.
College is no longer worth the price of admission. Except the market holds young people hostage for that stupid piece of paper...because everyone else is debt for that overpriced degree...so you are required to do it too.
I'm not in a business where we would get Ivy League applicants. But if I saw a resume with "Harvard" on it, I'd figure this person has to be a high maintenance asshole.
I worked for big industrial companies for most of my career and can only remember one executive who had an Ivy League degree.
He went to Penn on a basketball scholarship.
As William Buckley famously stated: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
Fortune 100 companies hire from U Illinois, U Texas, Texas A and M, Ohio and Penn State, and such for professionals but still hire Harvard MBAs from major consultant firms for the Directors of Strategic Planning that will become the next CEO. At least for now. State U kids can get to the C suite, not always to the top. An arrogant ivy will not make it in todays environment.
That seems to be a theme in "doctors who kill" documentaries and dramas. They have good bedside manners and look like doctors.
With lawyers, the problem with the hungry grads may be that they are hungry enough to cut corners. They are lawyers, after all, and hungry.
Interesting fact per a former colleague who immigrated to this country from Afghanistan: the plural of Taleb is Taleban.
I have not found that to be true in hiring associates. There is a definite correlation (though of course not perfect) between quality of school attended and quality of work product. Of course, what is true for biglaw associates might not apply in other areas of practice.
It's not clear to me what relevant experience Taleb might have that would permit him to make this judgment.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in David and Goliath. Worth a re-read.
i had One manager, that went to Yale..
He NEVER let us forget it; it's the ONLY thing i remember about him; oh, That and he was one of the FIRST execs they let go when they purged the exec ranks
(used to report to a VP (the Yale guy), who reported to a VP, who reported to a VP; That's a LOT of VPs)
My nephew the NYU grad, graduated from NYU.. He NEVER lets us forget that, either.
Many of our past Democrat presidents and other Democrat politicians are Ivy League Lawyers. I rest my case in Taleb's corner.
How do you know someone went to Harvard?
They'll tell you...
Many with insider knowledge have opined similarly
“The principle value of holding a Harvard degree is never again having to be being impressed by a Harvard degree”
--Thomas Sowell
Joseph Epstein remarks specifically on Harvard and Yale law students being some of the worst people in the world due to the attraction of the degree as a status good.
https://youtu.be/JF2eJSHKKd0?t=995
Old and slow said:
“He was the California record holder for squats back in the 1960's at one time. No small feat!”
True — it takes large feet to create the stable base squatting that much weight requires.
In the 2000s, I spent most of three years working pro bono as a habeas investigator trying to free from prison a young African man who, the evidence that the prosecutor invented and the defense attorney didn't debunk showed clearly, had been wrongly convicted.
After two years, the pro bono team from A Huge International Law firm got involved, too. Each time we met in what they called their "war room," I was impressed by one of their lawyers who'd gone to HLS with Obama -- impressed by how unimpressive he was. Breathtakingly unimpressive.
On the day the state court of appeal turned down the foolishly conceived and obviously doomed appeal they'd filed, I said during our conference call with their whole team that it was time to now file the habeas petition and use the mountain of evidence I'd uncovered proving actual innocence, Mr. HLS said, verbatim: "Why? We know they're not amenable to our argument?"
??? The man didn't know the difference between them. HLS, take a bow.
Meanwhile, the most effective criminal lawyer I've ever known went to Better Call Saul Law School.
For many years, I was a partner in an IP boutique. All of my partners were from top 20 schools. I went to a low cost state school back east. There were a number of instances (not many) when a client would cheerfully quiz us on our legal educations. I understood my place in the world more clearly when the client would react, as they always did, to my non-prestige credential after hearing the volley of Harvards, Yales, Stanfords and UCLAs. My background made me more of a skeptic, more of a cynic, someone with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and someone who believed in legwork more than brain work.
We had a plastic surgeon in Orange County who was convicted of second degree murder after a patient died through gross negligence and his unwillingness to send her to an ER when he could see she was in trouble.
He was a graduate of a prestigious medical school at age 19 and his professors said he was the most brilliant student they had ever had. He might have been a great astrophysicist but he had no moral standards for dealing with other human beings. I had a cardiologist who had a PhD in Astrophysics but she was human.
My niece got her undergraduate degree from Cornell and wanted to attend law school at Cornell. But the cost was just so expensive. She was a little disappointed.
She decided on University of Wisconsin Law School and has really flourished there. Had an article accepted for the Law Review, and is an Articles Editor for this year (3L). It really opened up some opportunities for her to network and the firm in Chicago where she did summer work the last two years offered her a position once she graduates in Spring 2023.
I'm not saying that she would not have those opportunities at Cornell. But she is glad she is at Wisconsin and is making the most of it.
Affirmative smoothing under a veil of privacy and deceit.
“Simply, an Ivy League education can hide incompetence for a very, very long time."
No, only about 1 or 2 years.
??? The man didn't know the difference between them. HLS, take a bow.
Meanwhile, the most effective criminal lawyer I've ever known went to Better Call Saul Law School.
I've been told by lawyers that the joke is, "third-tier law schools teach you law as practiced day to day. Second-tier schools teach law as it's practiced at the appellate level. Ivy league law schools teach law as it's practiced on Mars."
Also, the Harvard Kennedy School needs to be razed to the ground and the earth salted. Probably 90% of the problems today can be traced back to its graduates and their influence on policy.
This guy said a mouthful of truth,
I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty
William F. Buckley Jr.
If anyone hasn't tuned in to the crisis of expertise exhibited over the last 2.5 years at the highest levels of national and global governance...
Whether it was health policy or economics/inflation, the most educated and longest serving policy makers showed they are craven incurious and inflexible people who care little about the negative impacts of their views, nor the downside risk of their policies being wrong.
Let's never forget that 18 months ago the experts said:
- Vaccine passports are required and vaccines prevent transmission
- Lockdowns, including on schools, were vital
- Inflation was transitory as the economy gets going again
As just a few major items. And each of these points were repeated ad nauseum for long periods, with dissent shut down or mocked.
It’s an interesting observation.
More of an admission that people aren’t able to identify talent and competence.
That’s why Tom Brady is still playing in the NFL at age 45. If all “the next great NFL QB”s actually panned out Brady would have had to retire 8 years ago.
Reminds me of the joke:
"What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom out of med school? "
"Doctor"
Trump was impressed that Jared went to Harvard.
Jared is a fucking moron.
I am somewhat ambivalent about Harvard law degrees. Too of them brightest lawyers I have known were HLS grads. One was criminal, and ended up getting disbarred for having a large amount of pot. The Sheriff’s department had been after him for years, because he got so many of the drug dealers they arrested off the hook. They raided his birthday party one year, but he had been out making a beer run. He got everyone they arrested at his house off in short order. He should have been more circumspect in his own drug use, knowing this, but as a HLS grad, lacked a bit of hubris. Hired him once for a speeding ticket, and he had the prosecution run around in circles in short order. Never seen any criminal lawyer that good. Another HLS grad is a patent attorney. One of the best around.
But overall, most patent attorneys with elite law degrees are not very good. Why? Because they are typically lawyers first, and engineers second. Which means that they often don’t really know how the inventions they are working on actually work. Give me a service academy grad any day - almost all of them have real engineering degrees, and used them.
I was overall underwhelmed by elite law school grads when I was in a decent sized firm. Yes, they are conscientious and well connected. But never seemed as hungry as everyone else. Too willing to cruise on their laurels.
Harvard has other well known grad schools. One is their business school. There was a saying that you didn’t hire a HBS MBA unless you were grooming him to be the CEO. They just didn’t fare well as, say, a division manager. They also had spent their time in B School learning the Big Picture, and less on the details. Which means that they often didn’t understand the accounting, the finance, marketing, etc as well as grads from other, less elite, B Schools.
airlines are desperate for any warm body to become a new pilot and their hiring practices have gone full woke
Not desperate enough to pay for training, as it happens. Ask any young college grad who would like to go to flight school but can't as they don't have several dozen thousands of dollars lying around.
"Taleb" and variants are Arabic for "student." Taliban are Students (of the Quran).
Loved his Black Swan book but haven't kept up with him since.
I was well into my state u edumacation before I had much idea of the status issue, but of course I found it everywhere once I started paying attention.
That said, I would never have made it into anyone's law school had I tried.
"Taleb" and variants are Arabic for "student." Taliban are Students (of the Quran).
Loved his Black Swan book but haven't kept up with him since.
I was well into my state u edumacation before I had much idea of the status issue, but of course I found it everywhere once I started paying attention.
That said, I would never have made it into anyone's law school had I tried.
[Blogger being bloggery]
But overall, most patent attorneys with elite law degrees are not very good. Why? Because they are typically lawyers first, and engineers second. Which means that they often don’t really know how the inventions they are working on actually work.
When I was a kid in Chicago, our neighbor across the street was a patent attorney. At that time TVs were very new and he used to offer to fix neighbor's TV sets. He was a great guy.
A semblance of science, with models, social cults, verily predictions that may or may not reflect reality. When first you wield the doubled-edged scalpel.
Taleb is an interesting thinker but he doesn’t always make sense. What does it mean to say that lawyers from Harvard and Pace are of the same rank? Does he mean that a lawyer in the top 50% at Harvard is the same or not as good as a lawyer who was in the top 50% at Pace? Because that’s ridiculous. Smarts counts for a lot in a lawyer and the Harvard lawyer from the top half of the class is probably smarter than the Pace lawyer from the top half of the class. Being smart isn’t enough, of course; judgment and a keen understanding of human nature are also valuable skills. Hell, having a photographic memory is also a big plus, e.g., Henry Friendly, Roy Cohn, and Edward Bennett Williams. So, Taleb is just off base here.
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