Admissions essentially boils down to "impress me." (Not saying that's good for society, but it's good for the university.)

It's one of the exceptional cases where Goodhart's Law—"a targeted metric is no longer good"—doesn't hold.

It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people.

Just look at Facebook! ;)

It's not a matter of "trusting" vs. "distrusting" them. It's a matter of what universities (and other exclusive institutions, for that matter) select for. If you select for "social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence" without also having any objective way of measuring actual productive potential, not to mention evaluating a person's actual willingness to use their talents in support of a cooperative civil society, you're going to get a lot of people who will be very good at preying on others and using the system they are gaining entrance to as a tool to that end.

> It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people

Yes, that's true, but without those social skills they do a lot less damage, because they can't get very many people to interact with them.

Also, regardless of what standardized tests do or don't do, judging based on "articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others" is, IMO, a very poor way of filtering out people who will prey on other people, since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills (or at any rate be able to fake them well enough to pass a test for them) to be successful at it.

"since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills" If you look at history you will find many without those skills that preyed on others.

Yes, that's me.

> and who is comfortable making connections with others

And that will never be me.

Leadership is inherently nepotistic. You simply aren't permitted to lead if you have the wrong class background or the wrong ethnicity. (There's a reason all Senators look exactly the same.) You're literally just advocating for an old boys' club, and if that's what you want, you might as well be explicit about it.

In what sense did, I dunno, Obama and McConnell look exactly the same?

In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.

The insert bridge here wasn't built in a day, with one person.

Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place? How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members? Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.

It was highly disputed in the 1800s.

I'm not an expert, but:

> Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place?

We would compete for resources, new languages would be created rapidly from old languages instead of the gradual change we're seeing in the last 4000 years.

> How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members?

All language, like I said, is composed of many -emes. Chomsky's big discovery was that you can't seaparate syntax and semantics when it comes to any language.

> Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.

This is the standard intuitive view with when one has no evidence. There is strong evidence to suggest that it is the individuals who mispronounce written words who cause this rapid change in language--they are mispronounced and then subsequently miswritten, and then their semantics are subsequently misinterpreted, so their syntax and semantics slowly change in this fashion.

Saussure, the founder of the modern linguistic tradition, has this all outlined in his book [1]. He outlines your view, and then shows you that it is in fact not true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics

But being the kind of articulate person college people appreciate is also a strong cultural marker that you come from the "college tribe".

Harvard just had a huge lawsuit about that.

What we could do is gauge students' communication ability in a way that is less subject to these factors. Which we already do, by examining students' writing.

The typical use of the word refers to manipulative people who will smoothly pretend values and opinions they don't have in order to mislead people and take advantage of them. Alternatively it is people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic.

The two are much different things. People who communicate their values and opinions have massive comparative disadvantage against them.

Exactly. This is what a room full of smooth talkers looks like: two top journalists agreeing on national TV that 500 million divided by 327 million is greater than 1 million.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/03/06/msnbcs_br...

Your criticism seems motivated by some prior grudges against these people. For leadership Postillions, I’d prefer someone bad at math over anyone this petty.

I've never done well on a test when I didn't understand the material, and I've always done well on test when I did.

If there's any correlation with this and academic success, it's not necessarily a positive one. There's a grain of truth to the stereotype of "nerds" not having great people skills.

The whole world is a gigantic Animal Farm, also in the West. The apparatchiks have different functions and names, but the principle is the same. The system works better though.

I remember going to college not so long ago and meeting kids who had grown up in the US who still had an accent/manner of speaking that they got from their parents (like a Chinese or Spanish accent). And of course there are very smart kids who grow up with AAVE or strong regional accents, some of whom are probably white but who probably aren’t from a good socioeconomic class.

To people in this country, that's what leadership looks like, so if you grade based on leadership, that's what you're going to get. Not playing identity politics here, just stating a fact.

Surely MIT would rather graduate future engineering leaders and technical founders and not just engineers.