I always have to remind myself that an English "public school" is what most people call a private school.

Per Wikipedia[0]:

> "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.

I emphatically agree that an emphasis on rhetoric will make smart people smarter.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

The issue is that language drifted and now “public” generally means “owned by the public” rather than merely “open to the public”.

This is true both in their inferior form of "British Parliamentery debate" as well as the various American styles, such as Lincoln Douglas, Policy, or Public Forum.

https://youtu.be/fmO-ziHU_D8?t=34

We truly are two peoples separated by a common language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqjHz9laqgU&t=368s

And debate between the Harvard Democrats and Republicans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYLcpQQCjLE&t=1655s

I've never seen or heard of a debate like the one in Peter Schiff's youtube channel there, and it is pretty obviously being shared on social media for emotional effect.

While I have to admit I'm not a fan of that debate style, if you want to know the context behind it, there's an episode of Radiolab on the topic: https://radiolab.org/episodes/debatable

The short version is that it seems to have been a response and rebellion to what was already an arguably ridiculous style of competitive "debating": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0

You'd think that in a community of "hackers" that should value actual skepticism and subversion that people wouldn't fall so easily for obvious propaganda.

For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-speak-gibberi...

It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:

> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.

But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:

> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.

And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:

> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.

Naturally the most obvious explanation for the US beating the UK at something is that the US population is 5x ours. Another explanation is that outside of public schools and Russel Group universities, we don't actually have much of a culture of competitive debating or debating societies any more. None of the schools I went to had a debate club, despite being relatively good schools, and I never heard of any debate competition being held.

From what I've seen from US competitive debate, it seems to be surprisingly popular with minority students and seems to use a style of rhetoric and scoring that I'm completely unfamiliar with - seemingly sometimes rewarding speed or Gish galloping. Here, the debates that most people would be familiar with are most commonly judged by their ability to convince the audience and are more popular with well educated, upper middle class people.

If not, maybe that explanation isn’t a very helpful one.

So it’s not a very good joke, as it implies that there aren’t any other filters, despite their intense concern for reputation.

The joke would only work for schools that famously looked the other way on pretty egregious stuff if you paid them enough -- not on a school that makes a point of heavily filtering beyond the official tuition. (Sorry, "sticker price".)

Side note: It's also kinda funny how the parent expects 45k to be some kind of jaw-dropping, outrageous number, when Americans routinely pay that much for college.

This is not true of Eton or Harrow or the other public schools.

[0] - Or whatever Boris Johnson got, I can't recall exactly, they were spectacularly subpar but he's masterfully scrubbed them from the internet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33275396

So… what’s left to make the joke work?

Both of us thought this was hilarious!

Given the life-long opportunities an Eton education affords someone, and the likely backgrounds of that 75%, you’d be reasonable in suspecting “a system of perpetuated inherited privilege”.

When these schools were founded, the alternative was to have private tuition - as opposed to be taught "publicly" and live with children from other families.

(The school I went to was founded in 1513 - but is known as a private school rather than a public one because it was never a boarding school).

Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”

Ita confusing. In the uk, private schools are referred to as "public schools". The last person to know the reason for this died in 1764. Probably.

Schools that the actual public go to are called "state schools" because they're funded by the state (and not by daddy's estate).

(Although that school isn't currently in the HC, presumably because it was run by Christian Brothers and one of the teachers has since been imprisoned for inappropriate behaviour with children.)

Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon (including Merchant Taylors' School and St. Paul's School) and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.

Confusingly, "Public School" refers to the most elite (and very exclusive) schools in the UK

They do tend to be very good schools but raise issues about social mobility, elitism etc (they tend to be expensive).

Because, on the face of it, that viewpoint seems to be simply deranged.

The brexit vote passed with a very slim majority, which is why it's still controversial here.

It's also a cross spectrum issue, i.e. not of the left or the right.

Personally, I would like to see our politics become more centred and pragmatic again.

I don't want anyone like either Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg near the levers of power. Both seem determined to destroy things of value for the sake for the sake of the personal political dogmas.

Part of the current crisis is the intra-party conflict between the "libertarian" faction that wants more immigration to boost the economy and the "nationalist" faction that wants to eliminate it to win easy votes. They got to have their cake and eat it for the last decade (people voted Brexit to both increase and to decrease immigration from India), but this caught up with them.

One of the major mistakes made by Kwarteng as chancellor was firing an extremely senior civil servant which spooked not just the civil service but also the markets, because it indicated that elected officials would now be more active in running the business of government. That’s something no one really wants.

Real ill luck then to find the one educated fool who is skilled in obfuscatory rhetoric for the latest PM. Reassuring to know that the rest of parliament is filled with educated good intentions.

I don't think this is quite the benefit some think it is.

i'd consider that a bug not a feature

Sure, they may run circles around you or me when it comes to debating some aspects of policy. But not around someone who's invested time and energy into a specific topic, which I think ought to be the bar for whether we consider these people 'well educated' and 'intelligent' when they are running the country supposedly on my behalf(!).

On the conservative side you have several politicians who had actually been programmers before they went into politics, one who worked with implementing risk models at a betting firm. They had generally read the Ferguson/ICL papers and understood why they were deeply flawed, and could talk at length about the concrete technical problems that had undermined COVID modelling, both statistical and implementation wise. For example, one MP talked about a specific paper and why it was based on circular logic, others about the validation of the underlying assumptions. And of course they asked a lot of pointed questions about how such shoddy 'science' had been allowed to dominate the government, about how the quality of scientific advice could be improved. Concrete things that they'd already thought about a lot.

Then the SNP and Labor MPs stood up. It was night and day. They were, primarily, angry that a debate was being held in the first place. Their entire spiel was "How dare the evil Tories criticize amazing SCIENTISTS who are only trying their best". One even cited the conclusions of the specific paper a Tory MP had just ripped to shreds 10 minutes earlier, apparently without realizing he was discussing the same research. None of them had any knowledge of the actual topic whatsoever. Their worldview went no deeper than: academics are brilliant, Tories are evil, why are we even wasting time debating this?

This is ultimately the reason the conservatives have such long durations in government. The quality of MP they attract seems to be much higher overall. Yes they have lots of the Oxford PPE types but overall they're less angry, way more polite and analytical, and way more likely to have concrete skills obtained outside of politics. A good example of this problem for the left came up just a few days ago where a supposedly neutral Channel 4 presenter was caught on a hot mike calling Steve Baker a "cunt". Baker - a Tory MP and one of their former programmers - just politely brushed it off, clearly the better man.

This sort of thing is routine in Labour circles and it puts voters off. Whilst some may rail against classism, ultimately most people want to see civilized debate between politicians who don't clearly want to kill each other.

In addition to being out of touch and classist, a main thesis of the book is that Oxonians learn “to write and speak for a living without much knowledge”. This worked well for England for hundreds of years but more recently has led to disaster where actual knowledge and expertise matter eg implications of Brexit, pandemic response, etc.

Review: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/01/chums-how-a-ti...