cheating is just a canary
Moontower Munchies #110
Friends,
The common theme in today’s links is gonna be pretty obvious.
math team and other horrible things you to do get into Stanford (6 min read)
Benedict
This essay is about what it feels like to jump through hoops for an overbid goal. It’s not about the worthiness of the goal itself which is what a lot of debate around competitive schools tends to focus. In fact, the author despite a dreary, soul-sucking description of achiever life readily admits:
Was it worth it? It's hard to say it wasn't. My best friends are still the ones I met in high school and college. I met my wife in my first year at Stanford. The Stanford name gets me in front of venture capitalists and hiring managers, just like Oatnook's name got me in front of the admissions committee before that. I'm now 15 years into a tech career that I'd never even known was possible as a kid, a career that has been comfortable and lucrative in equal parts.
The essay is worth reading for several reasons.
1) It transports you into the mind of a person whose experience you may recognize in your own lives or the adolescents in your lives.
2) The distinction between a “mathlete” and a mathematician is a metaphor for the perversion we see everywhere — substituting a fake measure as a proxy for the thing we actually want to find.
3) Because the essay is the appetizer to today’s meal…but like a fancy waiter allow me some words first:
Some sleight of hand. When I say “substituting a fake measure as a proxy for what we really want to find” I’m getting you to accept an assumption. My assumption is we care about people matching to a life of thriving. But I’m not sure this assumption figures into society’s definition. Like the comfortable and lucrative in equal parts yuppie success story means thriving.
Ehh. There’s more to this.
“Success” may be a prerequisite for thriving but it’s not evidence of it. If success is sprouting from a soil of pyrrhic compromises, the plant’s not thriving. The fake hoop-jumping is an artificial light ensuring the seeds take to the environment but zap the natural tilts towards the sun.
The mathlete vs mathematician distinction says more about the ability to take pain to gain the approval of a gatekeeper who is not fundamentally interested in you but in the self-perpetuation of a system. Not because the gatekeeper loves the system, they’re probably most cynical of all by now if they have any self-awareness, but because inertia is a physical law. It takes energy to change course. Expending energy is risky.
It’s a 2 sided market. Both the judge and the applicant embrace conformity to reduce risk. When the rules of getting ahead are written down, and you get ahead, what have you demonstrated? Certainly grit. Tip o’ the hat, no shade. But picking a crowded selection from a menu is a “nobody got fired buying IBM” choice. When you eventually get fired, this could be literal but I mean it figuratively as the moment when you face a crisis of self, will you realize you traded your courage for certainty? Will you be able to get it back?
Another way?
Is there a way to replicate the desired outcome without chasing? Sure. You can lead. It’s not easy. The replication will be more expensive in terms of effort — but lower in terms of perceived effort because you’re alive.
It’s hard to trek where there are no tracks or where they are hard to see. It requires creativity, the knowledge that nobody cares or even notices when you have a bad hair day, and the meta-awareness that previously rewarding paths that are now overbid have a far worse risk/reward.
I’ve talked about this so many times. When I went into options trading it was a relative backwater. I was lucky it was on the cusp of becoming a booming business. The path was not overbid 25 years ago. It was highly competitive, sure, but nothing like it is now. Today, firms know to hire more than they need and then run them off against each other. Between this and the internships, they are smart. They know job interviews don’t tell you enough. They want a longer look at you.
I was taking Max to the ortho last Thursday and I saw what turned out to be a HS sophomore in a Jane Street t-shirt. I stopped him to chat. Asian kid. Math team. Seemed super mature, curious, and eager. We’ll stay in touch. You can’t see a kid like that and not want them to thrive. I want the mill to be kind to him. Not to be soft on him. But to genuinely energize him. Inspiration is the world being kind to you. Creating space to let it in is how you encourage and honor her kindness.
It’s tragic if the game theory of the system demands all your space.
If the cost of reducing risk is directing all your lifeforce and motivation to satisfy an endurance test, what are we even doing here? For whom is this endurance needed exactly? If I need it for me, and I do, then how much effort should I expend proving it meets someone else’s criteria. Or am I proving my endurance to someone else because I’ve substituted someone else’s pursuit for my own?
Like I said, all the above is appetizer.
Today’s main course is an assault by Zvi Mowshowitz (ironically he spent some time at Jane Street).
Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat (23 min read)
It’s a long post that reads briskly. I’ll excerpt just the opening and then the ending only because otherwise I’m going to excerpt all of it. It starts with a discussion about rampant cheating. It’s not an indictment. In fact, to read it on the level of morality is to miss why this essay is so important.
Because this essay is about everything.
You’ll understand why I opened with the math team post.
When you get to the “Whispering Earring”, a thought you’ve probably all considered, you’ll appreciate why this is about everything.
A lot of the stories we tell ourselves about motivation and meaning are going to look quite brittle in the coming years. There’s a silent river running underneath everyone’s house but the floorboards are starting to warp and it smells like mold.
The whole topic of cheating is just a canary.
Opening
Cheaters. Kids these days, everyone says, are all a bunch of blatant cheaters via AI.
Then again, look at the game we are forcing them to play, and how we grade it.
If you earn your degree largely via AI, that changes two distinct things.
You might learn different things.
You might signal different things.
Both learning and signaling are under threat if there is too much blatant cheating.
There is too much cheating going on, too blatantly.
Why is that happening? Because the students are choosing to do it.
Ultimately, this is a preview of what will happen everywhere else as well. It is not a coincidence that AI starts its replacement of work in the places where the work is the most repetitive, useless and fake, but its ubiquitousness will not stay confined there. These are problems and also opportunities we will face everywhere.
From the Closing
…our future may depend on the answer, what is your better plan?
The actual problem we face is far trickier than that. Both in education, and in general.
Extra
😂Matt Levine’s section on Student Finance Clubs is perfectly timed.
Money Munchie
My buddy Mat Cashman runs education at the Option Industry Council. The council is an industry group provided by the OCC, the org in charge of clearing exchange-traded option contracts and setting policy.
If you are a total beginner I recommend the OIC’s free course.
Mat had a long career as a market-maker and brings a totally overpowered experience level to his role at OIC.
He’s trying something new you should check out:
This Thursday, May 15 at 12:00 PM CT, we’re kicking off “OIC Office Hours – Ask Us (Almost) Anything”, a live, AMA-style session where two of our options instructors will answer real-time questions from investors. It’s designed to be casual, informative, and interactive — a new way to engage with the curious and the committed alike.
We’ve got two sessions scheduled for now — 5/15 and 5/22 — and we’re hoping to build momentum with each.
Stay groovy
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Goddam. This was so good.
I am unlikely to be the only reader here to realize at some point in his life that an unnervingly high % of my skillset involved winning prestige games in highly structured environments rather than learning to take actual risks or add value to the world. I did get very lucky though.... a few key mentors showed me offramps, opportunities and play spaces where "choose your own adventure" was an OK way to proceed. I'm grateful that I learned this in my late twenties instead of my late thirties, but still wonder what I may have contributed if I knew this in my teens. Now the question is how to encourage my sons to think this way before they leave the house.
Thanks for allowing comments so I had some space to get these thoughts down!