Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…ly get to, you’d like to ultimately identify the top 100 kids, and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that. And again, I would say this is part of the generalized corruption that’s taken place throughout this entire system, where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be. And then, just the final comment would be, the great thing about standardized testing and the National Merit System is it’s, like I said, it’s completely race blind, it’s gender blind, it’s blind on every other characteristic, it’s only done on test scores. And you can make an argument about whether that’s good or bad, but it is, for sure, it’s the closest thing that we had to get to merit. It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War. And of course, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it incredibly striking, and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today. So, back to the immigration thing, just real quick, it’s like, okay, we aren’t even trying to go get the smart kids out of [inaudible 03:03:39], and even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians, and the same thing for the smart Jews, and the same thing for the smart Black people. And I don’t know how that’s moral, I don’t get it at all. As you said about the 800, so I took the SAT and the ACT many times, and I’ve always gotten perfect on math, 800. And I’m not special, it doesn’t identify genius, I think you want to search for genius. And you want to create measures that find genius of all different kinds, speaking of diversity. And I guess we should reiterate and say over and over and over, defend immigrants, yes, but say we should hire more and more native-born. Well, you asked me in the beginning what’s the most optimistic forecast that we could have? And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?…

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