Debate Team Is What The Nerds Do To Get Into Harvard
I was thinking about another puzzle when I got up this morning: why do "the polls" say most people thought Kamala "won" the "debate", when the more respectable polls say Trump is inching ahead in electoral preference? The title of this post came to me in the shower: debate team is what the nerds do to get into Harvard. Look at Nate Silver's Wikipedia entr y, for instance: As a student at East Lansing High School, Silver won first place in the state of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters in 1996. Silver actually went to Chicago; same differece. But this reminds me of a presentation on cognitive dissonance I heard from psychology profs as an Ivy sophomore myself: looking back, it was remarkably cynical. Their point was that experiments had shown that the more unplesant an experience was -- like, just for instance, hazing -- the more respondents were inclined to rate it as valuable. The ex...