"They obviously wouldn’t do what I’m about to say, but this system is equivalent to one where they set a very affordable base tuition, and then add a “wealth-based surcharge” to charge their rich students extra money. And if you don’t fill out the form and tell them how much your parents make, you get the maximum possible surcharge.": uh, my uni does just that, actually? They’re government-funded, so tuition used to be a few hundreds of euros per year, but a decade or so ago they decided that now it’s going to be tiered by income, with tuition ranging from €0 to €15k.

I mean, that’s just copying the usual model you described after having previously done something different, but the equivalence between the two is a bit more blatant in that context, right?

Fellow not-at-all-a-data-scientist-but-wait-actually-that-sounds-fun here! I don’t know more about it than you do, but I’m glad you asked, since I hope to also benefit from the answers you’ll get :-)

Really interesting! I particularly liked the part on reading out loud: even though I’d heard it used to be more common (and that there’s even a French 19th c. novelist who had set up a specific ‘shouting room’ in his garden for shouting his texts out loud and see if they sounded good), but I’d never actually noticed it had so many advantages. Maybe I should do it more. Heck, it might even help me stay focused more easily on what I read?

Hmm. No, but only because what you describe’s a massive oversimplification of what was actually going on? (Not a historian, though). In the 1400’s in W Europe, there was: kings gaining power over their feudal lords, hence less infighting between local lords. That does give more time for pleasure, or at least more opportunities to have fancy houses instead of fortresses. There also had been the crusades a couple of centuries before, allowing to bring knowledge from eg. Ancient Greece that had only been preserved in the middle East: that brings new forms of art, new knowledge, etc. An actual historian might even want to say something about more centralised governments, needing more bureaucrats, hence more people who can write and think about politics and philosophy? And of course, merchants were on the rise compared to kings and lords. But I’m not sure why they specifically as a class would have focused more on pleasure than on status?

I can’t say I’m surprised you’d see things that way, certainly (though I am mildly surprised how much I see them similarly: I’m still too young for kids!). But that must feel… not great.

Really interesting! I agree on the importance of some things becoming more or less socially acceptable and how it influences behaviours, for good or for evil (why on Earth did being very anxious become so okay?). In my case, maybe part of my concern was more specific to me: as a good, routine-abiding autistic person, I used to be extremely scrupulous, in addition to having akrasia issues, so on balance it worked fine. But now it feels as though akrasia and anxiety are more okay, while I get more signals telling me that I shouldn’t be so scrupulous, and that may be why I notice that I’m less able to control my akrasia than before. (All of this is of course pretty speculative).

I’m not 100% sure the relevant lesson is to avoid sociology (or some other social sciences) entirely. The way I see it, it’s about as reliable as psychology if there had never been anything like a replication crisis: loads of nonsense at the very core of the field, and that everyone seems to think is gospel, but with a few good insights and useful approaches hidden in it—okay, maybe sociology has significantly more people who have been made actually crazy by politics, though. Then, either you avoid it entirely, or you engage with it knowing that you’re on a quest to find as much actually useful things in it as you can. If you do what I did as a 1st year student and engage with them only for your brain to immediately conflate the misunderstood, the immature, and the many genuinely crazy beliefs into "everyone’s completely nutty in that school!", you might make yourself more miserable than needed :-) 

Really cool projects, though! Good luck with those! I’m not in SciencesPo currently, but I’ve heard that some folks had started an EA association which seems to be growing pretty fast, and the (pre-existing) cybersecurity association seems to be moving a little toward AI risk, and to do it well (they’re often in touch with the main people working on AI safety here).

edit: if I had wanted to summarise my comments above in one sentence (I might have wanted to do that, right? ;-) ), it would be something like: SciencesPo is weird because it’s a great place to work on X-risk governance and policy, and quite a few folks in EA/rationalist circles do just that, but the vibes of the place  are just completely opposed to LW-style rationality. Not throwing the baby with the bathwater, then, is surprisingly hard. 

Interesting, and very well written. Because you have access to particularly funny examples, you show very well how much politics is an empty status game.
 

I should probably point out that five years ago, I was a high school student in France, felt more or less the way you do, and went on to study political science at college (I don’t even need to say which college I’m talking about, do I?). It is a deep truth that politics is very unserious for most people, and that is perhaps most true for first-year political science students (or, god forbid, the sort of people who teach them introductory political science classes). I studied political science precisely because I agreed with the sentiment you describe here, and expected something a little more serious. 
 

I definitely did not get it. The average political science undergraduate is very much like your friends—not least because they’re actually the same people a year older—and, while many professors are great, some are scarcely better than their students. 

You gave your funny sad stories, here’s one of mine (carefully selected to be the most egregious I’ve seen, but 100% true): first year sociology class, taught by respected specialist of Jewish life in Soviet-era Poland. Me, really curious about why sociology doesn’t dialogue more with some apparently contradictory results in social psychology. I try my best to ask "how does sociology react to that kind of stuff, even though it’s a completely different discipline and all?" in the least offensive way I can. 
Teacher’s face suddenly turns dark blue, she jumps off her chair, yelling "THIS IS SCIENCE! THIS IS SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE!". It takes me a few seconds to gather that she’s not blaming psychology for being science. Her brain registered something which kinda sounded like an attack against her discipline, and she’s defending the science-ness of her job. And not, certainly, doing anything like answering my question. In fact, she’s running around the room ("science! Science!"), and has forgotten about me entirely. After five or ten minutes, she eventually goes back to her chair, visibly exhausted ("well… where was I? Ah yes…") and resumes the class.

But the reason I’m writing this comment is exactly because I don’t want you to start seeing the whole lot of them as a bunch of crazies (as I myself did…). It’s really true that everyone who doesn’t end up working in politics, and even most of those who do, when they’re young, treat it as a deeply unserious status game (but, given what LW has to say about politics, I’d be really surprised if it was worse in France than in the US, or basically anywhere else?). It is also true that wanting to work on politics and decision-making doesn’t come with a specific knowledge of rationality. So, yeah, most people who think about politics do so in a very irrational way, because politics is a status game (not to mention being the mind-killer). But if you think that this is not a strong enough description and that the ones you know are really more crazy than that, I think the difference is because they’re high-schoolers :-) It does get a little bit better with age, but you might miss that if you brand them as crazies and forget to change your mind when most of them have grown enough to be a little less crazy :-)

Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even that would generally be a terrible idea for an individual actor inside the market: more often than not, it splits the revenue between two product lines, neither of which manages to make enough money to turn a profit. In fact, I can hardly see how it would be possible to have one single business be organised as a market: even though your goal is to increase efficiency, you would need many departments doing the same job, and an even greater number of ‘consumer’ (company executives) hiring whichever one of those competing department offers them the best deal for a given task… Again, the whole point of the idea that markets are good is that they’re more efficient than the individual agents inside it. 

Just me following up with myself wrt what the post made me think about: it’s as if there are two ways of being anxious, one where you feel sort of frazzled and hectic all the time (‘I need to do more of that stuff, and do it better, or something bad will happen’), and one where you just retreat to safety (‘There’s nothing I can do that wouldn’t come with an exceedingly high risk of something bad happening’). It’s quite clear that the former could lead someone to being an overachiever and doing masses of great stuff (while still, unfortunately, feeling like it‘s not enough), whereas the latter could lead to boredom, and probably from there to being depressed (which I like to conceptualise as the feeling that ‘there’s nothing I can do’)/maybe it‘s a propensity for depression which makes one’s anxiety work in that way? 
I’m not sure to what extent it’s actually useful to see anxiety in that way, though?