Interesting article. It resonates with a number of concerns I have with the way university and career tracks are done.
A few notes on the PSAT/NMF as a recent National Merit Finalist, with a few friends who were also NMFs, for and against the argument of the article:
I think the author overestimates the performativeness required to become a Finalist as a Semifinalist. Certainly the process felt less onerous to me than the application for most top 50 universities. I had barely any extracurriculars and a mediocre essay, and was still named as a finalist. I have no idea how close I was to not making the cut, but my guess is that any semifinalist with decent grades that takes the time to write a one-paragraph essay about their interests would qualify. As far as principal recommendations, in my experience they are not very picky, since they having more Finalists looks good for the school. I will concede though that this one could be an obstacle for people who are both extremely intellegent and introverted, and that I was helped by the fact that the school I go to had a steady enough stream of finalists to have a system set up to get them principal recommendations and make sure they fill out the required paperwork. Still, I would guess that most of the Semifinalists who do not become Finalists either aren’t planning to got to college, or have some sort of disciplinary issues that disqualify them.
I feel like the article doesn’t emphasize as much that this is not a test that all students take. In my school district especially, it was not very well advertised. I only signed up for it because one of my parents had been a Finalist, and even then I had to take it at another school because I missed the signup deadline for my school. I would suspect that many high-intellegence, lower income kids don’t take it simply because they aren’t really aware that they have to sign up, or don’t really know the possible benifits to taking it. I have a few friends who are good test takers (scored in percentiles similar to the cutoff for Semifinalist on ACT or SAT) but didn’t take it because it wasn’t on their radar.
I suspect that the IQ range rquired for a kid from a low income backgroudn to get Semifinalist based purely on intellegence is somewhat higher than described here, since there are kids likely of slightly lower baseline intellegence who do meet the threshold, due to tutoring, or taking it in other years to better prepare (usually because a parent signed them up). I didn’t do either, but I suspect that being in a household that put a high emphasis on literacy helped prepare me for this specific test, since the english section is more highly weighted.
In the research I did about scholarships for National Merit Finalists, the only school I could find that actually allows Finalists from all states to pay no money is UT-Dallas. FSU and a few others cover tuition, but not full cost of attendance, meaning money is, at least to some degree still an obstacle. I don’t know exactly how many states have high-quality universities that give full scholarships to Finalists, but my state doesn’t.
Great story! I feel like red isn’t the only one who could violate the laws of thermodynamics, though.
It seems like the blue pill could have also created energy, had they survived, by teleporting to a region of higher potential energy. The amount of power that could be generated by this method would be mostly constrained by the amount of they can take with them (the story seems to imply their clothes travel with them). If the rules are flexible enough, they might be allowed to teleport some massive weight to a higher elevation, in order to maximize the energy they create.
The green pill could presumably also do a version of this, where they travel to a high elevation as some light-weight animal, then turn into an elephant or something, and produce more energy going down than it required to get them up.
Both these methods are contrained in their power output, and probably generate energy slower than red. And admittedly neither were alive in the end, so I can’t blame black for not thinking of them. But they are theoretically infinite, and could be used similar to how red’s abilities are used in the end.