A healthy aversion to proxies

The importance of keeping the important things in mind

I was having breakfast with my roommates this morning when my French roommate (at UCLA on exchange) brought up something super interesting: he found that American university students seemed to be prioritizing their grades more than the actual learning.

I found this very intriguing. Grades were certainly a huge priority in my life in the last few years, especially in college. So much so, that I was pretty curious as to why that wasn’t the same case in France.

Turns out, French university students don’t have a GPA. The concept of a GPA was so foreign to my roommates, in fact, I had to actually explain what it was and how it was calculated. When they graduate from their European universities, they get a university diploma — no GPA included. For them, the hard work for grades and exams was to get into the university. Now that the students were there, they were free to focus on learning (and partying).

American students, on the other hand, live in an environment where grades are super important, even in college. We’re told getting a good job or getting into a good grad school (law, med, business) is super important, and having a good GPA is a necessary requirement for that. Students therefore focus on getting good grades, often at the expense of true learning.

In other words, in the process of pursuing the appearance of strong learning (high grades), the actual learning is forgotten.

It was at this point that something began to tickle the back of my brain. An inkling of a new thought, a new connection forming. It was this:

A few months ago, I had listened to a Lex Fridman podcast with Jeff Bezos, where the Amazon CEO discussed the importance of having a healthy aversion to proxies.

For Bezos, a problem of large, growing companies was that they began prioritizing proxies, rather than the underlying realities they represented. Metrics often became the goal.

He brought up the example of using metrics to measure customer happiness. Something like a low rate of customer returns. Initially, this could be used to represent customer happiness — if fewer customers are returning items they bought, surely they must be happier? But when low returns become the goal, that idea breaks down. There are plenty of other reasons return rates may be decreasing: it’s now harder to return something, it’s too expensive or inconvenient to do so, the length of time you can do so is decreased …

Another: using price as a proxy for customer value. The idea might be the lower the price, the higher the value. Sure.

But if the proxy becomes the goal, product quality will continue to drop as the goal becomes to lower the price as much as possible. It’s the reason why the phrase “cheaper now, more expensive later” exists for things like skipping car maintenance, buying bad-quality appliances, or neglecting close relationships (to name a few).

And sitting there at that breakfast table today, I realized this proxy problem is exactly what had happened with grades. Grades were used as a proxy for learning.

High grades = more learning.

I’m sure that initially worked well until people started assuming students with higher grades learned more. Students saw this, and then began to focus on getting high grades to show others how much they learned. We learned how to appear to have learned well. But the actual learning was forgotten.

And when I began to think about it, these proxies are everywhere and dangerously, often replace the underlying realities. Money is a proxy for success, and countless people chase more of it. Material possessions and social media likes are used as a proxy for happiness, yet often lead people to feel much worse inside.

We need to remember that our proxies are not truth, but representations of a deeper form of reality. In the case of grades, it’s important to remember that learning well is the underlying reality we seek. It’s the only way to achieve the end goals we seek to achieve. 

Best,
Dennis :)

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Dennis’s Picks:

• The book All the Light We Cannot See (I read it in one 5-hour sitting, and can’t recommend it enough!)