Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist’s Response | Hacker News Reader

Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist’s Response

techcrunch.com

26 pointsssclafani12 comments

From TFA:

I dropped out of liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas because I’m behind a social movement called UnCollege which supports Mark Twain’s mantra: “I have never let school interfere with my education.

First, I think it's really silly basing life decisions on witty quotations by dead people. Second, I can't wait till these kids re-discover FFTs or randomized algorithms, or Bloom filters, or suffix arrays, or linear algebra, or the SVD, or Bayesian networks, or countless other things that are effective solutions to real-world problems.

Hope they know that they're part of a high-risk, no-better-than-average reward experiment.

I have no idea why you think going to college is a requirement for understanding those things. I don't have a degree, and have used all those things in production (except FFTs - which I have used for fun)

- I was a defense contractor with Top Secret clearance working on ML for the airforce, which included research-level work with bayesian networks (I built tractable heuristics for solving partially observable markov decision processes).

- I built a scheduling heuristic for an international law firm (an NP-hard problem) using randomized algorithms.

- I built a recommendation engine for my a multimillion dollar startup I founded using SVDs.

- Today I open sourced a bloom filter implementation I wrote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443675) that uses recent research to be several times faster than a traditional implemention

- I implemented very efficient Reed Solomon coding using numerical methods and linear algebra for secret sharing

And I'm by no means unique. I know other dropouts who are doing world class work in distributed systems research and NLP. There's absolutely no reason you need to go to college to learn if you're motivated.

I didn't say it was a requirement. I meant to say that most students will benefit from a structured curriculum, especially the parts that may initially appear boring or useless.

Your accomplishments are very impressive, but you clearly are not the norm, which is why Thiel's advice can be damaging.

I personally know one of the finalists, and he's probably more impressive than I am (and certainly more impressive than I was at that age).

Thiel is simply arguing that we need to make sure kids know about other options available to them besides college.

Of course, if you want to be a medical doctor you need to go to formal school. But, if you have the right kind of personality and the right goals, college may not be the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.

And I don't think many people but Thiel are preaching that message.

Being a dropout is different than not going to college at all. And I'm not even saying that one needs to go to college, but someone who does 3-4 years at Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc... and drops out is in a very different boat than one who goes straight from high school or home schooling to the work force.

    but someone who does 3-4 years at Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc.

<rant:driveby> I am sorry. I HATE to hear this hog wash.

I have met many people from Caltech and MIT and the way you are saying it, it is like they are the distinguished elite... and yes maybe a select few are but don't generalize... they are really ditzy and honestly stupid people there. Structure, fear and the title of those prestige schools will keep you from doing something silly and failing out.

Last time I checked... Once you get in (from high school SAT / A-Levels / AP / CAPE) you are in for the full four years. So it is not the students. Scratch that.

So then what are you really saying the professors there will give me a better education than I will give to myself ? Ever heard of student cram sessions ? Students who study before class only to argue or sleep during ? I highly doubt a professor from another school will not provide a similar level of education other wise you are insulting them. So it is not the professors. Scratch that.

So is it their courses ? MIT has OCW, CalTech and Harvard I think have lectures on YouTube and elsewhere for the public viewing. So it is not the courses. Scratch that.

Stop giving credit where it doesn't exist.

And you missed what smanek is saying. This is someone who has either learnt material that would be covered in first year uni (which happens if you do AP or A-Level) or who is learning on his own. No one said that one will not learn jack shit when on the work force .. that is just stupid.

</rant:driveby>

Signed Pissed off Canadian on behalf of -UFT -McGill -UofA

The glib and snarky reply is that most people who go to college never learn any of those things. The majority of people who go to college don't take classes which include FFTs or suffix arrays, or even essential things like probability. And yet, for some reason, this is just considered normal.

You make a worthwhile point, though: for people studying without being in college, how can they make sure that they get the useful but scary- or boring-looking stuff? I would propose that some respectable people put together lists of the subjects that are important to understand for various fields of study, so that un-college folks don't just accidentally miss something important like linear algebra. You could go a step further and create tests or projects or some other mechanism for people to demonstrate that they've studied each topic and understood it. There's no inherent reason why colleges have to be in charge of both education and accreditation. (I think that the Khan Academy or one of its competitors may eventually grow into this.)

I've found that it's easiest to learn things -- especially difficult things -- when you actually care. One of the hardest problems that the best teachers in college face is getting students to care. The thing that struck me, reading through the article and some of the stuff on uncollege.org, was the pervasive sense of actually giving a damn about education. There's got to be a way to use that.

What am I missing? I don't understand why this college vs uncollege horse race is generating such furor.

We're engineers not because it pays well (which thankfully it does) but...because we just _had_ to be. I was born to be an engineer and my official first day on the job was when my dad brought home an Apple IIe.

College might be part of some engineer's education, it may not be for others. It was part of mine, but I learned how to work with Bayesian network, randomized algorithms and linear algebra after college.

I'm about his age, and I agree with his thesis. But this article is terrible. No substantial arguments for how formal education fails and why unschooling is a better alternative are presented. In Wadhwa's article, you can at least easily identify his arguments and decide whether you agree or disagree with them. His article is basically an enumeration of his opinions, as evidence by the abundance of "I" sentences.

I imagine he is on pins and needles waiting to find out if he got it and I imagine this was written fairly quickly so as to be relevant, time-frame-wise. I doubt it was intended to be anything all that grand. I think the selling point is "insider" and "right here, right now", so to speak, not "best researched, most polished paper ever".

Peace.

No need for it to be grand. But it has to be substantial enough for anyone to want to read it.

All discussions about his article aside (whether it's a valid viewpoint at all; whether it makes any real arguments), it's a little unclear to me exactly what he's doing. Can anyone clarify?

I've looked at uncollege.org, and the "What" page tells me that it's "a social movement support self-directed higher education." This means very little sense to me, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that.

Then he elaborates:

(1) "Writing a book about learning from life." Wait, what? This says absolutely nothing! In order to help you learn on your own, I will write a book about helping you learn on your own. But this is terrifically unhelpful; "learning on your own" is a massive area that needs to be specific in order to be of any use at all. As it stands, it's really no different from "PowerPoint for Dummies"--which, while useful for some people, is hardly revolutionary in sparking people to consider not going to college.

(2) "Developing experiential learning programs at existing colleges that are truly student directed." Again, this says absolutely nothing to me. Of course we all want students to have valuable, interactive college experiences. The problem is in determining how to do that, not determining that it should be done!

(3) "Building a platform to validate self-directed learning, allowing people to demonstrate their talents in an online portfolio and bypass the college degree." This gets somewhere, I think--he's finally coming up with some sort of idea. But it's unclear how this is superior to existing solutions (people already provide portfolios and examples of past work, and standardized tests exist to address this to some degree), and--as with the other cases--the execution is critical.

I don't mean to condemn everything about Stephens here. It does sound like he's motivated toward a worthy cause, and while I think college still has value for a lot of people, I think success in this realm would be fantastic. But it seems clear to me that his ideas are very undeveloped, and I'm very skeptical of the likelihood of his success based on what I've seen so far. Thiel might think differently--that the fact that he dropped out indicates some drive and initiative that'll lead him to success--but I disagree, and think that this is just a prime example of why it's good for many people to study for a few years.

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