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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both [projects and school].

Do they, though? Between schools offloading teaching as "homework", making kids do after school what should've been done in-class, and the cultural pressure making parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford - there's not that much time in a kid's day left.

> a treehouse is rarely the path to riches

pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.

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pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.

Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you are already rich.

Correct. I mean, it's the Maslov's pyramid - you aren't going to do interesting projects if you're constantly worrying about food and shelter.

I understand that most people don't have the luxury of starting interesting projects (I frequently talk about it on HN, too), but I think we can't read this essay (or most of the other pg writes) as targeted at everyone. His audience is clearly the people who can afford to entertain his ideas. Which is not just rich people - it's all the people who have some disposable free time, or can restructure their life to have it.

> parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford

Yeah, that's what causes the tradeoff. Kids can't do school, work on projects, and have parents that fill their schedule with loads of other stuff. It would have been perfectly reasonable for PG to launch his attacks on overscheduling rather than school.

> pg did not talk about riches in this essay

He talked about "work they do as adults" and "more predictive value" and "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator".

> It would have been perfectly reasonable for PG to launch his attacks on overscheduling rather than school.

I agree, it would have been. But I wouldn't let schools off the hook, because they are the other edge of the feedback loop: in big part, extracurriculars exist as a way to game admission system. Together, they form a system that tries to consume all the free time a kid has.

> He talked about "work they do as adults" and "more predictive value" and "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator".

At least in his writing, pg does play with the idea that work is valuable beyond the money it earns you, so I interpreted this essay in that light.

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