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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things.

I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.

Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.

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These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always something about them that seems really off and misguided at the same time.

The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off.

The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments.

There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis.

In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved.

Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.

> Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments.

There must be a balance. Without regulation bridges collapse, trains of toxic chemicals derail, and people get poisoned even just by eating and drinking. With too much regulation, innovation is stifled, usually because regulators were captured.

The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.

(Of course in a polarized electorate it's risky to admit both sides have a point, and try to work toward a productive compromise. After all, we can't have our candidate in the wings lose because our opponent incumbent got a 'win'--even if it is most of what we wanted anyway.)

it's not the regulations that are at issue, but people demanding irrelevant credentials.

after a few decades working as a programmer, do my highschool or university grades really still matter? yet some companies ask for them (notably canonical, they are also asking how i did in math in highschool. wat!?)

It can be both.

University credentials probably have more to do with proof one has grit, or social signaling. Unless it's for a specialized role that needs a certain degree.

Yup. It’s also because if they don’t list something to filter, they’ll be inundated with candidates they’ll have to spend more time and energy filtering.

> The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.

> (Of course in a polarized electorate [...]

Although the electorate is polarized, the two major parties do not significantly differ on support for things like regulatory capture, the revolving door between business and government, and the ability to frictionlessly convert back-and-forth between corporate money and political power.

They do differ, as Lina Kahn is proving and others before her. Sadly their efforts are too often sabotaged by Republicans who stand in the way or roll back the work.

The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. I think if you have to ask, you shouldn’t.

It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out.

Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.

They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.

Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.

So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.

sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)

If I do X I will get lucky != Lucky people can do X and win.

Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.

It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.

While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.

What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose.

Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed?

All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got.

And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.

Carmack is probably the only one who sticks out as he wasn't rich, connected or have early access.

Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.

Jonathan Blow spent almost 5 years at Berkeley and hooked up with the Tcl guys (Adam Sah sticks out). That's practially a graduate degree. see: http://number-none.com/blow/papers/rush_tcl94.pdf

Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?

>The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good.

And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can be very useful in success, it turns out.

The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it.

Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay...

I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since.

Anyone else with similar experience?

Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there.

There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way.

Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose?

Greed has a lot of history too.

Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.

> Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.

That is only because our system is so heavily built around bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal if done against any other group.

Could it be that education actually has value sometimes?

Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how to do that" despite having done that same thing in school. Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.

You barely remember anything from your toddler years, but they were some of the most impactful in your education.

Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I didn’t remember a thing, but it came back much faster than the first time.

I remember what I learned. I know how to walk, talk, and use a toilet.

I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences of normal subgroups, eh...)

But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.

>Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides.

maybe it's an elite small percentage who push society forward and improve it, and it's important that they are discovered and learn by learning and not as important what the rest do with their education.

I think society should be organized around the common (wo)man, but the common man wants the best doctor when he needs medical care, and the common woman wants the best aircraft designer to have designed any plane she flies on.

that's not to say that we should not look for better ways to educate people, perhaps we can find more doctors and plane designers, but just because 10% (or whatever) is all we get out of education doesn't make our education system a bust.

My last two years of high school were entirely about university entrance preparation. For someone who didn't plan to go to university, those years were of no value whatsoever.

With one exception, my favorite CS classes, by the test of which ones engaged me and changed my trajectory later in my career, had no programming. One was a sequence of classes about logic and set theory, the other distributed computing. The latter in particular has come up again and again and again as a blind spot for coworkers, many of whom did finish their degree or even a masters.

I got much more vocational coding in than the vast majority of my classmates before I dropped out, and not all of the theoretical stuff has been applicable. But what was has been invaluable.

No.

That is because regular, and failing(even fatal failure) often is just how nearly everyones life works.

You win by first learning where you are going to die, and not going there.

Most college dropouts fail. You are better off finishing school.

The world is full of “rules” that the best among us break. There is no progress from following exactly the path of people before you, but the world also has little capacity for people who break too many rules.

You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.

>You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.

This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.

There’s definitely value in being able to steel-man the opposing view and then dismantle it anyway. For one it can mean sending fewer people to meetings if you can trust a person to present your side fairly even if they disagree. If an I Told You So moment comes later they are still on record as dissenting. Which is enough for some people.

>>Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.

The adult equivalent of this to quit your comfortable paying jobs to do a start-up. Fail bad, and realise you are landed way behind people with 9-5 jobs.

Most of the times- "Do this scary thing and win" requires lots of luck going for you. In fact it can be attributed luck alone in nearly all cases.

The problem is people think if they work hard enough that chances will be in their favor. That's rarely, if ever the case.

By and large. Study well, get a job, save, invest, tend to your health and relationships. Just do the well set formula. You can't go wrong here.

I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do, and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of outcome.

I should have stated explicitly that the fallacy was selection bias. I agree with what you wrote though.

You would expect there to be lot more people making their living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the end those making reasonable living is small fraction...

Especially when we are talking pre-20th century. Child labor was the norm outside of wealthy families. It was more remarkable not to have a job at a young age than it was to have one.

And staying in school through college is a great way to be in debt for the rest of your life and regret having a useless degree.

So true.. we need to make college ultra low cost, accessible to all, AND useful

We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.

It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.

If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.

Society (and parents) still should have some responsibility on educating young people about career prospects of different degrees. Too many in older generations think any degree will land their children a job, and thus encourage them to study whatever they like.

I think school system is hugely failing students if they are not instructed and then capable of spending one or two afternoons on simply googling and looking at career prospects and what different jobs actually might entail. And then at least with minimal criticality thinking is that for them.

I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some information on with rather simple searches.

This belief that "a degree, any degree" is sufficient must have started after I went to University (mid-90s), because when I was a teenager, it was drilled into us that we need to not only go to University, but we need to major in something lucrative. Nobody, from parents to guidance counsellors, was saying "Oh, just go to college and major in anything, it doesn't matter!"

The younger generation that grew up with Google never think to google "starting salary for [my] major"? They need to be coached to do it?

Try it. Gott im Himmel!

> It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.

Agreed.

> If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.

Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.

A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake worth updating the educational system to handle better.

And as an objective practical matter, it is always on society. Society systematically loses masses of individual potential by not providing more guidance when it matters. (And perversely turning education into an easy loan factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of good guidance.)

I picked my major entirely on my own. My parents didn't advise me about it, nor did the school.

I have been known to advise young people that their intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and they all insisted they were following their dream, and are now working at minimum wage jobs.

I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who discover after they graduate that their chosen major has no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never checking such things? Google "starting salary for history majors", for example.

At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and the other degree for money.

I would assume that students getting into competitive schools were more informed (whether or not that resulted in a good decision).

> I don't have a whole lot of sympathy

It is a big objective problem, for the students and society. So even without feelings, some kind of incentives need to be better aligned with reality.

Limiting student loan repayment terms, with a limited percentage of student income recoverable to banks, would certainly incentivize banks not to help students get in trouble.

Telling basket weaving majors that they are welcome to do it for love, but to expect to be paying for the degree themselves up front, or with an ongoing job, represents the desired outcome, in simplified terms.

It's a lot easier today with google to be informed than in my day. All the information needed is a couple of searches away.

In any case, and I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices, and time to stop saying your choices are other peoples' fault.

> I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices

I don’t think that’s unpopular or the least bit controversial. Obvious, no?

But ending the story there isn’t productive. So perhaps it is not a popular reason to not consider other factors & improvements.

Individual lack of conscientiousness isn’t the only factor.

Students being handed loans, for whatever ill thought out career plan, with no immediate need for payback, facilitated by market warping government encouragement, schools whose incentive is obvious (they get most of that money), and banks who see students as easy marketing targets, is a systematic upfront incentive/road to the original ill thought out career plan, but now saddled with overwhelming debt.

Such a colossal amount of economically mismatched careers and debt that the topic is a regular subject of national politics.

There is an entire system of active influence, causality, conflicts of interest & responsibility there too.

So which undergrad majors do you propose Caltech abolishes? I can think of a couple with awful starting salaries.

As I mentioned before, there are no jobs for AY majors, even from Caltech. I don't suggest abolishing it. There were many AY majoring students, and they had open eyes about it. There wasn't any whining about it.

I think putting chemistry and biology in that box might be a little much too

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