What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
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What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
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Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#2Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out mythos a little too much.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#3It's kind of a big claim, that the most important thing that people got from Thiel Fellowship was the network. If that's really and truly the case, then how is this different from the universities of old?
I don't mean that as a challenge. I really do mean to pick it apart. You can argue that this one is more meritocratic. It's also blatantly clear that it had an admissions committee of one.
Edit: And as someone else pointed out, you don't get the hard skills training that you get in university.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#4You have to think who says a 15 year old can't do Advanced Physics, Run a Corporation, Perform Some Surgery. There are definitely works for which hours of experience are necessary, but for most of the things we do today perhaps age is really not a factor.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#5> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure.
I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself.
But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college?
I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's not. Not here.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#6The network is what really matters: you go from someone who knows professors and peers to someone who knows Peter Thiel and his peers.
I'm sure there is some meritocracy involved too, but I'm willing to bet that as a Thiel Fellow, you would learn faster than a university would allow (school of hard knocks?), while still accomplishing less than a more experienced entrepreneur. Experience matters, and being a Thiel Fellow is just a riskier but potentially faster way of acquiring it.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#7Brilliant technical minds denied the opportunity to gain awareness of the world through liberal arts exposure, are that much more easily pushed into working towards essentially sociopathic endeavors (like making it easier to sue media outlets wealthy people don't like out of existence).
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#8Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out mythos a little too much.
Right, you don't need much education to successfully run a company and make shitloads of money from it, but you do need education (a lot, in fact) if you want to truly advance science or society.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#9Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out mythos a little too much.
I don't think Thiel would disagree. He is talking about things that are not hard science/engineering.
Just because you need to educate yourself you don't need an education.
Re: What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
#10> Abraham dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to run Milo, which sold to Amazon by the time he was 25.
Milo was sold to eBay, not Amazon.