The Lesson to Unlearn

> it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance

I am curious, is this about some particular kind of homework? From my own experience, I would think that exercising a subject alone (which is what most homework was in my school system at least) is a very good way of understanding it better. I of course remember not wanting to do homework many times, and I remember excessive or idiotic homework assignments, but overall homework seemed to be one of the major modes of learning for me.

Also, related to Gates, Page, Brin - I don't generally think that it's a good idea to look at a small number of very successful people and try to emulate some part of their life experience - you are, în general, very likely to fall for some kind of survivorship bias, or accidentally home in on a less important detail (for example, Gates was probably helped much more by his extremely wealthy and well-connected family than any particular aspect of his schooling).

On the other hand, there are many voices saying that one of the important purposes of the public education system is to engender conformity, which is very rarely conducive to a truly out of the ordinary life. Noam Chomsky would be one of the most credible, and he has often credited his own career to his non-standard early schooling.

I'm a non degree student at an ivy league and I took a course this semester because I wanted to learn the basic fundamentals of electrical engineering. Because I'm learning because I want to, I put in effort into things I find interesting and difficult without the pressure of deadlines and grades. I love grades because it gives me the feedback I need (otherwise I would "learn" from youtube videos and pdfs) to assess how well I know the subject.

I can take breaks from truly hard problems until I have enough clarity of mind to approach the problem with a new perspective. I can't do that with a deadline.

I don't care if the answers "are out there" meaning the professor has returned graded tests and posted the answers; I do the work because I want to learn. That paradox of students wanting to review graded homeworks and students who want to learn by doing the homework is resolved practically by those that are more vocal about their wants.

I'm happy to take my time, doing my best (with the understanding that my best takes time) and observing my grade afterwards. Sometimes my learning takes me down paths that harder and more rewarding with the consequence that I take longer than others: I am a slow learner.

Good grades = Passing well paying jobs resume filter = startup initial capital for 90% of the population without access to the bank of mom and dad or a large inheritance.

PG starting to lose touch with regular joe.

To use a fun analogy, the teachers write the unit tests and you pass them by writing a mock or fake implementation of knowledge.

edit: and now I got to a point in the article where that's pretty much already said. Well, too late to delete this comment now.

I love Paul Graham's articles, but isn't this Goodhart's Law but with more words? (When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure)