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Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

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Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#51

Post by chernevik »

dpeck wrote: post #16
larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

I don't understand it either. I got by undergrad at a top 10 (or top 5 depending on the rankings) CS program, and while it whipped my ass I loved it. The freedom to think/learn/and dig into problems, late nights figuring out projects, scheduling in time for binge drinking that crazy semester I took 4 senior level CS courses and pulled a 3.5, I look back on all of it quite happily for its part in making me who I am. I…

That's because you had (presumably) well-thought out rigor.

Over in the humanities, the faculty gave up on / let themselves get chased off the Great Books about two decades ago, what they're left with isn't much fun. The social sciences mustn't come up with the Wrong Answers, or else. And the whole notion of merit and quality is sort of suspect in those disciplines, so the joys and terrors of seeking excellence are heavily obscured.

So, yeah, those programs are a lot less exciting than they should be.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#53

Post by sidww2 »

pnathan wrote: post #40
sidww2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive." Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. While universities have quite a few problems, universit…

> In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. That's a standard technical person bias. I'm betting that its not true on average, that a good philosopher, businessperson, or history student is equally smart, but it's not as discernible due to the falsifiable nature of technical work.

> That's a standard technical person bias.

First of all - I wouldn't count being a businessperson as liberal arts.

One way you can look at it is how many people drop out of technical subjects because they find them too hard to move to humanities and liberal arts vs. the opposite. Anecdotally, for me the former number has been much larger. The latter number has been 0.

Similarly, I've had many technical friends who took liberal arts courses and generally did very well in them. I also have many liberal arts friends who took technical courses and did not do well in them. In addition, the technical people I've met have been much much more hard-working than liberal arts people. (An exception I'd make is creative arts - people I've encountered in that field have generally been extremely hard-working. Also no one I've met has moved from say math to music because they found math too hard.)

Now it might just be because liberal arts people just don't like the technical subject matter on average as much as technical people like the liberal arts subject matter. But even if that's true, one is then right to choose technical people over liberal arts people.

Lastly, I also know liberal arts majors who are smarter than many technical folk I've encountered but I'm talking about the general trend here.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#54

Post by jriddycuz »

larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

I hated college.

I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now.

I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#55

Post by tdfx »

breckinloggins wrote: post #46
AmericanOP wrote: post #39

I keep hearing how difficult it is to build a standalone email client which integrates with gmail. Does anybody have a link to any good discussions for why it's so hard?

- There is no "gmail" API. It either looks like imap/smtp to your app, or pop3/smtp. - POP3 is completely braindead, so moving on... - Imap doesn't natively expose many gmail features. imap doesn't know about "Archiving" and "Labelling", so you have to map those to things like deleting and folders. There's an impedance mismatch. - Exposing a search interface with all the functionality and responsiveness of the web ap…

Making/receiving calls in Gmail is the reason I stick with the web client. I don't actually use the chat much, but I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Google Voice's integration with Gmail.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#56

Post by chernevik »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

A nitpick: don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus. “there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”. I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans, not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found t…

If you build a warp drive to reach the unicorn herds of Rigel, will it matter if you discover Rigel doesn't have any unicorns?

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#57

Post by 2pasc »

AmericanOP wrote: post #48
larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

IMO, the two problems with universities are: 1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information. 2) College needs to have a more h…

Regarding 2/ In France, most good universities/schools have a high school approach to teaching students. The problem of the high school model is that it was already debilitating in high school... and it does not make it more fun in college. For having studied in both US and FR systems, I can tell you that I was more excited about working on my own or in teams and doing homework when I was in the US than feeling I was in HS again in France or elsewhere.

Freedom and ability to explore is actually THE main advantage of the US college system.

Now slackers will remain slackers whatever "platform" you put in front of them...

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#58

Post by philwelch »

kenrikm wrote: post #38
bluekeybox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Yes.

I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.

A lot of that is in spite of the university and not because of it. But even a mediocre university will provide more resources than you might find without it.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#59

Post by hallnoates »

hallnoates wrote: post #17

> dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). don’t worry about doing something constraining in the short term, because if you don’t succeed in the short term there won’t be a long term Umm, search is just fine thank you. I could not survive without Google currently. The only thing I don't like about them is the lack of good customer support and the way they tend to develop unintuitive…

To those that are -1'ing me- I think that PG appreciates dissenting opinion. If you are going to -1, at least provide a rebuttal. I just disagreed with him.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#60

Post by imaginaryunit »

larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

What I get from pg's comment is how the research experience has become less fun across the board in the last few decades (I'm focusing on post-graduate research, but a case could be made for undergrad research too). There are many reasons why this has happened, but the major outcomes are that:

-Publication pressure makes it such that research progress has become significantly harder to gauge (e.g.: it's become uncommon for results to get reproduced) across many fields (statistics, machine learning, the health sciences, which I've done work in for over 7 years at a highly respected institution)

-Balkanization of research fields where problems become increasingly exotic and narrowly focused to the point of being contrived (all the better for publishing papers of course)

-Increased difficulties in securing research funding or employment (more temp jobs though);

-Arbitrary metrics often being used to judge one's work. Example: if you do theoretical work, reviewers can reject your paper for lack of "applications"; if you do applied work, they can reject for "lack of theoretical depth" (what either of these terms mean in 90% of cases is arbitraily defined by a single reviewer who just wanted to torpedo your work).

-In some fields, entire mafia groups have formed that rigidly control the review process for that field, which means good luck to you if your work competes with theirs and you're submitting a paper/applying for grants

-Lack of accountability as to how research dollars are spent (vis-a-vis the public's interests)

-...

BTW, I say the above as someone who did a lot of enjoyable open-ended research as a grad student.

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