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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#11

Post by davidw »

jbert wrote: post #9

If large organisations are less efficient: - why do they survive? - if they survive despite all, why do we permit them? If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment. Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local compe…

> why do they survive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

I would really like to see more analysis of what structural differences point towards the lots of smaller firms that pg sees, and whether this is a short blip in time, or a long term trend.

Also, I hate to dredge up that ugly topic "politics", but currently, in the US, if you or your firm fail, that's great in terms of opening up space for others to try, but a little scarier in personal terms, with regards to things like health care. Long term, who knows how things like that will play out.

Re: After Credentials

#12

Post by gruseom »

davidw wrote: post #6
edw519 wrote: post #5

One could easily amend this to include "After Perceptions". As a young geek, I was often passed over because I didn't look like I could do the job. It started with little league and continued on through high school and into the work place. I even quit one of my better jobs because a slicker looking but far less talented peer was promoted into what should have been my job. No more. As a mild mannered adult geek, I sti…

> until I open my mouth and show them On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron. The downside of this in Europe, for me, has been moving about 4 hours away (absolutely nothing in the US, in terms of distance) and completely losing this adv…

You'll have to start over. That's not such a bad thing. So, Italian before, what now?

It's good to still have a bit of an accent. I knew an American who had mastered Russian to the extent that he was indistinguishable from a native speaker. There were, however, glitches that would show up in his speech - an occasional wrong phrase or something. Because he spoke perfectly otherwise, Russians sometimes thought he was a dumb Russian. This made me realize that you want people to know you're a foreigner, just a foreigner who speaks amazing X.

I never spoke Russian as well as this fellow did (and most of it is now sitting freeze-dried in my brain somewhere), but there was one funny thing in my case. Much of what I learned came from reading, so sometimes I would speak Russian like a 19th century novel. This made my friends laugh, but they also liked it - Russians are big on literacy.

Edit: your core point is quite right, and is easy to verify by the impression it makes when you meet a non-native speaker who speaks excellent English.

Re: After Credentials

#13

Post by smanek »

I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points the SAT (relative to what they would have gained studying on their own). If memory serves, a standard deviation (on the old 1600 point test) was usually in the neighborhood of a 110 points.

Increasing your score by less than half a standard deviation was nice, but it rarely made or broke your college application.

Re: After Credentials

#14

Post by rw »

Paul said: History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

I am studying development policies and growth economics this year. His statement really doesn't count for the countries who have very little wealth to begin with. In fact, he needs to clarify that it is better for wealth to be passed through families, than for that wealth to be destroyed.

Re: After Credentials

#15

Post by alexandros »

Paul seems to be hitting on the optimization by proxy issues seen in many areas, even in pagerank. Google looks not for quality of a page but for indicators of that quality, namely inbound links by quality websites. Similarly exams and credentials do the same. If you can write about these books, you know literature. If you got a degree there, you must be very capable. And in the first generation it works.

However, as people become aware of the ranking mechanism, they try to get ahead by overoptimizing for the narrow areas inspected. So pages do linkfarms and black-hat SEO, students goto cram schools, etc. etc. essentially producing the exact opposite of what was initially sought. I believe Joel spolsky had a good article on a simillar pattern in sales.

The question is if an algorithm that affects its input data can be made so that it adapts to the changes and gradually reaches some kind of equilibrium with the input data or stabilizes in some other way. As paul suggests, one way would be to make the system more transparent, or even 'social' such that the participants have a way to update it in an agreed way. This would keep the minority from cheating on the majority.

Doing away with such filters though might be a bit harder than we think, especially given the breadth of their applications. As aristus commented, even YCombinator has an examination system. In fact it wouldnt be too hard to imagine cram schools for YC given enough incentive. I fear this is a problem we have to either solve or live with.

Re: After Credentials

#16

Post by retyred »

sadly i think college credentials in the US have lost their luster because its always a let-down. without a doubt there is only one school that i have never met a single retard from: caltech. cmu is a close second. every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies.

my attitude is that i do not care where you went to school. in an interview, if you ace the questions, why do i care if you went to ball state? so what, maybe that is all you could afford. on the other hand, if you can't answer my questions, why do i care if you went to stanford?

furthermore its likely that most people here do not know what the best colleges in korea, japan, china and india really are. so best to just skip the education section of the resume entirely

Re: After Credentials

#17

Post by llimllib »

jbert wrote: post #9

If large organisations are less efficient: - why do they survive? - if they survive despite all, why do we permit them? If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment. Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local compe…

> If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment.

I don't think either of the metrics you mention would solve the "too big to fail" phenomenon. The fact is that "too big to fail" is a misnomer, which has actually been used to represent the concept "too connected to fail".

I.e. it is not Bear's/AIG's pure size that prevents us from allowing them to fail, it's the connectedness that they have in our financial system, which depends on a web of millions of transactions per day between every large bank. Then, if a big bank were allowed to fail (not that I'm endorsing this theory), that would cause a cascade effect where banks started charging higher rates for those millions of transactions, which would cause less of them to happen, which would cause even higher rates, etc. etc., ending in a completely broken financial system where each bank wanted too much money for each of the many transactions they depend on to exist in their current form.

So, I don't think that limiting the size of companies in the financial sector would prevent the "too big to fail" phenomenon by itself. Which doesn't mean it's not a good idea; just that I think that particular example doesn't suport the idea that well.

(edit: and read Coase, like davidw's comment suggests :)

Re: After Credentials

#18

Post by pg »

cperciva wrote: post #8

PG claims that a shift towards smaller companies results in people being judged on their performance rather than based on factors which do rather poor jobs of predicting said performance; my experience with tarsnap indicates otherwise. I have a small number of customers -- somewhere between 10% and 20% -- who are using tarsnap based on a recommendation from another tarsnap user; but the vast majority of tarsnap users…

Initially the users of a new product will have random motivations. They can't all come from recommendations when you've only just launched. But a year from now the number of users you have will depend mainly on how good tarsnap is.

Re: After Credentials

#20

Post by byrneseyeview »

pg wrote: post #10
aristus wrote: post #4

I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those a startup quickly dies.

It would be interesting to see numbers on that. Informally, I noticed that back when reddit was good, anyone who was asked had either heard about it because it was YC-funded, or heard about it from someone who heard about it that way. I'm not certain, but I would probably bet that the submitters of, say "Man sentenced to NINETY THREE days in jail for taking 6 seconds to sit down! Outrageous!" or "Warrant Issued For Man Paying Fine With Pennies" didn't find out about it the same way.

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