oh and by the way, what should be the policy on inheritances?? those are a direct transfer of power/resources between generations which can just easily be seen as unfair advantages.
After Credentials
111–120 of 209 posts
Re: After Credentials
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.
I think it's actually Nobel Prizes per alumnus, i.e., it includes advanced degree-holders as well. (See http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/about/notable , which states that "Caltech has over 20,000 living alumni—of whom 17 are Nobel Prize-winning scientists", and goes on to list lots of notable Caltech Ph.D. alumni.) So the graduate admissions committees are apparently doing a good job, too (though clearly they screwe…
I've heard two different figures for Caltech. The 17 figure I read on Steve Hsu's blog; presumably he has the same source as you, although I assumed he was referring to undergrad only. That assumption seems to have been a mistake. The reason I made the assumption is that while I was a postdoc, one of the oncampus papers ran an article that set the number at 27, if I recall correctly, roughly equally split between undergrad and grad. In either case they're a long way ahead of other US Schools.
Re: After Credentials
#113Ask someone who works at Google if there was ever a time when in the company's history when a Stanford or Berkeley degree wasn't a major advantage in the hiring process. Even at a small startup, you're probably going to have more faith in an unknown from Stanford than an unknown from Western Kentucky U. Paul's essay is interesting, but I don't think any of recent academic / sociological studies would confirm his conc…
"Ask someone who works at Google if there was ever a time when in the company's history when a Stanford or Berkeley degree wasn't a major advantage in the hiring process."
All my info is based on what they said (and hence somewhat unreliable), but the factors cited in my case were my startup experience, the interview feedback, and the fact that my skillset happened to fit what they're looking for at this point in time. I also have an Amherst degree, so I can't rule it out as a factor, but nobody once mentioned it. And my GPA sucked, so it certainly couldn't have been all academic.
Re: After Credentials
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this sentiment entirely. I went to a public magnet high school with SAT scores averaging around 1480 and at least half our graduating class every year ends up in an ivy / mit / stanford. I'd say more than half of those who made it to the top tier got in from legacy / extracurriculars / obsessive dedication to good grades and making teachers happy as opposed to genuine intelligence and love of learning. A…
"This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering." That's not the case as I've witnessed it. I won't directly name names, but I am thinking about a school that is ranked number 4 for graduate engineering on U.S. News.
U.S. News has a fairly broken ranking system. I think they try and set things up so schools jump around with little rime or reason so people will buy this years ranking vs just reading last years. I mean if if my school will rise and fall 5-10 points while I am their why try and give a number just list those that make the cut.
Re: After Credentials
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 senten…
Reddit's a unique case because their initial user base (like News.YC's) consisted of other YC founders. And since they couldn't afford any form of promotion that cost money, news of the site spread mainly from those users.
And other followers of your essays, and people who got rejected from YC that first time. I checked out Reddit at first because I was curious what the folks who did get in were up to. And they happened to have built something cool, so I told a lot of my friends and family, and who knows who else they told.
I think it's a fairly good bet that Reddit did a lot better with their initial group of users being seeded from folks who'd heard of you or followed comp.lang.lisp, than if they tried to launch something among their UVa friends.
Re: After Credentials
#116I 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 1…
Applications to top schools are extremely competitive; I could easily see 50 SAT points making or breaking an application. I was under the impression that these days your application has to be more or less perfect to even have a chance to get into an Ivy League school, unless you're a legacy or a URM.
Amherst isn't quite Ivy League, but I had a bunch of friends there with SATs in the 1400s, or even the high 1300s. I believe the median (from stats, not from friends) is about 1460.
It was fairly scary how many of my friends had 1590s or 1600s, though.
Re: After Credentials
#117Paul 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…
How would you run a cram school for YC? Say you were given 19 yr olds at the end of Year 1 of Uni. You have 2-3 years part time. How would you get them in? Activities? Interview coaching? Resume building? Portfolio building? Specialised learning?
If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively have the ability and motivation build things people want as measured in users and sales...
...then a cram school for YC would be a program much like YC in which younger teams built smaller, more easily guided technology start-ups.
Re: After Credentials
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you run a cram school for YC? Say you were given 19 yr olds at the end of Year 1 of Uni. You have 2-3 years part time. How would you get them in? Activities? Interview coaching? Resume building? Portfolio building? Specialised learning?
I'd probably build their social network: connect them to hundreds of influential sources of free marketing. If you're judging performance, the initial performance of a connected founder will greatly exceed an unconnected one. If you don't wait long enough to watch market effects take over before judging which startups to keep, you'll only end up with the networked ones.
Not sure about gaming YC, but that might be a trick for gaming performance measurements.
Re: After Credentials
#119Could also be because of increasing specialization. When my parents' generation was going to work, the sort of things you'd actually do might include serving beverages on a plane, assembling cars, or shuffling papers around. There's not much room for differentiation in these jobs: you either do them well or you don't do them, without many gradations in between. So the only way to "prove" that you had qualified, top-notch employees was to use their degree as a substitute for their competency.
A similar effect occurs in the financial and management consulting industries today, two of the most degree-conscious industries. It's nearly impossible to measure performance in these industries, because the results of an individual's work don't become apparent until 5-10 years later, and there are a whole host of confounding factors. Did the money manager get rich because he was good, or did he get rich because he was lucky?
Re: After Credentials
#120The left likes credentials? The right doesn't like intergenerational transmission of income? These aren't any left or right I recognize. Who is PG thinking of?
I didn't say either of these things. I said that the left has to fall back on credentials (the wording of which implies they don't like them). And while the right may not like estate taxes, I don't think anyone on the right (unless there are any ancien regime fans left) favors the use of that wealth to buy position. At most they'd probably concede the possibility is an unfortunate consequence of not taxing people twi…
Using the left/right abstraction is really silly. It's a broken, continually redefined buzzword concept that is too simple... so don't bother with it.