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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#141

Post by hs »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #82
mthg wrote: post #51

Earlier 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.

i was one of them

Re: After Credentials

#142

Post by jedc »

DaniFong wrote: post #73
aswanson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you controlling for those not admitted that went to similar caliber schools, or have an example of how that statistic compares to those schools with a similar quality applicant pool?

You can show fairly quickly that the success of Caltech alumni in sciences, as measured by awards, is comparable only to the École Normale Supérieure (and possibly Phystech in Russia depending on how you count). Check out http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A (EN).htm The column 'Alumni' compares the number of Nobel prizes or Fields Medals won by Alumni to the number won by Harvard (in percent). Caltech scores 52.8…

Even more successful would be Cambridge University. 83 Nobel Prize winners in total. (31 Nobels from Trinity College, Cambridge alone!) http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/nobelprize.html

That said, Cambridge is a far bigger University than Caltech and others, but a large proportion of those degrees are awarded in non-science fields.

Re: After Credentials

#143

Post by miked »

DThrasher wrote: post #50

One important factor Paul left out was the ability to terminate bad employees. If an organization can't get rid of poor performers at reasonable cost, due to restrictive labor contracts or tenure for example, the organization will have to put much more effort into screening candidates.

The usefulness of measuring depends on how actionable the measurements are. I think this is one of the big reasons that the startup culture in Europe has never really developed. In most European countries (and US government agencies) it's almost impossible to fire someone after a short probationary period. This distorts labor markets so badly that even left-leaning labor economists (e.g., Brad DeLong) have sharply criticized European labor laws.

This brings up an interesting sorting issue. If it's easy for people to be terminated and/or quit (because they know that there are other jobs, available in part because other employees have been fired or quit), there should, over time, be an improvement in the matching between employees and jobs. This should lead to higher productivity as well, not to mention greater job satisfaction.

Re: After Credentials

#144

Post by dhimes »

strlen wrote: post #129
dhimes wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if anything it seems to screw them up That's why it's dangerous :) Buffet has it right: leave them enough so that they can do anything, but not enough so that they can do nothing.

It's dangerous, but not to society as a whole. I.e. Paris Hilton has the money that she uses for hedonistic purposes, but she won't be put into a position of power.

I'm assuming that you mean national power. Plenty inherit the family business and/or money and wield local power.

In formulating my reply, I think I came around to the other point of view. Bad things can happen, but inherited money is probably a minor enabler in this, and just the opposite can happen as well (inherited money can do much good).

Re: After Credentials

#145

Post by jmtame »

I see a lot of discussion about YC, but I don't think this has much to do with YC as much as it does with the market in general. The two really important things I took away from this were:

1) Instead of trying to make credentials harder to hack, we can also make them matter less.

> Comment: I think this is a general statement being made, correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't think this was a "At YC, we can make credentials matter less." I see this happening at the successful startups. They no longer say "B.S. in C.S. required" they say it's "optional, or equivalent experience." I would say that is brilliant.

2) Now we seem to be entering a new era based on measurement.

> Comment: I would agree 100%, and I'm glad you used the example of East Asian culture. There was a lot of turmoil, but one of the biggest things was feudalistic societies. If you haven't read the Biography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, I would highly recommend it (especially if you're an entrepreneur). His father hated Japan because it was feudalistic, so where he exerted the most effort and was far more intelligent than his superiors, he never moved up. Your position in society was not driven by merit, it was essentially determined by your family and birth. That frustrated a lot of the people who were very smart, even though they lacked "credentials" of going to a nice school because they couldn't afford it (or taking the Civil Service Exams for the same reason).

Re: After Credentials

#146

Post by JimCooper »

And how are you supposed to measure performance? Many jobs are just not susceptible to doing that. It is well known in the software industry that attempts to measure programming performance result in programmers skewing their efforts in order to make the metrics look better. Teachers in the UK are measured on students' grades, so for some totally unrelated reason , students grades have gotten better every year for the last 20 years.

Proven ability to do your job is one thing; measuring your individual performance whilst doing it is another thing altogether.

Re: After Credentials

#147

Post by kailashbadu »

A good school doesn’t just give you a degree. It’s the whole experience that makes it worth going to a great school. A reputed school does a very good job at bringing smart people together. You get to network with future CEOs, innovators, and innovators. And when you spend a few years with a bunch of other smart people around you, some of it rubs off on you and you become smarter.

Re: After Credentials

#148

Post by kailashbadu »

Moreover, a great school doesn’t produce great minds out of a dumb soul. Rather the people who attend these schools are already smart to begin with. Just as birds of a feather flock together they decided to go to the same few elite schools. The successful people who are alumnus of Ivy Leagues would still have been just as much smart had they attended a nondescript school. Likewise, a not-so-smart person wouldn’t go very far even if he made it through (somehow) to a great school.

Re: After Credentials

#149

Post by Tangurena »

kingkongrevenge wrote: post #101

Credentialism and Mandaranism are artifacts of state dominated societies. It's really that simple. Free market economies feature so much creative destruction that power has little chance of persisting across generations. Only in a system lacking Darwinian market selection mechanisms do credentials become so critical. Credentialism emerged in China because the Chinese state was always much more powerful than the Europ…

Inheritance taxes eliminate the persistance across generations of power and wealth. However, since the bush administration chose to repeal estate taxes, they intended to return the US to the sort of nation with a hereditary aristocracy.

In IT, we saw the problems with "credentialism" in the problems with "boot camps" and the "paper engineers" who came out with CNE/MCSE credentials who also were basically useless.

Re: After Credentials

#150

Post by aswanson »

kingkongrevenge wrote: post #101

Credentialism and Mandaranism are artifacts of state dominated societies. It's really that simple. Free market economies feature so much creative destruction that power has little chance of persisting across generations. Only in a system lacking Darwinian market selection mechanisms do credentials become so critical. Credentialism emerged in China because the Chinese state was always much more powerful than the Europ…

Or finance-Wall Street. Maybe not, as the vast idiocy taking place there has been exposed recently. But memories are short.
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