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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#171

Post by Prrometheus »

illumen wrote: post #120
pg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's true. There are certain ideologies that travel together, whose fortunes tend to wax and wane together. If you told me an ideology (say, environmentalism or unionism), then I could easily tell you whether it was on the right or left (in this case, both left).

There are exceptions in practice, but to say the labels are meaningless is silly.

Re: After Credentials

#172

Post by blasdel »

miked wrote: post #140
jpcx01 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give an immediate example. The left wholeheartedly supports Teacher Unions who are fundamentally opposed to merit pay, prefering seniority and tenure.

And in Missouri at least, teachers' unions have made it so that any teacher, no matter how bad, can get a raise just by getting a master's degree or a PhD.

MiT and D.Ed. degrees are almost completely worthless (even worse than MBAs) largely as a result of such programs.

I had several teachers in the DC public schools who were considerably worse after getting graduate degrees. They weren't remotely clever to begin with, and having faddish pedagogy drilled into them didn't help at all.

Re: After Credentials

#173

Post by blasdel »

dougp wrote: post #168
strlen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paris Hilton is a bad example she makes like 200 million a year. Perfume sales at Target, clothing lines, etc.

And she didn't inherit any money, just status.

Re: After Credentials

#175

Post by DaniFong »

russell wrote: post #121

It's an interesting essay, but just to be argumentative, I think it takes the wrong path to the conclusion. I posit that South Korea has only one highly regarded university or some other suitably small number. Maybe it's the University of Seoul. If you get into U of S, you are a superior being, you get the choice government jobs, you get to be the department head, you get the industrial fast track. If you don't get i…

I like the notion of 'reputons' but might I suggest a different word, 'reps', or perhaps 'props'?

Re: After Credentials

#176

Post by bd »

DaniFong wrote: post #165
jedc wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, one issue from the SHJT list is that they weight more recent awards more heavily. Cambridge was a preeminent force in science and engineering in the earliest half of the century, but seems now to have diminished somewhat relative to others.

Here is a list of the Nobel Laureates per university straight from the source (based on affiliation at the time of the Nobel Prize announcement):

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html

Wikipedia has another list based on what universities claim themselves:

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

So while Caltech is doing very well indeed, there are 15 universities with more affiliated awardees.

Re: After Credentials

#177

Post by kops »

I tend to agree. But I also think that people who are cunning enough to beat the system are then usually good enough to perform at a job as well provided the right kind of carrot is being shown. A very similar stinking system exists in India where a future of a kid is sort of nailed right after high school. But invariably the guys who crack the engineering entrance were cracking the civil service exam at the end of their graduation. Funny thing is that now a management course is values better than civil services, so again best of our engineers (in terms of resume) are sweeping the top MBA seats. So probably though it is some cram exam or something similar but it seems to get you some intelligent people who are capable of chasing anything. But that's true only for the top layer. Average ivy league student is mobbed big time in the industry by smart kids from unknown colleges. At least half the programmers I admire come from useless colleges.

Re: After Credentials

#178

Post by rms »

DaniFong wrote: post #175
russell wrote: post #121

It's an interesting essay, but just to be argumentative, I think it takes the wrong path to the conclusion. I posit that South Korea has only one highly regarded university or some other suitably small number. Maybe it's the University of Seoul. If you get into U of S, you are a superior being, you get the choice government jobs, you get to be the department head, you get the industrial fast track. If you don't get i…

I like the notion of 'reputons' but might I suggest a different word, 'reps', or perhaps 'props'?

Karma? Guānxi?

Re: After Credentials

#179

Post by dsimard »

retyred wrote: post #21
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…

this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...…

Retyred is on to something here. Outside of web startups I think the trend may have actually gone the opposite way over the past 20 years or so. Companies are getting bigger, not smaller. Here are a few:

Retail: just went through a mass-consolidation. The more dynamic firms, the "places to be" if you wanted to do something interesting in retail, were the ones doing the consolidating. Think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, Walgreens, Best-Buy etc... While it may not be interesting to the crowd here, innovation in things like supply-chain has been stunning.

Consumer Goods: P&G has been unstoppable, and that's where most people in that business want to go because that's where the interesting things were happening.

Consumer Electronics: Dell, Apple, Sony etc... have crushed everyone.

Banking: Ditto. Where did all the ambitious young financial engineers want to go? Easy: Goldman-Sachs. Not that innovation here was a good thing... but that's another story.

Agriculture: ADM, Monsanto and the agri-business giants have almost completely taken over. Small farms are near-extinct.

This list could go on for a while, but I'll stop. I think you see a similar winner-take-all pattern playing out in most industries. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of all this: the percentages of people employed by institutions of different sizes.

Perhaps pg is right that it's starting to happen though. Maybe the web world is at the vanguard of what will be a broad counter-trend. I suspect that won't be as strong a force as he thinks though - the advantages of being big are still too great in too many fields.

Then again, maybe the mass-consolidation was artificial. Maybe all the M&As owe as much to artificially cheap money as to natural advantages of scale. I guess we'll see.

Re: After Credentials

#180

Post by pg »

netcan wrote: post #84
alexandros wrote: post #15

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…

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?

That's a very interesting question. Above all I'd have them build things. We like anyone who's created an open-source project we've heard of, for example.

I'd also try to get them jobs at existing YC startups. Then they'd both learn how startups work, and (if they were good) get recommendations from people we know.

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