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Paul Graham: News from the Front
61–70 of 128 posts
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#62When I was in college, I figured out that the education you get doesn't really change. However, what does change is the people that you are associating with. At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students, which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests that force you to challenge yourself. Also, it is like the difference between the regular classes in high school…
If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much as you think.
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything.
My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This essay posits that choice of college doesn't act as a success indicator when evaluating a pool of people. That's addressing a different question from whether choice of college acts as a success factor for individuals.
Uh oh. Actually the second half is about the latter. Is that not clear?
I read it as 23 paragraphs making strong statements about the former, and 3 paragraphs making weaker statements about the latter. But that's just me. Someone who sees college as a stamp of destiny would say you made a strong statement about the latter.
In general, I find myself a poor judge of what will or won't be clear to other people in a given essay; I read differently from most. I discover what did and didn't work in your essays from reading comments. I have a hard time extracting general communication principles from each essay's success or failure, because audiences differ. Still, I hope to learn something; writing is important.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#64I always wondered if boso getting into YC had anything to do with the founders having gone to Oxford.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much as you think.
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything. My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
[4] At the best colleges you learn more from other students than from your professors. You should be able to reproduce this at almost any college by making a conscious effort to find smart friends, instead of leaving it to chance.
I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#66ha, this is true. i go to rutgers for 4k/yr after a certain ithaca ivy wanted 43k/yr or whatever it was, so i get to keep a college fund's worth of seed money for whatever i do post-grad. and the "elite college" types i meet in the summers are no better-educated than me (and incidentally, drink a lot more...)
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#67I liked this article, if for the simple fact that it can only help my cause (I graduated, though not from a prestigious school)! The whole time I was going to school I was super impatient to get done so I could actually get working on something real. I was really just after the piece of paper they give you at the end (though I never attended my graduation to get that paper, and the original was sent to the wrong hous…
It's tempting to dismiss the experience gained at college as being not useful or applicable, but from my experience, there is generally a noticeable difference between those who learned all the fundamentals (e.g. college level math, physics, language theory), and those who are self taught. There are alot of really talented self-taught coders out there, but for the rest of us, the breadth of understanding from sloggin…
oh, I wasn't trying to say that school wasn't useful. I don't think you can argue that school is useful. I was just trying to say that I agreed with pg's point that it depends more on the person, rather than the school.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything. My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
[4] At the best colleges you learn more from other students than from your professors. You should be able to reproduce this at almost any college by making a conscious effort to find smart friends, instead of leaving it to chance. I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.
Ah. I guess being in the footnote made me think it was more of an offhanded comment than a major counterpoint to the premise of the essay. Perhaps in an edited version, this should get its own paragraph.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand on that? What kind of information?
We can tell which founders went to the same school. We can ask people who teach at or went to school x about applicants from there. If they went to a school we know about first hand, we can ask more specific questions about what they did in college. If they went to a big hacker school like MIT, we can suggest that they recruit friends and/or launch their beta there.
It also gives you the data you need to continue testing this theory.
Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much as you think.
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything. My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
I think I see what happened. When you read, "Colleges differ," you took "you wouldn't be missing much" as the context. This is largely due to "So it is with colleges."
Earlier, in "Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs" I think pg intended "a bit" to communicate that what he's saying about exclusive clubs is less true for colleges. Humans read differently from computers, and those two tiny words are easily lost. "So it is with colleges" dominates.