The Lesson to Unlearn • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#101

Post by pyb » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #64

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #26

This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing. > And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades. > When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones,…

> This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing. I love reading his tweets! They're all so down to earth and illuminating. That said, I'm not a fan of his blog writing as much. I find it full of overly-sparse nuggets of wisdom. It needs to be more concise, to the point, with fewer clever metaphors. This article could've been compressed 70% and still have been human readable.

pg seems to have a backlog of essay ideas that he's catching up on. This is all good, but also means that they get written a bit too quickly. It's the classic "had I had more time to spend on this text, it would have been shorter" syndrome.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#102

Post by zamfi » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #90

I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…

> I'm waiting for the entrepreneur who will say he doesn't care how much money he makes or how many customers he has, only that it's worthwhile and needed doing.

Closest to this today might be Elon Musk, maybe...but there are other complexities there?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#103

Post by jtbayly » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #90

I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…

Every free (as in speech) program is written by somebody that said that. But they are generally not entrepreneurs.

The entrepreneur is by definition somebody that cares about money.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#104

Post by vezycash » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

>The real problem is that most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to

This is what happens when the teacher's hidden goal is to make marking/grading easier.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#105

Post by Rerarom » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

Yeah, but what you learned can be changed in the future (by learning more when you're in a more comfortable position), grades can't.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#106

Post by hooande » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

I know that learning how to hack systems is valuable because that's how I got into YCombinator. I set out specifically to hack the application process and succeeded. It wasn't even that difficult to do.

If pg believes what he's saying in this essay, I have two questions:

1. why did he design a testing system that was easily hacked?

2. why does YCombinator itself focus so much on hacking the venture capital system, as opposed to making great products? [1]

I think the answer to both is that the ideas presented in this essay don't scale. If you can't create a 200 person per year startup incubator that focuses on true learning instead of process hacking, then how could someone do it for a 20,000 person university? Things get boiled down to metrics like grades and valuations because they are the only way to measure/manage the productive output of a large number of people.

The insight that I've had is that as long as large civilizations and organizations exist, there will be easily hackable systems. There is a direct relationship between the number of humans involved in a thing, and the number of opportunities to hack that thing. Understanding and exploiting this seems like a valuable ability.

[1] I was personally struck by how much of YCombinator was (in 2008) oriented around learning what magic words to say to investors and exactly when to time techcrunch launch articles, etc. There seemed to be no time given to "how to make a great product", likely because this is something that can't be taught

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#107

Post by krosaen » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

I actually have found that, at least for math and science classes, focusing on learning was a less stressful way to do well on tests, even if cramming was potentially a workable way to get the grade too. The remaining problem is that often times the course load dictated that some classes had to be undertaken in hack mode.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#108

Post by sutterbomb » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

dkyc wrote: post #89

mattbee wrote: post #38

This spends too many words justifying the stale "real hacker" tradition of dunking on education, and kindof ignores the problem of how to measure something so subjective as learning. So people who are good at tests get ahead. We get that you're not interested in grades. We all know people who play the game and win, not sincerely engage with their job or education or whatever. But I'd like to hear from pg / other peop…

"Growth" in the YC definition ("revenue growth with positive unit economics", or the closest proxy to that) seems a pretty objective test to me.

They’re often selecting applicants before growth is a factor, no? Surely there are hacks to this process

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#109

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #41

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

> He hates homework (as do most kids) I just didn't do my homework and got bad grades. Luckily in my country you can always get in via standardized tests instead of grades so I did well in life anyway. I'm not sure why homework is weighed so heavily in grades, it mostly just shows how much free time the students are willing to sacrifice. The biggest cost this had for me was the guilt that I hadn't done what I was sup…

[deleted]

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#110

Post by friendlybus » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #103

ken wrote: post #90

I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…

Every free (as in speech) program is written by somebody that said that. But they are generally not entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is by definition somebody that cares about money.

Like Wozniak? Twitter launched without a business plan, Jack was on the Colbert Report in the 2000s saying he'll figure out how to monetize it eventually. I really question how much Uber cares about money recently...