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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#311

Post by GCA10 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #294
rglullis wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the people aren't motivated, any standardized measure will miss the mark Shouldn't that be a sign that trying to come up with standardized measures is a fool's errand? Short of blatant social engineering, I don't see how we can have a system that could improve people's motivation and drive for education. And if we don't have a way to actually change human nature, why do we keep trying to design this system that…

It's a trust issue. It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend. We could give more autonomy to individual schools or teachers in terms of designing tests, but then we'd be facing two problems. One, the grades given by different schools/teachers would not be directly comparable. An A in one school could be awarded only for exceptional circumstances, and in another jus…

The Big Four accounting firms pay huge attention to college grades and it works well for them. Ditto law firms. And in those fields, the mechanical pursuit of grades -- independent of actual knowledge -- models the actual demands of the job pretty well.

Accounting and law firms are looking for people with the stamina and single-minded goal focus to get document-creation tasks done, one after another, to a high degree of "skill." Getting an A on the test and preparing an SEC-compliant bond prospectus are close cousins of each other.

In fields where real-world mastery doesn't have much to do with the orderly routines of getting a 97 on the midterm, employers are less likely to hunt for people who got 97s on the midterm. (John Steinbeck stumbled around Stanford for six years and never graduated. But he got more accomplished as a writer than a whole decade worth of creative-writing majors with high GPAs.)

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#312

Post by Thriptic »

prox wrote: post #34
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…

I remember this history teacher who was a breath of fresh air. He told us in advance his test where very simple. And the reason was quite genius: if you just listened and took a few notes here and there, you’d pass the test. Which freed the mind to really absorb the knowledge and have fun with the subject matter. He was also very good in discerning knowledge and teaching why a certain topic was good to know. I think…

I had a software security class that was taught in effectively the same way. The professor knew they had to give grades so they just set it up such that the midterm and final accounted for the bulk of the grade and made them really easy. This ensured that almost all students would get at least a B using conventional brute Force studying methods. This removed all of the traditional grade optimizing pressures. He then made the homeworks and labs quite difficult and made them require a lot of independent research so that you could be free to try hard and potentially fall short without fear of getting owned. You would basically get out of the class what you put in. It has so far been my favorite class in my program, the one I learned the most from, and one of the most empowering classes I've taken.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#313

Post by neltnerb »

Zelphyr wrote: post #217
stavros wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is literally all of open source software. The problem here is that you're waiting for an entrepreneur to say this, which is the wrong kind of person to expect this from.

> The problem here is that you're waiting for an entrepreneur to say this, which is the wrong kind of person to expect this from. I agree and can’t help but wonder if this is why we’re seeing more and more developers trying to make money from their Open Source projects.

Is it not because rent keeps going up while "entrepreneurs" use their work with minimal attribution and certainly no financial contribution to get rich? The same "entrepreneurs" who then act entitled to free support from the same developer struggling to pay the rent?

I think they're really just trying to solve the problem of "how do I afford to eat while still supporting software used by Facebook to make billions of dollars"?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#314

Post by johnrob »

pavlov wrote: post #240

The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…

As PG implies, the work environment at big companies consists of more hackable tests - so (ironically) that type of interview might be a proper test.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#315

Post by lostcolony »

hooande wrote: post #106

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…

This was my immediate objection as well. School, as it stands, was actually -incredibly- useful to me. Because it taught me that the stated objectives of a person, organization, etc, are often lies, and that the trick is to learn the real objectives, and optimize accordingly. Between classes that actually taught me the material, classes that expected me to learn the material without teaching it to me (but still expected me to complete relevant projects that required understanding), and classes that required me to learn completely separate things (i.e., yes, physics class, where the taught material, homework material, and tested material, were all ENTIRELY DISTINCT FROM EACH OTHER, and so I had to learn to navigate that and reach out for help from TAs and past students and etc), I feel like I got a more complete education in how the world works.

That's not to say "hack the system", but it is to say look deeper. There's value in learning. There's value in the stated objectives; after all, there's a reason they're being called out. But there often are unstated, important systems and objectives to understand and address, too.

I'd love this dream world PG describes where everything aligns, the stated priorities are the only ones, and the systems and cultures and tests optimize only for them. But that's not the world we live in.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#316

Post by knzhou »

GCA10 wrote: post #300
taeric wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amusing how many of my peers still hold to the notion that heavier things fall faster. Not a higher terminal velocity, but the intuition that they accelerate faster. Hilariously tough for folks to shake.

Add air resistance into the mix, and denser materials do fall faster. Coins vs. napkins. Plums vs. crumpled balls of paper I'd actually take the lesson the other way. It's hilariously tough for model-makers to acknowledge real-world noise that prevents their theoretically precise models from delivering reliable results.

This is exactly why making more FCI-style questions is so hard. They shouldn't be sensitive to things like air resistance -- a question whose answer is completely changed by realistic air resistance isn't a very good one.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#317

Post by isidor3 »

taeric wrote: post #291
knzhou wrote: post #264

As somebody who has designed some of the tests Paul Graham is complaining about, it really is hard from the other side! For example, it's long been known in the physics education research community that students come away from introductory courses with very little physical understanding, even if they can do the plug and chug problems on typical tests just fine. Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediat…

It is amusing how many of my peers still hold to the notion that heavier things fall faster. Not a higher terminal velocity, but the intuition that they accelerate faster. Hilariously tough for folks to shake.

Heavier things do gain kinetic energy faster when falling, it's easy enough to confuse "being hard to stop" with "moving fast." Intuitively, the heavier object has "more" of something but in casual conversation "kinetic energy" isn't a common or familiar term. If you haven't studied enough physics to reach for that concept, I'm not surprised a lot of people just settle on "faster" when attempting to describe it.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#318

Post by bmahmood »

Likely unpopular opinion here, but it seems a little unfair to fault YC founders for believing "that the way to win was to hack the test", when the YC application itself would seemingly select for founders that exhibit this behavior with questions like "When have you most successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage?"

I'd posit the YC application in and of itself shares some of the facets that the article is critiquing in a "test". The fact there are paid services popping up to review YC applications reminds me of SAT Prep services.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#319

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

burlesona wrote: post #253
pavlov wrote: post #240

The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…

Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…

it's a really simple problem honestly. Make a standardized test, but don't put an hour time limit on it. If you gave the exact same algorithm test with a 24-hour time limit vs. a 1-hour time limit then had a 1-hour interview explaining the solution to the problem you would be testing for something closer to programming acumen than memorization. I have no idea why tech companies find this so challenging.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#320

Post by rglullis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #294
rglullis wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the people aren't motivated, any standardized measure will miss the mark Shouldn't that be a sign that trying to come up with standardized measures is a fool's errand? Short of blatant social engineering, I don't see how we can have a system that could improve people's motivation and drive for education. And if we don't have a way to actually change human nature, why do we keep trying to design this system that…

It's a trust issue. It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend. We could give more autonomy to individual schools or teachers in terms of designing tests, but then we'd be facing two problems. One, the grades given by different schools/teachers would not be directly comparable. An A in one school could be awarded only for exceptional circumstances, and in another jus…

> It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend.

Are they really, or is just this elaborate illusion supported by most decision makers to give some rationalization to their own selection processes? When you have Harvard being sued for discriminating against Asians, how can we keep a straight face and tell the kids that they need to study hard because the grades matter?

I think this is part of what PG wants to defend in the essay: why do we actually care about grades at all?

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