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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#341

Post by taeric »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #334
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.

There is a larger gravitational force on heavier things because they're heavier. Trouble is, they also have more inertia, which exactly counteracts the larger force (because of the principle of equivalence) and so they fall at the same acceleration as lighter objects.

That feels wrong.

You can say that two larger things attract each other more than smaller things. Especially as they get closer to each other. Catch, of course, is all things on the earth are in the noise range compared to, you know, the earth. If you are talking about gravity and acceleration on the earth, you are talking about 9.8 m/s^2. Pretty much period.

And yes, there are terminal velocities that impact maximum speed. Acceleration, though, is not velocity.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#342

Post by taeric »

isidor3 wrote: post #317
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.

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.

Yeah, and we have words for that. Momentum, is a good one.

I should clarify the last time I had this conversation, I'm talking about 40+ year olds building bikes. They were thinking a heavier bike would accelerate faster down a hill. That just is not how that works.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#343

Post by rglullis »

knzhou wrote: post #307
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…

We have to try, because the alternative to standardized testing isn't some egalitarian utopia, it's nepotism.

Wait, what?! Why?!

I am not asking for any utopia. What I am asking is "Instead of setting ourselves for failure every time coming up with some scheme for testing performance, why can't we just use actual performance on the activity that we want to evaluate candidates"?

It works for people in sports. It works for trade professions. It works for traders. It works for performers, entertainers, even entrepreneurs.

Why can't we have an educational system that does not put people on tracks to mold them and instead just coach them to follow whatever path they seem fit?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#344

Post by JimboOmega »

loh wrote: post #292
manca wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I said in my retweet to PG's essay. Having hackable bad tests in the very tech industry proves the point that artificial tests are still the way of thinking for many and something we collectively need to unlearn. The question is how.

When I see a company conducting these kinds of tests during interviews, it's a signal to me that they are probably not a very forward-thinking company, and probably not a good fit for someone like me who tends to think outside the box. If it's another cog in their machine that they want, these kinds of interview tests are probably pretty good. But if they're an innovative company trying to change the world, they'd be…

> Beyond that, in my opinion, nearly anyone with average programming experience can hack a typical programming/whiteboard interview

I agree with your conclusion that all it does is filter out inexperienced/incompetent candidates. This is valuable, but to me it's the "first question" - can they code?

I don't think there's really much value between an "Amazing coder" and a "can get the job done" coder. Very rapidly you're trying to answer much softer questions like "does this person work well others?" or "how fast can they learn new systems?" and there isn't a good way to do that.

The interview question I usually give is algorithmically very simple. There's no linked lists, no graph theory, none of that. What I actually look for is mostly how they interact with me and how they go about solving it.

There's a pretty straightforward gotcha that more or less everyone hits. If the candidate hits the gotcha and then keeps piling on special cases without ever taking a step back, that's a big minus. If they keep doing it even after I suggest there's a simpler solution, that's worse still. I much prefer somebody who takes a step back but can't quite figure it out without a little more help than one who just remains confident in their solution no matter what.

Yeah it's inherently shitty that I have 45 minutes to figure out if this person will benefit the org for years to come, but there's a lot more signal there than just "Did they open their CS 201 algorithms textbook in the last few week?"

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#345

Post by ken »

stavros wrote: post #191
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. 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.

Possibly. But for a little while, I did hear about "lifestyle businesses", i.e., the idea that you could be financially sustainable in tech without needing massive growth.

And these days, I think most of the open source software I use was actually contributed by a corporation.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#346

Post by ignoramous »

guptaneil wrote: post #331

The problem is not that fundraising feels like a test, it's that fundraising is a test posed by authority figures, and by pg's own definition, is probably hackable. How hackable is proportional to the quality of the VC. Luckily startups themselves are indeed not a test. So you can avoid any test by making enough revenue to not need external funding, but the second best strategy is take the VC's test without trying to…

Paul, though he doesn't reference his previous essay [0] (which has a section on gaming the system) in the current one, did write then that fooling the investors and treating it like a test is only going to delay the inevitable.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/before.html

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#347

Post by JimboOmega »

dominotw wrote: post #309
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…

Haha here is the email i have from my facebook interview thats coming up. "Your initial Facebook interview is coming up and we want you to ace it! Here are some tips and resources so you know what to expect and can prepare adequately. Preparing is key. Our initial interview determines whether to continue with a full series of onsite interviews. This initial interview is primarily a coding interview that will take pla…

This is an initial phone screen and in this context this a valuable approach. This is one level past fizzbuzz. 'Can you code something past "hello world"?' is what they're looking for. There's nothing worse than an onsite with somebody who just cannot code at all.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#348

Post by eggsmediumrare »

kccqzy wrote: post #323
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…

I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothi…

I've never done that (self-taught dev), but I've set up SSO, terraformed production systems, wrote ETLs for system critical data... I'm not an amazing developer, but I get things done. That test would filter me out simply because I've never tried it before.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#349

Post by mattchew »

ksdale wrote: post #324
mattchew wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family. I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.

Your comment jumped out at me, my wife and I are homeschooling/unschooling and some of people we've met focus on "purity" and all I can think when I talk with them is, "The point isn't to completely avoid anything that looks like schoolwork, the point is to guide the children to learn more than they would have otherwise."

Yup. Unschooling has some tendency to become an ideology instead of a practical point of view, and people get stuck in it. When all your homeschooling friends are stuck in it too, it becomes hard to get out of it even when it's not working well.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#350

Post by ken »

robocat wrote: post #287
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…

You are implying that PG thinks money is all important - but he doesn’t think that. PG: if you had to boil it down to one quality to look for, authenticity would be the most important one. “You’re looking for people who are real friends,” he said to Chang. “Not just for people who got together for the purposes of this startup. You don’t want people who were in it just for the money. He also talks about how that start…

I didn't mean to imply that he thinks that. Sorry for the apparent ambiguity.

"Wealth" is still problematic, as per the cigarette example.

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