41–50 of 97 posts
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> Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal How easy it is to brush aside two of the largest tech successes of the last 20 years!
facebook was 17 years ago. What about since? If you cannot adjust to the times or if your new advice is bad, it does not matter how good your prior successes were.
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Plenty of thiel fellows have started billion/multi million dollar companies (figma, ethereum, luminar, upstart, etc.), so it seems that $100k had been enough for them.
But was this with the $100k. I am guessing they got chosen by Thiel and then with his connections raised a lot of funding later from someone else. There is no way you can start a successful tech company with just $100k. Things are so expensive. Maybe 100k is good enough for a hobby but you are not going to make a living off that.
The stamp of approval from Thiel and his network help of course, and is likely more valuable than the $100k but for a lot of these students it gives enough runway to tinker for 2-3 years before landing product market fit.
> Imagine learning to play music by fooling around with a piano and discovering that some keys sound good together. Even if after a while you begin to structure music that sounds halfway decent, if you ever want to get good and collaborate with other musicians, you're going to have to start from the beginning and learn theory, chords, and musical notation. Sure, like Bowie. Or Prince. Or McCartney. Wait..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
facebook was 17 years ago. What about since? If you cannot adjust to the times or if your new advice is bad, it does not matter how good your prior successes were.
At the risk of breaking the rules, what recent successes do you have that are in any way close to Facebook or PayPal that makes you able to give advice?
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> The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably By what metric is it failing? Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce? What is your emphasis on “modern” referring to? You clearly have strong feelings about this, and I’m curious why, but your comment doesn’t clearly communicate why you feel th…
>By what metric is it failing? the trillion dollars of student debt that can't be paid off because many degrees don't produce real economic value to justify the cost of education. Having millions of people waste years of their lives and massive amounts of money is a failure. >Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce? because I know the history of the university system and it's barely changed in cen…
Less than 10% of student loan debt is in default, and the total debt is less than 2 trillion, so I don’t believe it’s accurate to say “trillions” can’t be paid off. Also according to the US Fed, degree holders earn on average 2x more than non degree holders. (Think about the increase in tax base as a result).
Student loan debt isn’t necessarily any indicator of failure. Debt is (perhaps) a natural part of the economy. There might be reasons that we should fund education and not ask students to borrow. But the borrowing by itself is not proof that anything is wasted or wrong.
> it’s barely changed in centuries.
What are you referring to? The fields of Bioengineering and Computer Science didn’t exist centuries ago. Physics and Chemistry have changed completely. Almost nothing in the modern soft sciences did either. Modern research funding is nothing like it was centuries ago, or even 50 years ago. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
> because the government subsidizes it so there is no incentive to change
Then it means people pay less than they would otherwise? That further begs the question of what kind of efficiency you want. What should a college education cost, and who should pay for it? How much should professors get paid, and who should pay them, where should the money come from?
You complained both about govt subsidizing and debt. So how do you envision this getting cheaper? I’m in favor of govt funding education, but that’s a bigger subsidy than today. I think the govt can already afford it (since degree holders earn 2x more than non degree holders) but that doesn’t change the efficiency of the system.
this is all the same rehashed Boomer garbage defending college. Reality is that all of these benefits could easily be replicated at a fraction of the cost. Cultural inertia is the only thing keeping the current university system alive, everything about the tenure track and how graduate students have to work is broken as well. The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern wo…
The pro college crowd has a tool the anti-college crowd doesn't: They understand that the masses respond emotionally rather than rationally. If there is to be meaningful change in society, we need to make people feel embarrassed for attending college.
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University is not trade school. There is more function there than simply learning to do the narrow job one believes the future may have in store for them. Here are some others: - Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation - Find sexual mates - Find platonic mates - Learn many disconnected things - Learn many connected things - Learn to take criticism in the open - Learn to render criticism in the open - Engage divers…
I am glad you like those things but for most people an undergrad degree is a piece of paper and a line on the resume. If it does not help me with my job and future income it should not be mandatory for employers to require it. I have no problem with degrees not required by employers. If you apply at a tech company and get rejected because of lack of undergrad degree then are you saying becoming "a robust citizen of t…
And you've pinpointed the problem - it's not with universities but with employers.
> Imagine learning to play music by fooling around with a piano and discovering that some keys sound good together. Even if after a while you begin to structure music that sounds halfway decent, if you ever want to get good and collaborate with other musicians, you're going to have to start from the beginning and learn theory, chords, and musical notation. Sure, like Bowie. Or Prince. Or McCartney. Wait..
this is all the same rehashed Boomer garbage defending college. Reality is that all of these benefits could easily be replicated at a fraction of the cost. Cultural inertia is the only thing keeping the current university system alive, everything about the tenure track and how graduate students have to work is broken as well. The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern wo…
The pro college crowd has a tool the anti-college crowd doesn't: They understand that the masses respond emotionally rather than rationally. If there is to be meaningful change in society, we need to make people feel embarrassed for attending college.
This whole thing is a dangerous, scummy lie. Millions of people drop out of college, and most of them don't end up founding billion-dollar companies. Why do they drop out? They can't afford it, they don't have the social support, they get sick, they lack the preparation or are too young for it... all sorts of causes. It is not glamorous. It is not a sign of great ambition, nor is it taken to be such. It is usually a case of failure (that may or may not be the person's fault) and, in the real world, failure hurts. Sure, dropping out of Harvard to found Facebook is a winning play, but most people don't have those kinds of options and can't afford such a major misstep.
Peter Thiel's anti-college push is something even worse. Our education system in this country isn't as good as one might want it to be. It's expensive, often elitist, and of dubious quality (even at prestigious schools) except for people with outlier levels (outlier among those under 25, at least) of self-motivation. All that said, it's the one component of our society that still kinda works and that still, in some privileged subsections, is run by people with decent intentions. It's the last bastion of meritocracy left. Perfect meritocracy? Not even close. But if a professor played favorites as brazenly as an average corporate manager (65% and "culture fit" = A+/executive fast track; 97% without "culture fit" = C/"Meets Expectations") his life would be made hell. Getting "screwed" in college means studying your ass off and making a B, due to some tricky question on the final. Getting screwed in the corporate world means losing your income--possibly, your housing and your reputation as well--over the smallest infraction or none at all.
Education is the one component that's left in our society where a working-class person can outperform his social "superiors". This is the real reason why royalists and rightists like Peter Thiel want to destroy it. Think we lack social mobility now in the US? We do, but scrapping the colleges is going to make it worse... so keep that in mind every time some Silicon Valley asshat says that formal education is a waste of time.
I say the same thing about the SAT. Is it flawless? No, of course not. It picks up a number of cultural or socioeconomic factors with no correlation to true ability. However, without it, though college admissions are going to become more socioeconomic, not less.
When I was in college, I had to enroll in a course called "Structured Systems Analysis" for my computer science major. It remains, to this day, the most boring course I have ever taken. It was essentially a crash course in business for software developers: we discussed topics like software estimates, methods of team management, and company mission statements. It was slow, stultifying, mind-numbingly-boring information. The professor was actually great, but there was only so much he could do with the material. I fell asleep studying for the final - literally. And I was the kind of student who read textbooks for fun.
This is a common experience: finding the most boring class also to be the most applicable one on the job. The jobs are what's broken, not the schools. I find it sad that software estimation is taught at all in schools. See, I'm a believer in the liberal arts education in the classical sense: liberal, in this context, means an education appropriate to a free person (as contrasted with servile arts). Real computer science is a liberal art, but giving estimates (or, say, doing user stories) is a servile art.
The problem with our society isn't that a liberal arts education is outdated or elitist, so much as that our society has very few positions left in which a liberal arts education is actually useful or appropriate. Colleges are forced to take one of two options, neither free of ugliness. One is to dilute the program with servile skills like writing user stories to make graduates more employable in the strata of jobs they'll actually be able to get; the other is to give people an education that wildly overestimates the quality of job positions that will be available to them. (As I said, the liberal arts education is designed for free people, but how many people really are free of the labor market? I'm a leftist, so I'd like to see this addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.) I'm not surprised that a course focusing on software politics turned out to be more useful than any of the others, but it's sad that this was the case.