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Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

fortune.com

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Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#41

Post by cpach »

dont_dox_me_bro wrote: post #29
vlan0 wrote: post #7

>“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” This is important. We are limitless potential. To embody that, is to understand that life is uncertain. It's great to set goals. But don't take them too seriously. Or you will get lost in the concept.

I really wonder what he means by low expectations as a billionaire? I'm guessing it's drastically different than the 70 year olds I know working retail jobs so they don't die from poverty.

He didn’t really say that he expects to starve or anything like that, did he? I assumed that the framing of the article was something like this: doing business, technological development and working inside corporations. Not food security or life in general.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#42

Post by briantakita »

Attention needs to be paid to foundational primitives that support a more elaborate architecture. An elaborate architecture built on low quality primitives lacks integrity. This integrity issues will need to be addressed one way or another. Better to have a feedback loop to improve these primitives.

Hardship is feedback to address these fundamental primitives to create integrity with the big picture. If someone builds a foundation on froth, don't be surprised when the foundation collapses. Entitlement does not provide value.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#43

Post by [deleted] »

Draiken wrote: post #21
Ninjinka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#44

Post by waswaswas »

Aloha wrote: post #33
nimbius wrote: post #15

Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form. The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undef…

You dont have to go to Stanford to get a decent job, or even work for Nvidia. You dont have to go to a top tier school, or even college at all to be a working (and decent) engineer. Going to Stanford and taking on gobs of debt is absolutely a choice you make, I agree with you about discharging college debt, and whatnot, but some of this is based on choices individuals make.

Due to generous financial aid policies, Stanford ends up being free or cost-to-family less than flagship state schools for all but (depending on definition) the professional class and wealthy...

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#45

Post by transitionnel »

ryandrake wrote: post #25
cowboyscott wrote: post #11

This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]: > You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the ri…

This guy: best chapel speaker I have ever seen. In all seriousness, I took that speech on as my own personal motto for the rest of my life. Take dead aim at those rich kids, indeed!

I'm sure they make good friends, being perpetually bored and all [like us] ;)

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#46

Post by nottorp »

duggan wrote: post #20
nimbius wrote: post #15

Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form. The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undef…

I dunno, it sounds like he's as self-made as it gets. Immigrant family, worked in Denny's, got an electrical engineering degree, founded Nvidia. I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

There's no data on wikipedia about his family. They moved from Taiwan to Thailand and then the US. That doesn't say if they were rich, poor, or who they knew.

I mean, i used to believe self-made man stories until I found out who Bill Gates' mother is. Now I'd rather see some research.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#47

Post by Draiken »

cpach wrote: post #32
Draiken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

Was luck involved? To some degree I guess. But come on, to say it’s pure luck, is that credible?

I'm not saying it's pure luck. I'm saying the only relevant part is luck.

If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.

You're one of the lucky that could migrate, went to the right schools, met the right set of people, were born in the right year and so on.

It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#48

Post by ytx »

COGlory wrote: post #26
m3kw9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich hater be hating here. He came from poor to the top and wasn’t passed a silver spoon, so he has enough qualifications to lecture.

It's not rich hating, it's that there's a billion poor people who weren't passed a silver spoon, worked hard, but ultimately failed in the one key element: luck. Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck. In general, it makes them very unqualified to tell other people how to get rich. And no I'm not saying rich people are too dumb to understand it, I'm saying that they're trying to ration…

I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#49

Post by ajross »

Not really relevant to Huang's speech per se, but the article engages in IMHO one of the most infuriatingly wrong misconceptions in education journalism:

> [Stanford] is one of the most selective in the United States [...] and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, [...]

Stanford students, and students of elite institutions more generally, are simply not taking on more debt than "typical" college students (for various values of "typical", from large state schools down to community colleges). Most debt loads are regulated and capped, it's extremely hard to get a personal loan beyond that. And to the extent that's not true, it's actually the wealthier students, and ones attending smaller niche schools outside the normal finanancial aid world, that bear the highest loads.

A quick google turned up this list, which roughly matches my understanding:

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...

Sort by highest debt load per student, and note (1) how many of the schools at the top of the list are ones you've never heard of, (2) that literally none of the top-10/elite/whatever schools appear on the first page of the list, and (3) how heavily modal the graph is anyway: basically graduating students take on about $38-40k of debt in the US, no matter where they go.

Please be very suspicious of this kind of class warfare screed. It's just wrong, and it finds its way into the public conciousness by throwaway lines like the one I quoted.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#50

Post by sanderjd »

dont_dox_me_bro wrote: post #29
vlan0 wrote: post #7

>“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” This is important. We are limitless potential. To embody that, is to understand that life is uncertain. It's great to set goals. But don't take them too seriously. Or you will get lost in the concept.

I really wonder what he means by low expectations as a billionaire? I'm guessing it's drastically different than the 70 year olds I know working retail jobs so they don't die from poverty.

My read is that he's just making the same point as the stoics (and I'm sure many others, I'm just most familiar with it from stoicism), to not expect or fall into the trap of feeling entitled to good things. In stoicism, this is the point beneath the oft-caricatured practice of contemplating that death could come at any moment. If you don't expect or feel entitled to even just living from moment to moment, then it's (in theory) easier to see that each additional moment of life is a gift, and each good thing that does happen to you, all the more so.

Personally, I struggle to actually achieve serenity and positivity from this in practice, though I do find it compelling in theory.

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