How to Start Google

Yeenage Mutant Minja Vurtles.

Or at least that's how I always read it in my head.

YTA

I have mixed feelings about this, mostly because the stakes on giving people persuasive advice with an enviable track record in hand might be at its highest in a room full of 14/15-year olds.

This is exactly the kind of thing that made me dramatically more ambitious and harder working when I started reading pg essays (pushing 20 years ago now), so I have a huge soft spot for the feeling/nostalgia that I got when I just let it wash over me. And it’s ultimately why I think it nets out constructive in spite of some real problems: if I heard this at 15 I would have started working really hard at 15 and not 22 or 23, and I would have started cultivating relationships with people who were going to be powerful at 15, instead of arguably antagonizing powerful people until, well maybe still today [1].

It’s got some serious problems though: the way most people get rich is by having wealthy parents, though at the apex it’s having wealthy parents who raised you to work hard and manage relationships with powerful people well [2], so given that by 15 most of that already has or hasn’t happened, I think we can generally regard pg saying that as a “useful fiction”: outcomes will improve at the mean for 15-year olds who believe him about this, or such is my prediction.

The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. And while trying to achieve at a level where you go to Stanford without a mountain of uniquely nasty debt [3] is strictly a good thing in high school / primary school, actually going to university via debt is an extremely dicey proposition if you miss and that distinction is tough to sell to that audience.

Better advice would be to start learning from the best educators in the world via a YouTube Premium subscription concurrent to high-school studies (and making them whiffle ball on a curve compared to peers that don’t), try to get a scholarship to an Ivy or Cal or something, but go to community college or directly into the workforce (Work for a Startup™) if you miss and don’t have graduate study on the agenda.

Mostly the feeling I get is that pg and his essays these days sit in the Venn between “well intentioned”, “aspirational/idealistic” and “not true”. It’s a fine line sometimes between “aspirational” and “false”, it gets finer yet in light of Sinclair’s Maxim [4]: what might be dismissed in a low-effort way as “out of touch” or even “self-serving” is trivially unfair to pg. He has his own family he could be spending time with instead of speaking to young people, he doesn’t need or seem to want any more money. He’s just past the point where he can de-leverage his intellectual and emotional investment in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: he’s the LTCM of serious intellectuals in technology. The book about that is called “When Genius Failed”, and John Meriwether is a brilliant man who lived by an admirably robust ethical code in a very rough neighborhood.

[1] The most significant glitch in pg’s firmware is that he says “smart and hardworking” when he really means “good at becoming powerful”, a direct quote [5] about his protégée illustrates this very clearly.

[2] Pick a list of very rich people and click on all the links, a fine starting point is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.

[3] Yes there have been some modest reforms, no it’s not fixed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67546893

[4] At the top, a man’s living can be about intellectual as well as financial capital: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

[5] I’ve known too many YC alumni too well for too long to even engage with any hatchet job on a piece that if anything understates the reality: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma..., please don’t prey on my worst instincts by tempting me to cite documented examples and credible primary sources.

I upvoted because I thought it was a clever observation (meaning one that did not obviously present itself to me), although I did need https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763016 to explain what you meant.

I think he’s saying that at the time when you’re making the prediction you can’t know. If you're gonna learn som core technology that you can use 7 years later (where he suggests programming) then this makes sense.

I think there’s a strong element of luck here: even if you have general purpose skills in eg programming or CS, once a novel opportunity presents itself, you likely won’t have a head start, especially today. But what can you do about it? Telling kids who are 14-15 that they should bet on some more niched tech like LLMs or even transformers would likely be terrible advice.