Great stuff. I agree that the ogre is barely noticing the potshots, but I think it's also failing to notice the crumbling foundations it's standing on.
Muse, tell me (of) the man of-many-turns who wandered very widely after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy
This is because "man" and "of-many-turns" are both grammatical direct objects of the muse's requested narration (the imperative ἔννεπε). However, the dictionary forms for "man" and "of-many-turns" are ἀνήρ and πολύτροπος, in the nominative case. If you're calling a person "of-many-turns" in English, you should presumably use πολύτροπος (polytropos), not πολύτροπον, much as you might say that Queen Elizabeth II had an *annus horribilis* in 1992 rather than an *annum horribilem* (as it would be in Latin, but only in the context of being the object of some specific verb describing her experience of it).
Greek grammar is precisely the kind of education college dropouts miss out on. If Gibson knew of his mistake, he might endorse it as an object lesson that (he thinks) It Doesn't Matter.
Gibson and Thiel completely and totally do not get why anyone would care about the Odyssey and ancient Greek. If they think about the study of Greek and Latin texts at all, they probably think it's some weird fad of *pretending* to find this stuff fascinating, gorgeous and important. And they imagine themselves sweeping into a room full of faddists and shouting, "The emperor has no clothes on," while Ben Franklins fall out of their pockets, their hair, their nostrils, their large narcissistic mouths, and I won't go on about other orifices. And then the assembled faddists, freed from their compulsion to pretend The Odyssey is of interest,, stampede out of academia and on down to Bank of America where they take out loans to fund start-ups that are sort of like fucking PayPal.
If you think Peter Thiel doesn’t care about and isn’t interested in ancient texts, you really have a very bad idea of what Thiel is like, framed by people who do not understand him and don’t care to.
Listen to Thiel go on Jerry Bowyer’s podcast and talk about Biblical interpretation. Find literally any talk where he goes on a tangent about the Greeks.
I disagree with many of his opinions but if you think he isn’t interested in the field of classics, or ancient civilizations, or religion, or history, you are blundering.
Um, you may be right. Every single account I've heard of him, including in Scott's review, gives me the impression he is a narcissistic asshole. None of them have made me even slightly curious to know more about him, therefore I do not. The main thrust of my complaint here was that he (in my imagination, anyhow) is not interested in the ancient language and moved by the literature. If when he talks about the Greeks it's more stuff from his theory about the little cracks and crevices in history where innovation can flourish, that's not really what I'm talking about his not getting.
Yeah, so, again I don't endorse Thiel in his entirety, but the man is genuinely well-read about theology and antiquity and interested in it for its own sake, and the sake of intellectual curiosity and what it means for man. It's not just single-minded pursuit of his pet theories.
I object to any characterization of Thiel where he isn't a guy with broad-ranging interests and talents, who cares about these interests as any genuinely intellectually curious man would do—the very idea is absurd if you've had any exposure to him that isn't mediated by his political enemies' polemics.
It's kind of weird, but I have this fascination with Thiel...maybe it's because he's more in the background compared to other Tech billionaires like Musk or Zuckerberg, which makes Thiel more interesting to me...he seems kind of like an "Eminence Grise" of the Tech World...
100% wrong. Thiel actually founded his own campus newspaper at Stanford because he was so mad that classical literature was dropped as a required course. From Thiel's wikipedia page:
He studied philosophy at Stanford University. During that time, debates on identity politics and political correctness were ongoing. A "Western Culture" program, which was criticized by The Rainbow Agenda because of a perceived over-representation of the achievements of European men, was replaced with a "Culture, Ideas and Values" course, which instead pushed diversity and multiculturalism. This replacement provoked controversy on the campus and led to Thiel co-founding The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, in 1987 with funding from Irving Kristol.
You may be rebutting a point I was not making, it's hard to tell. My point, which may indeed be wrong, is that Thiel and Gibson are people who would snigger at someone's thinking it was important to use the correct form of "polytropos" in their book, and taking the trouble to post an explanation of the relevant Greek grammar, along with the first 2 lines of the Odyssey, where the word appears. I picture them as people who cannot understand revering a poem, and by revering the Odyssey I mean being fascinated and moved by the original poem itself, in ancient Greek. I may be dead wrong about that. (People of that mindset do exist, though. I believe it was on here that someone remarked that now that AI could produce images & rhyming poems on demand we wouldn't need artists any more.)
I get that Thiel is interested in philosophy and history, including that of the ancient world. That interest, though, does not preclude his being indifferent to the literature of the ancient world. Neither does his fight to keep the classical literature course at Stanford. This is a one year course? So clearly students would be reading everything in translation. And that's fine, but it's not at all the same thing as reading the originals. So whether I'm dead wrong about Thiel comes down to whether he read & revered, or can at least understand reading and revering, ancient literature in its real, ancient form. I picture him plowing through world history scanning for ideas and images relevant to the goal of Winning by Getting Rich as Fuck, heaving "polytropos" into his wheelbarrow as he passed the Odyssey. But of course my picture might be wrong.
Anyhow, I freely admit I know very little about Thiel, because everything I have read about him, including Scott's review here, depicts such a repellant person that I have never felt any desire to know more about him. It may be that my reaction to the polytropos issue has little to do with Thiel, and is mostly an expression of my feeling about the way the world is changing.
Dude, get serious. "Insufficiently committed to fealty to ancient Greek grammatical rules" is an absurd criticism to level at anybody outside a classics department faculty meeting.
Everything I know about Thiel from publicly available information is that he's a shitty, greedy, narcissistic human being. In the context of this information about his motivations for starting the Stanford Review... I'm updating my opinion of him to include "racist". I *do not* believe he has any intrinsic interest in western classics, I think he recognized it as an issue he could make hay over while a student.
My criticism of them is that they cannot understand what it is to revere a poem. I mentioned Seth Schoen's detailing the relevant grammar as evidence of his reverence for the text -- maybe something a bit like reverence for the Torah. And I'm sure you grasped that. Why pick a detail supporting my main point, pretend it's my main point, then complain that my main point is an absurd nitpicking detail? You want me to get serious? How about you get fair.
Tell that to my friend on here, the atheist who twitted me with not understanding Scripture because he could read Classical Greek and I, he assumed correctly, could not.
If you can't even koine Greek Bible, dude, then what use are you? 🤣
Hmm, idea that people who read the Bible in English can't understand scripture doesn't ring true to me. I mean, the Odyssey is poetry. It's a story, but it's also a cathedral of words. The Bible is a mix of myths, people's testimonies, and, I dunno, religious teachings. It was never intended to be a work of art, where the language is a thing of value in itself. (Though I do think much of the King James Version is magnificent language.)
I never get this impression from these kind of people at all. I am sort of one of them, and I certainly learned 20X more about almost all subjects from my own personal readings than college. Fuck I took 3! astronomy courses in college for fun because I wanted to learn something about it and didn't learn one single thing I didn't already know from general reading.
And that was pre-internet/youtube. The point is you don't need some professor to make reading Cicero interesting, and if you don't find it interesting a professor isn't going to help.
Wait, what impression from these kind of people? I don't see the connection between my little written caricature of Thiel and your rant about the limitations of college. In fact I actually agree with you about the limitations of college. But what has that got to do with my complaining (perhaps unfairly) that Thiel and Gibson don't understand what it is to revere a poem? Did you think I was saying that the only way to learn to appreciate Homer is to listen to some college professor's lecture about him? I neither said nor implied anything like that.
The kind of people who find university/college tedious and an unnecessary hoop to jump through and think society should put many fewer people through it.
They are generally not uncultured boors, which is exactly what you accused them of. I would find myself very much aligned with them regarding college (though I am not a libertarian like Theil at all), and I for instance think vastly fewer people should be going to college. And yet I was reading my 6 year old the Odyssey. So clearly I think it has value.
There is a history (which you partook in with your comment) of accusing people criticizing modern liberal arts education as people who hate the liberal arts. It often comes across to me like church fathers decrying the translation of the bible into the vernacular because the peasants might get ideas. No one needs college to learn/love the liberal arts, like at all, and it is what college is the worst for.
College is great if you want to become an Aerospace engineer.
You're right, I did accuse them of being uncultured boors, and I may be wrong about that. But the rest of what you're mad at me about is ideas you are importing from somewhere inside your head, not ideas that I have. I already told you that I *agree* with you about the limitations of college. As for the liberal arts -- I don't know what to do about that. It seems to me that interest in literature is declining greatly, and that makes me sad. The age of the written word is ending, I think. We are moving on to new modalities -- video, virtual reality, forms of communication where the quality of the prose is not important. But I certainly agree that making people who want skills they can earn a living with go through 4 years of liberal arts education, paying huge sums to do so, is ridiculous. I do not think everyone interested in business, start-ups etc. is a boor -- that's an idea you imported.
As I've said, I really do not know much about Thiel. Maybe my mind has tarred him with the brush of Gibson. Do you at least agree with me that Gibson's not real impressive? He doesn't *think* well. Look how Scott quickly lays bare the shallowness of Gibson's thinking about alternatives to our present system of education:
"For example: what, exactly, is Gibson’s alternative to the education system? The back-of-book-blurb says Paper Belt On Fire is about “how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow” - but evolve how? What exactly has been proven here? A few of the very brightest young people, hand-picked by an expert young-person-picker and given $100K, can become billionaires or make great discoveries without a college degree. What are the implications? . . . And if you don’t have a good answer to this question - the one relevant to 99.9% of education system inmates - have you really launched a challenge to the educational system?"
I don't know Gibson at all really, but from what is presented here yeah it seems pretty shallow. And yes I was lumping you in with a class of people you are likely not a member of. Sorry about that.
I am just sick of the reflexive "you hate the Odyssey", to the comment "maybe we should not be teaching future office monkeys about Foucault and how to properly analyze James Joyce when they don't even know how to work Excel or what a mortgage is".
As for my answer, it would be taking most of the B and C level students in college, and preparing them to be office workers and mid level managers and tradespeople via vocational schooling.
I would much rather hire someone who took 2 classes on business behavior and etiquette, 2 classes on microeconomics, and 2 classes on the MS Office suite than someone who has a 4 year degree (if that was an option).
Warning (50% of ban) for this comment. High temperature + low effort; you sound pretty vicious but I don't have the slightest idea why you think this is true.
The solution to the problem is to find some less expensive mechanism than college to generate the information about someone that going to college generates. If you do that you could both get rich and do good.
One possibility is to develop apprenticeship programs for the sort of jobs college graduates end up with, paying a low wage but producing evidence of ability. That's suggested by a paper I saw an account of which looked at people who had been admitted to top colleges, comparing the wages of those who went to those colleges to the wages of those who didn't. The conclusion was that the Harvard graduates made more money in their first job but not thereafter, presumably because the student who was accepted by Harvard but went to San Jose State demonstrated in his first job that he was as good as the one who went to Harvard.
If it was that easy it would be happening, so the problem is finding out why it isn't and how that can be changed. Or finding another way of producing public information of quality. Adverse selection, after all, comes from information asymmetry.
Are you familiar with Triplebyte? Their business model is to be the first pass of hiring for programmers, replacing each company's resume screening with a centralized in-depth interview. Seems to be aimed directly at this.
It does seem like they (the team) were acquihired, but 'Triplebyte' itself will be shutdown. (I'd guess Karat won't provide anything like the same service.)
Even just for recruiting 'tech' workers, this seems like a *really* hard social-coordination problem – none of the companies trying this seemed to have had any durable success. Triplebyte was one of – if not *the* – best of the one's of which I'm aware.
The problem is one of the things college is a strong signal for is willingness to conform to societal expectations. It's very difficult to come up with an alternative signal of conformity.
Perhaps there is some way to use Mormon missionary service? Tricky to disentangle the bundle of signals there, but there ought to be some way. Even just an audit study with all its imperfections might be informative at a baseline if you were to randomize mention of a mission relative to a resume with other shared signifiers (e.g. byu grad, from Utah, etc.) but no mission.
The book "How Children Succeed" (section 2.7) mentions some research by Carmit Segal in 2006 suggesting that military-recruitment tests are a good predictor of lifetime earnings. Quote:
"What the coding-speed test really measured, Segal realized, was something more fundamental than clerical skill: the test takers' inclination and ability to force themselves to care about the world's most boring test."
It's a network effect problem. The more people you have in this system the more valuable it is - so it's between hard and impossible to start small and compete with the mainstream.
Arguable, even the Thiel Fellowship can't succeed in scaling up. It only works now because to be selected means you're exceptional, and so people pay attention to you (and yes, people paying attention to you is absolutely essential in building a billion dollar company). If they tried scaling in any way, even by keeping the same enrolment criteria but just casting a wider net, the perception would be they're less exceptional - and thus they'll automatically be less successful.
Without the PR of the "Thiel" name and the small numbers, you have to compete with the old system - and this means getting enough employers to take you seriously so young people chose you. This is hard.
It has to be done on a large enough scale so employers recognize it, but that doesn't require anything close to the scale of the present system. And the problem is smaller if you initially specialize, develop your alternative for particular niches. I gather it has already happened for computer programming, that there are paths other than going to college, such as participating in open source projects, by which potential employees can demonstrate their competence.
For my part, I just wish my college ( a state school, nothing special) had offered classes/tools on starting a business for non-business majors.
I eventually got there, but it would have been a lot smoother if I'd been integrated with the right resources early, and some common pitfalls had been pointed out.
(did you mean to subscriber-lock this one? it doesn't seem controversial in any way...)
At first I was really confused about one of scifi's greatest legends having anything to do with Peter Thiel, and then realized it was some other Gibson I'd never heard of.
Definitely some self-serving bias here, but I'm increasingly sympathetic to all such forms of the idea that, the greater share* of societal gains from education are skimming the cream of brilliant folks...the regular system kind of works for this, albeit in a very costly and lossy fashion. But at least it's institutionally automated, no need for eccentric VC Supermen to intervene. Something to be said for that. Pressure to drop tracking, AP courses, etc. is disappointing in this regard. Yeah, some very particular smart kids will do just fine even without school. There's millions of candidates though, and I'm highly doubtful even a dozen versions of Thiel Fellowship could adequately screen them all. And ironically, the more we sabotage internal identification of promising students, the more incentive there is for doing TF-type things. (The end result might be good for everyone, but it's still playing defect with The System, and that's not a sustainable equilibrium. The ogre can smack down such potshots a whole lot harder if it really cares to. For now it's just the buzzing of flies.)
It's frustrating though, that one of the only credible alt-credentials is so libertarian-aligned. Maybe it's true that the Fellows are more diverse than the media likes to claim. Merely being associated with Thiel and VC though...that's its own kind of baggage, and puts selection pressures on who'd ever consider the offer. There's good reasons, of course - if the left is aligned with traditional education, then splintering off alternatives is betraying the coalition. (Not a coincidence which direction lotsa charter schools and proponents skew.) The school prison pipeline problem is a hard one to crack. Maybe LLMs will make MOOCs finally work, shrug.
*Which doesn't mean the other share, of educating the median and the lower end, isn't also high ROI. All things that draw out people's latent potential are good investments.
I went spelunking into the SEC website to see if I could figure out the Luminar transaction. I found out that Luminar was merged into a SPAC in 2021. SPACS trade at around $10 until they announce a deal. This was the right technology at the right time for the market and after the merger the stock spiked to $37. It now trades at about$7. Symbol is LAZR..
Like most early stage technology companies, LAZR loses a prodigious amount of money.
I couldn't find any filings about sales by the 1517 Fund, but that may be because they ceased to be an affiliate at some point after the merger with the SPAC (not a director and under 5% of the stock).
No question that the founder of Luminar was a great hire by 1517 and no question this was a successful financial transaction for the 1517 investors. I'll be interested now to see the company's ultimate fate.
This seems to disregard entirely that studying is a great amount of fun. A lot more fun than working IMO at least. I really miss my student days. It helps that I'm not American though, so I don't really feel the need to revolt against the system when it doesn't have gen ed requirements and I don't pay a lot of tuition.
I don't know if these people disregard it so much as they don't care? Even in their ideal world, if you wanted to go to college to study, they probably don't really care (although in this real world I'm sure Thiel is furious about gov't subsidies etc). I think they're just concerned about the people who would prefer to try interesting and ambitious things right away but are prevented by credentialing needs.
Yeah lots of people can have fun taking out $30k in debt/year to hang out with friends and occasionally attend classes. It was a blast. Doesn't mean it is a productive use of societies or an individual resources.
How to start this virtuous cycle? One word answer: apprenticeships. Germany has (or had - don't get me started) a solid system of apprenticeships. Meaning, you could just leave high school, start learning something you'd be paid for, and that would be the basis of further career. I have a PhD and I am slightly jealous of the people who took that route and are buying their second, or third, houses...
There is a solid apprentice-to-middle-management pipeline, as well as the understanding that you can always go back to University to pick up the skills that would let you go from middle-management to senior management (e.g., the way some people get MBAs).
Would this work in all cases? I am more hard pressed to think of cases where it wouldn't work (okay, medicine). But even the sciences it'd work. You can really easily learn how to do most lab experiments, and someone with a few years of doing actual experimental work would succeed far better if later he got some courses in the science of his choice.
And companies _could_ do this really easily! Offer high-school kids a chance to apprentice as whatever. Yes, the money would be a pittance, but so's the money for internships etc. A company could easily drum up good publicity for this program ("Here we are helping the underprivileged").
This'd be one step back from the "Society of Status" and one step towards the "Society of Contract" (terms courtesy of Isabell Patterson, Rand's mentor).
There's your solution.
Side note: is there anyone, I mean anyone on earth, who doesn't regard the media as being complete and utter scum? Just curious.
Hmm yeah I sorta agree. But as a counter point: Way back in the 80's I was biking around Europe for the summer. At one point I hooked up with this guy from Switzerland who was in an apprentice program. He didn't like it all that much and was jealous of the American system that let late bloomers (like himself) go back to college and do what they wanted, rather than being somewhat trapped in the system he was in. Granted this is a single data point from 40 years ago.
It also doesn't hurt that Germany distinguishes between university in the "liberal arts" sense, technical university (TU) and "polytechnic" (Fachhochschule) all of which offer slightly different "services" to the student. Berlin alone for example has good institutions in all three categories, and as far as I can tell even nowadays there's less of the status signaling from what kind of place you went to, that you get in the US. Also, by comparison with the US, I think tuition is still practically free (minus a small registration fee and the cost of textbooks)?
> This'd be one step back from the "Society of Status" and one step towards the "Society of Contract" (terms courtesy of Isabell Patterson, Rand's mentor).
This distinction is originally due to Henry Sumner Maine, in his 1861 book *Ancient Law*, where he describes the "movement from Status to Contract".
I was not very impressed by the Stark Therapeutics website. They have three AAV siRNA candidates which are in the "early preclinical" stage at best (meaning, they've just started testing them out in mice, probably). This was cutting-edge in roughly 2004. It might work, but it's not especially innovative.
Yeah -- and specific concept of the lead (RNAi interference for type 2 diabetes) looks like a specifically bad idea, as I elaborate below. This is less "establishment hates iconoclasts" and more "people who know what they're doing don't back doomed projects."
I'm a biotech guy. Have worked in AAV gene therapy. And even without deep perusal of the technology, I can understand why Stark Tx was regarded as un-financible.
Problems include (but are not limited to):
1. AAV, though a promising technology for gene transfer is still expensive to produce, and carries significant safety risks at high dose. Does this sound like the type of drug modality you want to try for type 2 diabetes? A disease which can typically be well managed by safe-as-houses standard of care drugs? (typically only very bad type 2 patients even move onto insulin).
2. Gene therapy has generally succeeded in areas of high biological certainty. If your cells don't produce clotting Factor VIII, you have hemophilia. If I can use an AAV vector to transduce some % of the cells in your liver so they now produce Factor VIII, that will very likely mitigate your hemophilia. (spoiler: it does). But do we know with high certainty which gene(s) will work for Type 2? No, we don't -- and because carrying capacity for AAV is only 4.7 kb, it had better be only one gene, and not a too big one. Or else we are delivering multiple vectors (each one a new IND and new manufacturing!)
3. High biological certainty is also helpful because it gives you confidence that if your medicine works in a mouse or a large animal model, it will work in man. Hemophilia is like this. Knock out Factor VIII and hey presto, your beagle is a Romanoff! But is diabetes in a mouse similar to diabetes in a human. No it is not! So you'll get very little reduction of biological risk until you've dosed humans (and spent ~$20-$40M)
4. And even if you do show human POC, the path to approval in diabetes is long and expensive. And (as noted above) the standard of care is relatively inexpensive and has (literally) millions of years of patient safety data.
So why did The Biotech Establishment (which, for diabetes has funded, among others: cell therapy, novel antibody therapy, and of recent not, the fabulously successful GLP-1 peptide drugs) pass on Stark? Because they were threatened by pathbreaking innovation and an unconventional weirdo founder? Maybe! But more likely because most people with expertise in drug development would regard the lead program as (very) unlikely to work, unlikely to be competitive if it does work, very expensive to get to the point where you have any reduction of risk. It's a bad project!
Whenever Batman critics at the comic book store would complain, "Why is the world's smartest man wasting his time punching muggers in the face in back alleys? Ooh, it's so unrealistic!" my default riposte was to bring up Marilyn vos Savant.
They're smart in different ways. And it depends which version of the comics characters we're talking about, since both of them have undergone the same kind of power creep over the decades.
Anyway, we all know Reed Richards is the smartest 😁
He's presumably somewhat older since his kids have been allowed to gradually age, but Marvel's sliding timeline keeps that well under the sixtyish real-world years since those early stories.
Yes, the 1940's Batman is the best. Rich enough for a house on a hill and rich enough to leave work to fools and horses, but not super duper billionaire. Brave, but a glass jaw. Avenging his parents, but not nuts about it, it's just something worth doing. Like the Hatfields and McCoys.
Modern versions (I'm thinking of you, "Gotham") tend to go heavy on the dark, brooding, Gothic flavour. The 40s and 50s Batman was much lighter in tone; Bruce Wayne was smart and capable, not lurking in the dark cave, and was able to pull off the "social butterfly" role convincingly.
I was a kid in the 70s so that's my reference point for Batman and Superman, and let's say the 70s were... colourful 😁 Those, and the campy 60s show which I didn't pick up on because I was a young child, and watched it uncritically with my granny.
I remember saving my pocket money to buy an annual and one of the stories was a variation on "The Picture of Dorian Grey". The Bronze Age version is the one which has cemented itself as 'my' Batman; I didn't follow the series into the 80s but I did have Strong Opinions as Jason Todd as the new Robin (mainly "there is only ONE Robin and who is this brat and hurry up and kill him off").
70s Batman comics trended more serious than the Silver Age/Batmania era. (Though in those days reprints and backups were a lot more common, so comics in the rack presented a mix of eras.) But Bruce Wayne didn't go from well-adjusted pillar of society to brooding obsessive till the 80s.
Frank Miller was the main inflection point, and even he initially did that as a possible future Batman whose war on crime had gone on too long. Then after that became a mega-hit, he projected it back to Year One and collected a posse of imitators.
Jason Todd was likewise retconned from blond Dick Grayson retread to so delinquent the fans voted to kill him off, leading to the round-Robin that ultimately wound up with the Batman Family being bigger than Superman's supporting cast.
You're right about the 70s era, but they did still leave some horror, magic, and SF-tinged stories through. They didn't go full-on grim, brooding, dark, gothic, constantly rainy Gotham until the 80s.
I have very mixed feelings about Frank Miller. I don't like what he did with the character, but I acknowledge that it was wildly successful. The problem was, as you say, it was such a mega-hit that instead of leaving it as an AU Batman, it was crowbarred in as a retcon for everything.
The movies were dreadful. DC has never known how to manage its properties, and until the recent flops Marvel was streets ahead in turning them into movies everyone would want to see. DC on the other hand seemed to think the solution was "Make Batman campier. Make Superman grittier". After the first two Tim Burton ones, I didn't go near the rest of them. And don't talk to me about Ben Affleck - I dislike him as an actor, so the mere thought of his scowly petulant face under the Batmask makes me shudder.
I did think Michael Keaton as Batman wouldn't work, either, but Burton managed to pull that off. I've seen some reviews of the new Flash movie that say when Keaton's Batman shows up, that's the best part of it (and I can believe it).
I suppose the version we read/saw at a particular age is the one that will be the Platonic form for our notion of what the character should be, so yeah: 70s Bats and Supes for me!
I always appreciated the characterization of DC's second Mr. Terrific as "the third smartest man on Earth". Exactly the right way to establish that he's the smartest man in virtually every room and someone that other supergeniuses have to take seriously, while being openly unbothered about the ultimate superlative, (which those who care can argue between Batman, Luthor, Brainiac 5, etc).
I’m in higher ed. Believe me, there’s *plenty* of legitimate criticisms of higher ed that can be made. But one that I am sick to death of seeing is “we make 18-22 year olds spend a fortune on college when they don’t really need it to go get a job.” Even worse is when the sole focus is on the smartest and most driven who would succeed under any conditions. And people accuse higher ed of being elitist! Here’s the thing: universities were never designed to produce workers. We are here to create, curate, and disseminate knowledge. Full stop. Back when few people went to college, higher education really was a luxury item for the gentry. People who didn’t have to work in the mines got to go on a Grand Tour of Europe, or own fancy jewelry, or got to read Homer, Byron, and Nietzsche and learn calculus, the latest in physics, and the development of representational art.
When college became available to the middle class, and even a possibility for the lower class, that was a wonderful way of making these fruits of civilization more widely available. Then business opportunistically saw that they could outsource job training to colleges, making future job applicants pay for their own training. On top of that, higher ed became so expensive that non-rich students became obsessed with “what course of study will get me my first job?” So now even people who should know better just think of higher ed as preparation for employment and criticize it on that basis. It’s as if we had a fad of eating peas off a knife and some critics come along to say that’s stupid—a fork or a spoon would work better. I agree! But that just shows we’ve somehow forgotten the true reason for a knife. It doesn’t mean that knives lack value or aren’t necessary.
Oh dear, for the struggling masses college has almost always been about preparation for employment. The ~$100k cost of (four years at) a state college, makes that almost mandatory. I'm in the happy situation of having my two kids graduated and working in their chosen field, one went to school to be a music teacher and the other an engineer. Focus on career from day one.
Yes, but not career *alone*. Scott makes an off-hand comment about the Gen Ed class, and while it may be the annoyance it sounds like, the idea is to try and fulfil the purpose of going to university - not to be stuffed with the tools of your chosen trade like a Strasbourg goose, but to get at least a taste of the whole world of culture and learning.
From 1941 letter of Tolkien, in response to request for something about the late Professor George Stuart Gordon:
"Gordon was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds from 1913 to 1922. Later, he was Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, from 1922 to 1928; President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Professor of Poetry there, and Vice-Chancellor (1938–1941).
A personal contribution of his was his doctrine of lightheartedness: dangerous, perhaps, in Oxford, necessary in Yorkshire. No Yorkshireman, or woman, was ever in danger of regarding his class in finals as a matter of indifference (even if it did not have a lifelong effect on his salary as a school teacher): the poet might 'sit in the third and laugh', but the Yorkshire student would not. But he could be, and was, encouraged to play a little, to look outside the 'syllabus', to regard his studies as something larger and more amusing than a subject for an examination. This note Gordon struck and insisted on, and even expressed in print in the little brochure which he had made for the use of his students. There was very little false solemnity, except rarely and that among the students."
That is incorrect. The high cost of college is a relatively new phenomenon, on the order of 30+ years. I was an undergrad at a well-regarded SLAC in the 1980s and my $14,000 academic scholarship completely paid for two years there. $14k in today’s money is just over $42k, which might get you one year of just tuition at the same place. State colleges were far cheaper.
OK college is part of the cost disease that has struck lately. I went to a state college in the 80's. It was still all about getting a job for at least 90% of the people I was there with.
>We are here to create, curate, and disseminate knowledge.
Wow do you (generally, not specifically) do a shit job of it...
I do totally agree that there is an important place for college. At maybe 1/3 the current enrollment figures, possibly less.
But it seems pretty actively hostile to creating/curating/disseminating knowledge these days. Not somewhere I would want to be if I had any interested in pursuing the truth about anything, and especially anything even vaguely politically adjacent. They might as well be medieval monasteries, and should suffer the same fate.
"If you’re a future budget analyst or middle manager who wants to drop out of college without it sending the wrong signal, what do you do?"
I assume Thiel doesn't care about the middle managers, right? Not much is lost when society has to wait a couple of extra years for a bureaucrat.
Maybe for society at large it would be a much better tactic to create some sort of barebones 2-year college that is inexpensive and difficult enough to serve as a good signal, get geniuses to go there, and force people to accept that as an alternative to college. But I assume that's not at all what Thiel's after (and would require getting entangled in the paper belt so he'd lose I guess)
No one likes middle managers and other purveyors of bureaucratic bullshit. But unless you have a better idea for how to organize billions of people in a. Complex economy, you’re basically the same as the people who say “we just have to end capitalism and we can fix all the world’s problems”.
This is likely self serving, as I am on the cusp of middle-manager-hood, but I think the contempt for middle managers almost exclusively comes from people who have never worked for a semi-sizable company (or sour grapes from people who peak somewhere below middle management).
As far as I can tell, a main role of middle management is to be a mediation layer between the metis of the company, held by the rank-and-file, and upper management's attempts at running a company in a High Modernist way. This is an important and difficult task!
This is an important and difficult task. In fact, I believe that it is SO difficult that only in the constant competition of the private sector is middle management kept lean and focused on the important tasks. In the public sector, it's easier to just add more and more layers of middle management to insulate yourself from the difficult parts, and then nobody is really good at the important parts.
For various reasons the moral of the Thiel story reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's short story Asleep at the Switch, within the novel Jailbird:
“Asleep at the Switch” is a story about the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor angel at the Gates of Paradise had to say to him. It was some story about how Einstein could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc².
“But there you were—asleep at the switch again,” said the auditor angel.
“Yes,” said Einstein politely, “it does seem rather typical.”
“So you see,” said the auditor, “life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not.”
“Yes, I see that now,” said Einstein.
“Would you mind saying that in so many words?” said the auditor. “That life was fair.”
“Life was fair,” said Einstein.
“If you don’t really mean it,” said the auditor, “I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox—even though you had only five more years to live—” The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.
“I would have been rich?” said Einstein.
“‘Comfortable,’ shall we say?” said the auditor smugly. “But there you were again—” And again his eyebrows went up. “Asleep at the switch?” asked Einstein hopefully.
The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. “So you see, Doctor Einstein,” he said, “we can’t blame God for everything, now can we?” He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.
So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.
But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.
A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters and himself into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.
There was Harvard again.
All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn’t only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.
It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.
So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors’ motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.
The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts’ respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein’s fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.
Nice, I don't know what to do. Our system has become too ossified. I wanted to say that we needed some college to break the mold and give students a chance to learn the skills they'll need at their jobs. But that would mean having some company willing to take a chance on these students from a non-traditional school. It's a chicken and egg problem. (I'm recalling a story about the birth of MIT and how it was supported by the industries that wanted to hire the graduates.) I guess the only sure thing I can say is that the idea that everyone needs to go to college is dumb.
I didn't really decide I wanted college until fifteen years after I dropped out. I kept meeting college grads who weren't exactly rocket scientists, and saw homeless people driving new cars. Of course, I changed from English to Education, then finally graduated in history. On the way, I 'wasted' a year and a half in education and more than seven psychology courses, and earned a BA after 180 units.
But I learned a degree is no big thing, and doesn't require any particular vigor. It's just jumping through hoops. But unless I had experienced the challenge and success, I wouldn't know that. So I learned something: I learned how to learn.
I dislike business books, self-help books, and business self-help books, plus I am not a libertarian so I should hate this, but I'm laughing too hard to spin up any bile.
"Our commercial printer had misunderstood our request and printed them on seven-foot-long scrolls"
That's what you get for trying to emulate a squabble of German monks, Michael. You shoulda stuck with Leo X! Did Luther have a pet elephant that, when it died, Raphael was commissioned to create a fresco for its burial place? No, he did not!
All the same, when Gibson is talking about dropping out of school because talent doesn't need formal education, I note that he and his colleague are not touring high schools looking for kids before they go to college, he's touring colleges on his version of the milk run. That would seem to indicate that there is *some* value in the college selection and admission process.
"Proving that people can become billionaire tech founders without college degrees implicitly suggests they can be successful middle managers or budget analysts without college degrees. So the sort of companies that need middle managers and budget analysts should also consider hiring people without degrees, and the sorts of average-level-of-talent-and-motivation people who want these jobs should consider skipping college."
I think, no? Because as we've seen with FTX (don't mention the war, sorry) when you have smart people in charge who have wonderful ideas and are throwing out the stuffy old ways of doing business because they are smart and know modern stuff, you really do need some of the older guys and gals in office business wear who cut their teeth on the stuffy old ways to step in and make sure you do things like have a set of accounts, not just 'everyone dip in to the kitty and take what they need for their great idea'.
The smart drop-out founders with the bright ideas may not need the formal qualifications, but if they're going to get anywhere implementing their bright ideas, they need a structure, and that needs the less bright people who slogged along and got the relevant piece of paper and worked as a middle manager or budget analyst. Maybe the lower levels don't need the college degree, but they need some kind of training, and professional bodies are not just gatekeeping to create artificial scarcity so they can hike up salaries for their members.
> I think, no? Because as we've seen with FTX (don't mention the war, sorry) when you have smart people in charge who have wonderful ideas and are throwing out the stuffy old ways of doing business because they are smart and know modern stuff, you really do need some of the older guys and gals in office business wear who cut their teeth on the stuffy old ways to step in and make sure you do things like have a set of accounts, not just 'everyone dip in to the kitty and take what they need for their great idea'.
Eh. SBF is going to jail because, regardless of his intent, he primarily fucked up accounting and kept bad records in an excruciatingly heavily regulated old boys club style industry that had a run.
SV has classically hated regulated spaces because it's not too far off from having to placate the Ellsworth Toohey class to succeed.
A typical tech company does not implode if they make the mistakes SBF made. They rarely get stuck irrevocably giving their wealth away in a matter of hours because of bugs or idiocy and then get to go to jail just for it.
Having the older guys and gals is only important if you need to be a welcome member of the older guys and gals club.
"SBF is going to jail because, regardless of his intent, he primarily fucked up accounting and kept bad records in an excruciatingly heavily regulated old boys club style industry that had a run."
So you regard "let's keep records of:
(1) Who gave us money
(2) How much money
(3) Where we put that money
(4) What happened that money
(5) Who did we give that money to"
is all "old boys club style"?
I hope you'd be happy with a bank that went "Oh hey hi, MIke! Uh, you want your account balance? Dude, who knows? You want your money? Sorry guy, the guy who deals with that is on three weeks vacation, call back then?
Have we your money? Man, who can say, how should I know? Probably? Maybe? Remind me, how much did you deposit again?"
I find myself curiously ambivalent, since my own history embodies elements demonstrating both sides of the conflict.
I guess I would say that, if you expect college to teach practical skills or true theoretical knowledge, you’re mistaken about it. If you genuinely want those things, and go to college to get them, unless you’re very lucky, the college itself will be little help. They don’t have some magic procedure that will give you skills or knowledge from sitting in a classroom and filling out test/homework forms.
But college is still an essential institution, in that it brings together cadres of people who care about the thing you’ve gone there to study. Together with them, you can learn it much better than on your own or from a college course.
(I’m telling you this like I discovered it; but actually, I was taught this by college professors, many of whom are very self-aware. They know that the students who really learn, learn from each other.)
It sounds like maybe Thiel and Gibson built a business model on poaching from these cadres; luring away from colleges the only thing that ever made them genuinely useful: the brightest, most self-directed students, with the strongest leadership abilities. I.e. the ones who are responsible for most of the actual learning that happens on college campuses.
I don't get this attitude " if you expect college to teach practical skills or true theoretical knowledge, you’re mistaken about it."
I went to a small liberal arts college for a Chemistry degree. I mention "small liberal arts" because there were no "gen ed" classes. We had to take classes from a sufficiently broad range of subjects to graduate; I mostly did music, cog sci, and film classes when I could. All of those classes gave me the distinct impression that the professors were attempting to train us to, at the very least, be good academics in those fields. The cog sci classes were quite obviously designed for pre-meds or students going for a PhD in cognition/psychology or whatever. The econ 101 class I took was, while extremely basic (barely covered more than I got in AP econ in high school), laying the foundation necessary for anyone planning on becoming an economist.
And I mentioned I was a chemistry major because **COLLEGE CHEMISTRY CURRICULUM INCLUDES A COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF JOB-RELATED SKILLS TRAINING** like everything we did in labs, which we had every week, for almost every chemistry class. Sure, 90% of labs I did in college had nothing to do with my current job (as a chemist), but at least 90% of labs were relevant for *someone's* career.
It seems like there are two rather different goals here that are being jumbled together: attacking the higher education system and increasing opportunities for innovation. These don't seem to have a lot of overlap, as far as I can tell. The number of 18-22 year olds with eight figure ideas in their heads that no one else thought of would figure to be vanishingly small. From my experience, a lot of innovation comes from industry insiders who came up with an idea how to do something new or different or better. Example: my old company had a modestly successful startup as a client that made software for optometrists and ophthalmologists' practices. The founders were five optometrists who apparently thought to themselves "hey, it'd be nice if we had software that did X; I'll bet other practitioners would pay to have software that did X. Let's try making software that does X and see what happens."
The issue, of course, is that it's difficult to generate those kinds of insights unless you're one of those practitioners in the first place. The goal, I think, for Gibson and Co., if they want to really start a fire, needs to be finding ways to get people from know-nothing high schooler to optometrist without having to pass through extractive institutions like our modern "2k per credit hour to be taught by grad students and adjuncts" university system.
"your plan might still get shot down because a planning commissioner thinks its glass windows are “a statement of class privilege”
So I clicked on the link to find out what was going on there, saw the objector's name, looked her up and within one line went "Aw yeah, that explains it":
"Myrna Melgar is an American politician currently serving as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for District 7 since January 8, 2021."
What the heck is it with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? I first became aware of this unique and special entity way back when it was issuing resolutions calling on Cardinal Levada to do what they wanted, not what the Church taught, in relation to Catholic doctrine and practice:
WHEREAS, It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great City's existing and established customs and traditions such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need; and
…WHEREAS, Cardinal Levada is a decidedly unqualified representative of his former home city, and of the people of San Francisco and the values they hold dear; and
WHEREAS, The Board of Supervisors urges Archbishop Niederauer and the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to defy all discriminatory directives of Cardinal Levada; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors urges Cardinal William Levada, in his capacity as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican (formerly known as Holy Office of the Inquisition), to withdraw his discriminatory and defamatory directive that Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Francisco stop placing children in need of adoption with homosexual households."
Well, that was back in 2006, we've moved on to new fights now.
But that is a terrible objection. There are better ones (I actually agree with her that the design looks awful, boxes stacked on boxes with floor-to-ceiling windows so that passersby have little choice but to get an eyeful of what you like to do at home) - so the lack of privacy, the lack of safety (can that mostly-glass structure be up to code?) and the expenses that heating and cooling those apartments will incur because all-glass = no insulation, which also means environmental impact.
Talking about how the poor don't have windows so this is a slap in the face for them? Ah, missus, just re-introduce the Window Tax and get some revenue off the ostentatious rich with their big windows, why don't you?
"The tax was introduced in England and Wales in 1696 under King William III and was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax."
Another possible criticism of Gibson's thesis (to which I'm broadly sympathetic, fwiw) is that it seems like to some extent he's free-riding on the sorting mechanisms of the system he wants to do away with. By which I mean, why spend so much time hanging around MIT in particular? Why not one day at MIT and one day at, say, Framingham State?
Maybe Gibson thinks MIT is useless to the people who go there. But if they all started believing that and stopped putting in applications to MIT (and the like), then people with the kinds of cognitive dispositions Gibson wants to recruit wouldn't be congregating in one place anymore, making the Gibsonian project of matching talent to capital that much less efficient.
“Everything you do illegally, you do efficiently. This, of course, is perfectly obvious. For one thing, you do not write at all because writing on an illegal project is suicide. For another thing, you work with whatever equipment you have on hand, and of course, you do everything on your lunch hour, which starts at 8:00 in the morning and finishes at 5:00 in the evening. Another thing, when it doesn’t work well and it is illegal, you drop it very quickly and kill the project. When it is legal, you carry it on to doomsday, hoping that somebody else will carry it on, so that when it finally fails you won’t be blamed. If an illegal project does succeed, you will be a hero, but if it fails you would like no one to know about it, so you bury it quickly. Illegal projects are very, very efficient from many points of view. We were allowed to do much of this.”
Jacob Rabinow. “The Individual in Government Research and Innovation,” in Innovation and U.S. Research: Problems and Reccomendations, ed. W. Novis Smith and Charles F. Larson (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1980), 161.
Philosophy major who grew up in poverty, and with a lot of ill-advised behaviors I was working through from 16-26, but who started a successful consulting firm at 32 that is now 9 years old, and has done very well given my educational and professional background.
So I am in strong agreement with a lot of this.
I am hoping to not need to send my kids to college, it doesn't seem to me like the value is much there for people already bright and academically inclined (the 9yo already has lots of opinions on say the French Revolution and Roman political policy). You can learn just as much, probably more online, and spend the time you would spend in school developing actual professional skills.
>If you’re a future budget analyst or middle manager who wants to drop out of college without it sending the wrong signal, what do you do?
Well in my case I will hope to provide my kids with enough professional advice/support and financial backing that they can make it work. I am evidence that if you are good enough at something people just stop asking what your credentials are (as long as you are NOT applying for a job). Which is why it is great being a consultant. I am known as the best at what I do, no one even asks what my background is (though by now I do have a lot of relevant professional experience). I don't even have a website. All word of mouth.
When I was 29 and first breaking into this industry and giving multi-billion dollar projects advice, I was included in rooms/meetings I would have NEVER been allowed into if I needed to be there as an actual employee.
I do agree that most people probably won't have my ability/desire to start helping the current educational paradigm burn down.
" I am evidence that if you are good enough at something people just stop asking what your credentials are (as long as you are NOT applying for a job). "
The problem is, to get to the point where people know you are very good at your job and you can then leverage that into "I don't need the fancy piece of paper", you have to have something to back that up, which in general is experience and evidence of successful projects.
And to get the "I have ten years experience of wrangling seniors at Cambridge", you have to be hired on first. Which, as you imply, does mean you need the fancy piece of paper. Some places may take a chance on hiring on Joe with 2 years of community college rather than Frederick with his MBA from Harvard, but it's a lot easier for Frederick rather than Joe to get his foot on the first rung of the ladder.
Even for you, the advantage your kids (and Bryan Caplan's kids, and Taylor Cowen's kids) have is that you are established, you have the contacts and knowledge to help them. You can always ask your good old buddy or that last place you consulted for to give your kids an internship. Joe's parents, the turnip farmers, don't have that advantage.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying "wouldn't it be nice, but that's not our current world".
Yeah but my parent was for all intents "a turnip farmer", and I definitely didn't get where I am with my piece of paper from "directional state" in "philosophy".
I didn't have a fancy piece of paper at all. And had to job hop a lot in my twenties to move up the ladder, and then luckily broke into an area where most of the current people were fairly incompetent.
My point was that there is a path for success that doesn't involve college and/or fancy pieces of paper. And yes I intend to make that path easier for my kids than it was for me. Who wouldn't?
I might be misreading your post but it seems like you did indeed complete your undergraduate education. So you wouldn’t really be an example of what you’re describing would you? I’m generally in agreement with you but it seems like in our current job market if you forego college you’re limited to an entrepreneurial path.
My point wasn't that there isn't "credentialism" out there. There obviously is.
My point is I am evidence that you can overcome this. I was literally pretty much nowhere at age 25. I had a CV that said I had a BA from directional state in philosophy, had worked part time as a standardized test grader since then, and didn't have any network connections or special skills/certifications other than I was in actual fact smart and in actual fact good with computers.
Scott's piece was despairing "if you want a future for you kid what do you do?". I am saying I am a partial example that it isn't all as bleak as that. I did end up on an entrepreneurial path, but isn't that the best path there is anyway? In control of your own fortunes, not beholden to the whims and vicissitudes of others' foibles?
I agree with you that you can overcome not having a degree. I'm curious whether you think having the degree helped you at all between the ages of 25-32? The reason I'm asking is this. I went to the Canadian equivalent of a magnet high school, where all of my classmates had (at some point) scored in the top 2% of an IQ test equivalent. I'm sure the test/process isn't perfect, but generally I'd feel comfortable saying that most of my former classmates are in actual fact smart. I still keep in touch with some of them, and the ones who didn't finish college express a lot of regret about not obtaining an undergraduate degree. They face difficulty applying for jobs, and they would go back and finish their degree if there was a way to do so without taking 4 years off work or taking classes part time for 6+ years. Now we're all still in our 20s, so maybe by 32 they'll feel differently, but it really seems to me that your options are greatly limited if you don't have a degree. Looking at job postings I get the same feelings, even companies who don't explicitly list a degree as a requirement mention wanting either the degree or experience in lieu of the degree, which is a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
>I'm curious whether you think having the degree helped you at all between the ages of 25-32?
Oh for sure it did. The friendships and connections I made with 1 or 2 students and a half dozen faculty were highly valuable to me intellectually/socially. But in retrospect none of that required being a student. The clubs I was in were not restricted to students, neither are the classes, you can audit them.
So in terms of enrolling what I got was a bunch of time wasted on stuff I didn't need and a piece of paper at the end in exchange for $60,000 or whatever.
"but it really seems to me that your options are greatly limited if you don't have a degree."
For sure especially at the start. Once you work your way up a bit less so. My sister
dropped out of college repeatedly, made a huge mess of her life, worked her way up in medical insurance, and then switched to politics and is now a highly paid political consultant. My sister in law who is a dummy, dropped out of several colleges, pursued the trades for a while, then pursued another career, then decided at 35 she wanted to be a civil engineer, went to school and actually finished.
Like if my son wants to be a geologist I will tell him to go to college. You cannot "break into" geology very easily as far as I know. But if he is like 75% of college students who just wants to vaguely studying "something" and then will begin as an office monkey, I would tell him to just start as an office monkey now. Also my son is 9, so I am also betting here that in say 2035 not having a degree is going to be seen as less of a problem than it is today.
I would also tell you that in my "peer group" almost everyone was underutilized and underemployed and felt the job market sucked at 25-30. And now at 35-40 we are almost all highly successful. Some of it is really jsut about putting in your dues and demonstrating to people that you are effective and getting some actual experience.
Also I would encourage you to ignore job requirement sin applications if you thin there won't be many applicants. They get ignored a lot.
Of course everyone wants to help out their kids, but do you see yourself the argument that the persons who did it the hard way by "went into work soon as I left school, had to job-hop around, it took a while before I got enough experience to be taken seriously" are eager to help their kids cut out some of that by "send them to college"?
"send them to college" isn't some guarantee of success either. LOTS of kids take 6 or 7 years, and some of them don't even finish their degrees. Or they could go to college and get convinced that studying "art history" is a good idea. Happens all the time.
The question isn't:
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with no degree and little/no work experience"
or
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with a degree and little/no work experience".
It is:
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with no degree and substantial work experience"
or
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with a 80% chance of degree, little/no work experience, $100,000 in debt and their mind filled up with a bunch of nonsense".
It depends on the work experience. "Left school at 18, worked in hospitality industry" may be great if you want to move up the ranks to be a hotel manager, but "have done hours upon hours standing on my feet taking orders and mopping floors" is not going to impress a potential employer if they're hiring for 'can you work on our overseas investments desk?'.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but the whole "skip college and get a good life" only works for certain bright kids who are bright in particular areas which fit the demands of high-paying jobs in certain businesses.
As we're seeing with the current tech layoffs, that route is getting choked off right now; if companies do hire on, they'll be using "must have X degree" as a filter for job applications. I'm probably prejudiced by my own experience, leaving school in 80s Ireland just in the teeth of an economic recession then, and having experience of applying for jobs that were "yeah we've got 300 people applying, you don't have a degree".
I worked a summer temporary job (unpaid, because that was back in the days of "if you volunteer to work for the employer for free, they'll see you're such a good employee they'll offer you a full-time job" as advice not alone from school guidance counsellors but the government as to 'how to get a real job') and was well capable of doing the tasks, and they were happy with me. But when it came to a full-time job - "sorry, you need a degree in dairy science".
That was simply a screening method because of the volume of applications every vacancy received. So while I agree about the credentialism and how it's often unnecessary, I still have the inclination that "better to have, and not need, then need, and not have".
OK I hope that works out. For me and my kids, going without the credentials was not an option. It all worked fine for them and my only complaint is the cost, which is out of control compared to when I went to college. (I had enough resources such that my kids ended debt free, but we were 'lucky' that way.)
Educational credentials serves the same purpose that reputation used to serve. In a small local society with low mobility, you can judge people based on their reputations. This isn't entirely legible, but because everyone knows everyone else, it doesn't have to be legible.
In our modern society, where people regularly move across the country for jobs, we need some replacement for reputation. And an important and irreplaceable of reputation is that it is developed painstakingly over years of behavior.
School is a necessary evil. While I do think on the margin, society should replace credentialism with job-specific testing when possible, it's really useful from a societal perspective to have a legible ranking for someone's rough potential to do indepedent cognitive work--a ranking that has a clear interpretation anywhere in the country.
What can--and should change--is that college needs to cost *way* less. If we are going to force you people to spend the best years of their life signalling, at least don't put them in debt for the priviledge to do it.
Certification of some kind is a necessary evil, but there's nothing that suggests the university system is. I imagine the system would look very differently if our training and certification institutions were distinct entities. Instead, we pass occupational licensing laws requiring a bachelor's degree from a verified school, and do nothing to incentivize the schools to be efficient in moving qualified people through the system.
Oh that seems right. If any school could be certified by some other entity.... who pays for the certifying institution? Ideally it would be the businesses hiring the college grads.
The student, most likely. Same process as taking any post graduate certification, like you see in accounting, we just don't require school on top of proving your competence.
Oh, the student pays. So ~10% of your tuition pays for the certifying entity. (Or maybe we are talking along different paths? I didn't understand the part of not requiring schools? I was thinking about how you give accreditation to schools/ departments.)
I'd like to completely separate the schools from the certifiers. I think it's a conflict of interest that we let the schools certify whether they did a good job teaching you
Yeah I agree with this. So how do we make college cheaper?... besides having the tax payers pay for it. (Which is why my tuition was low. In 1980 NY State picked up most of the tab.) OK lots of people think we should pay for it with taxes on everyone, but this seems wrong to me. Giving a leg up to those who need it the least.
I haven't looked in-depth at the economics of higher education, but my understanding is that demand is artificially subsidized through student loans and the supply is restricted via liscencing and weird tax stuff. We should stop doing both of those market-distorting things and see what happens.
On a philosophical level, I think it would be better for everyone involved if we openly talked about how, for the majority of people, school is showing your worthiness to your employer. A lot of the irrationality surrounding school is that there is this mythology around being Educated that does more harm than good, I think.
Re: loans. Well those are sometimes needed. I like P. Thiel's idea of having the colleges be 1/2 signees on any student loans needed to complete the education. Making student loan debt non-cancellable in bankruptcy was a mistake. Someone with money needs to co-sign the loan.
And yes ease of licensing for schools.
Philosophy-wise, it would be nice to have a closer tie between college and the businesses employing the graduates. That seems in everyone's interest. But you can see how a business would not want to invest in someone and then have them go work somewhere else.
Can I get some clarification on this? Do the proponents of "college is just virtue signalling" think that people *don't* learn anything while going to college? That they could just sit in a library (or I suppose use the Internet today), read all the relevant textbooks, and bingo, now they're trained to walk into a pharmaceutical plant and start pulling levers (not on the factory floor, the higher level jobs)?
Because whatever training or education I got, I *needed* it. I would not have learned it on my own, and just reading the textbooks wouldn't have done it for me. I needed practical instruction as well, and the advice and insights that the tutors had which were not written down in the textbooks.
Or is the "college is just signalling" crowd simply indicating - well, I don't know what? They seem to be saying "my four years in college were a waste of time, I could just have gone straight to my first job doing what I'm doing when I was eighteen and finished high school". And for some jobs, maybe that works. But not for all!
Hmm, well I loved college and spent way too much time there. But let me try to answer some. I'm going to talk about an engineering degree, because that's what I ended up getting. The first signal you send is that you were smart enough to get into that college. Then once in college for engineering you need to be able to pass the first year courses in calculus, chemistry and physics. Some people aren't prepared for that. Once in the engineering program there are many required courses. Some of those are taught by good instructors, and others are rather blah. (I always told my kids to find out who the good instructors are and try and get into their courses.) Now you certainly learn a lot in those courses, but only maybe 10% of it will you use in your job. Engineering training is more about how to think about problems and less about specific skills.
So in closing, college is great and necessary for some people, but it's not for everyone. And "The rent is too damn high!"
" Now you certainly learn a lot in those courses, but only maybe 10% of it will you use in your job."
But you never know which 10% until you go to work? 😀
Thanks for your response, I do get the impression from some of the talk that "college doesn't do anything except give you a piece of paper for money" is the major view. I never went to college but I'd like to think *some* kind of useful information was imparted.
I think there are two main threads to the "just signaling" idea:
First, for fields of study like George H.'s example of engineering, the value is mostly-to-all in the classes specific to your major (or prerequisites thereto), so the sizeable chunk of the total time/effort/money spent on all the other requirements for the degree are wasted.
Second, for the remainder of fields (exemplified by the set of "<blank> studies" but also including a large portion of, e.g., English or psychology majors), there isn't anything in particular learned that's useful in a subsequent career (and for many of the "<blank> studies" degrees, much that's actively detrimental), so we at least shouldn't collectively be writing blank checks for students to pursue them.
I learned a lot of things in college/graduate school but mostly I forgot them and/or they were useless to begin with. I definitely could have started my career right out of high school without my many years of higher education and the world would have been better off, although college was enjoyable.
Maybe we should use an analogy to sports. The very best high school sports players (except for football) more or less skip college and go pro. The ones left playing college ball are good but not usually among the very most elite. So the decision to skip college and go into the real world should be framed as "I'm forgoing college to go straight to the pros". That sends a kind of talent signal, by analogy.
In the last 10 years I’ve hired 30+ people into engineering, marketing, etc roles who didn’t have anything like a bachelor’s degree. The job descriptions for the open roles at my company explicitly say “university degree not required.” We’re a pure software company just shy of 200 people now, and VC-funded.
I believe this is where the rubber meets the road on creating a cycle. Make it clear to the future founders in my company, most who probably do have BS or grad degrees, that it can be effective to hire people without degrees. So that when they go found their companies, and I join their Angel rounds, they have experience and an advisor reminding them to ditch degrees as a criteria.
It wasn’t like I came to this position through nature or nurture. School was easy, ended with an Ivy grad degree, and plenty of indoctrination in the power held by alumni and fellow-travelers. My education in the lack of necessity of hiring elite school grads came first, then an education in the rare but exceptional talent present in equal count in the pools of people without degrees as the pools of grads. It was counter-intuitive for me, until it wasn’t.
We’ve toyed somewhat seriously with creating a potentially accredit-able work + training program for folks coming out of high school. Unfortunately we’re in the worst possible local env to source any of the future greats: Taiwan and East Asia. Zero parents locally will accept less than “do 4-6 hours of homework each night to get into the best school, then get the best job, then create a family, then support us when we get infirm.”
I think this bias of very-talented-people-centrism affects many of criticisms of the educational system in this community. I mean specifically k12 education. Of course school was child prison for people who can't or don't wish to get along with other random kids who are not like them in a social jungle, and who can very easily follow their curiosity to gain much more knowledge than the teachers can teach them in a class. But that's extremely unrepresentative of the median child, for whom this system is constructed (to the extent that it's constructed for some purpose and not just as a slow optimization process over many competing interests).
I don't think the point of the Thiel Fellowship is just to let a few highly successful people skip graduating college. It's to make them high-profile examples in everyone else's minds.
As you say, the problem with not having a college degree in our current system is that "most people will assume on priors that you’re part of the first category, and downgrade your expected value as an employee or business associate." If this program can create enough famous college-less entrepreneurs, maybe it can shift those priors toward the second category (or even a third category of "so competent that they didn't need college"). And then (like your model of fashion) maybe people who are close to the Thiel-Fellowship-tier, but not quite in it, will start to use dropping out as positive signaling.... and so on.
This is of course very optimistic. It probably needs a lot more people and publicity than it has, in order to create a virtuous cycle on college signaling. But I don't think it's fair to say that it doesn't have potential benefits for anyone outside the very best self-made entrepreneurs.
If education is mostly signaling, and signaling unlocks market opportunity, it doesn't follow that we have to assume the only kind of signaling that matters is a college education. Younger generations have been using YouTube for just this purpose.
Despite the high bar of monetization and other challenges, YouTubers have a public transcript of their knowledge and ability to produce content. Does being a YouTuber translate by itself to any domain besides media? Maybe not.
But signaling is closer to something like (publicly-documented?) production for an existing market plus reviews. Signaling you can serve an existing market requires you start a business serving an existing market and share the reviews. Hyper-genius IQ not required.
Both - Peter Thiel was the CIA, and he faked his death to protect his family.
Great stuff. I agree that the ogre is barely noticing the potshots, but I think it's also failing to notice the crumbling foundations it's standing on.
There are definitely parts of the education industry that have taken notice of their foundations, but it has yet to penetrate deeply.
https://universitybusiness.com/pa-state-system-university-asks-to-sell-off-part-of-its-housing-inventory/
From what I recall reading a month or so ago, Edinboro is still trying to sell.
This metaphor could be used for the mountain with the same name too, interestingly...
> Polytropon - a famously untranslatable Greek word (“of-many-turns”? “always-has-a-trick-up-his-sleeve” “clever bastard”?) used to describe Odysseus.
This form of the word (πολύτροπον) is in the accusative case, just as it appears right at the beginning of the *Odyssey*:
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
Muse, tell me (of) the man of-many-turns who wandered very widely after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy
This is because "man" and "of-many-turns" are both grammatical direct objects of the muse's requested narration (the imperative ἔννεπε). However, the dictionary forms for "man" and "of-many-turns" are ἀνήρ and πολύτροπος, in the nominative case. If you're calling a person "of-many-turns" in English, you should presumably use πολύτροπος (polytropos), not πολύτροπον, much as you might say that Queen Elizabeth II had an *annus horribilis* in 1992 rather than an *annum horribilem* (as it would be in Latin, but only in the context of being the object of some specific verb describing her experience of it).
Reasonable, but GIbson uses πολύτροπον in the book and I don't feel strongly enough about this to nonconsensually edit it for the review.
Yes, that makes sense. I just think Gibson chose this particular form ill-advisedly (or uncritically).
Greek grammar is precisely the kind of education college dropouts miss out on. If Gibson knew of his mistake, he might endorse it as an object lesson that (he thinks) It Doesn't Matter.
Gibson and Thiel completely and totally do not get why anyone would care about the Odyssey and ancient Greek. If they think about the study of Greek and Latin texts at all, they probably think it's some weird fad of *pretending* to find this stuff fascinating, gorgeous and important. And they imagine themselves sweeping into a room full of faddists and shouting, "The emperor has no clothes on," while Ben Franklins fall out of their pockets, their hair, their nostrils, their large narcissistic mouths, and I won't go on about other orifices. And then the assembled faddists, freed from their compulsion to pretend The Odyssey is of interest,, stampede out of academia and on down to Bank of America where they take out loans to fund start-ups that are sort of like fucking PayPal.
Just flat wrong.
If you think Peter Thiel doesn’t care about and isn’t interested in ancient texts, you really have a very bad idea of what Thiel is like, framed by people who do not understand him and don’t care to.
Listen to Thiel go on Jerry Bowyer’s podcast and talk about Biblical interpretation. Find literally any talk where he goes on a tangent about the Greeks.
I disagree with many of his opinions but if you think he isn’t interested in the field of classics, or ancient civilizations, or religion, or history, you are blundering.
Um, you may be right. Every single account I've heard of him, including in Scott's review, gives me the impression he is a narcissistic asshole. None of them have made me even slightly curious to know more about him, therefore I do not. The main thrust of my complaint here was that he (in my imagination, anyhow) is not interested in the ancient language and moved by the literature. If when he talks about the Greeks it's more stuff from his theory about the little cracks and crevices in history where innovation can flourish, that's not really what I'm talking about his not getting.
Yeah, so, again I don't endorse Thiel in his entirety, but the man is genuinely well-read about theology and antiquity and interested in it for its own sake, and the sake of intellectual curiosity and what it means for man. It's not just single-minded pursuit of his pet theories.
I object to any characterization of Thiel where he isn't a guy with broad-ranging interests and talents, who cares about these interests as any genuinely intellectually curious man would do—the very idea is absurd if you've had any exposure to him that isn't mediated by his political enemies' polemics.
It's kind of weird, but I have this fascination with Thiel...maybe it's because he's more in the background compared to other Tech billionaires like Musk or Zuckerberg, which makes Thiel more interesting to me...he seems kind of like an "Eminence Grise" of the Tech World...
Who knows. Maybe he's the Rorschach ink blot of the tech world.
100% wrong. Thiel actually founded his own campus newspaper at Stanford because he was so mad that classical literature was dropped as a required course. From Thiel's wikipedia page:
He studied philosophy at Stanford University. During that time, debates on identity politics and political correctness were ongoing. A "Western Culture" program, which was criticized by The Rainbow Agenda because of a perceived over-representation of the achievements of European men, was replaced with a "Culture, Ideas and Values" course, which instead pushed diversity and multiculturalism. This replacement provoked controversy on the campus and led to Thiel co-founding The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, in 1987 with funding from Irving Kristol.
You may be rebutting a point I was not making, it's hard to tell. My point, which may indeed be wrong, is that Thiel and Gibson are people who would snigger at someone's thinking it was important to use the correct form of "polytropos" in their book, and taking the trouble to post an explanation of the relevant Greek grammar, along with the first 2 lines of the Odyssey, where the word appears. I picture them as people who cannot understand revering a poem, and by revering the Odyssey I mean being fascinated and moved by the original poem itself, in ancient Greek. I may be dead wrong about that. (People of that mindset do exist, though. I believe it was on here that someone remarked that now that AI could produce images & rhyming poems on demand we wouldn't need artists any more.)
I get that Thiel is interested in philosophy and history, including that of the ancient world. That interest, though, does not preclude his being indifferent to the literature of the ancient world. Neither does his fight to keep the classical literature course at Stanford. This is a one year course? So clearly students would be reading everything in translation. And that's fine, but it's not at all the same thing as reading the originals. So whether I'm dead wrong about Thiel comes down to whether he read & revered, or can at least understand reading and revering, ancient literature in its real, ancient form. I picture him plowing through world history scanning for ideas and images relevant to the goal of Winning by Getting Rich as Fuck, heaving "polytropos" into his wheelbarrow as he passed the Odyssey. But of course my picture might be wrong.
Anyhow, I freely admit I know very little about Thiel, because everything I have read about him, including Scott's review here, depicts such a repellant person that I have never felt any desire to know more about him. It may be that my reaction to the polytropos issue has little to do with Thiel, and is mostly an expression of my feeling about the way the world is changing.
Dude, get serious. "Insufficiently committed to fealty to ancient Greek grammatical rules" is an absurd criticism to level at anybody outside a classics department faculty meeting.
Let me rephrase for him/her.
Everything I know about Thiel from publicly available information is that he's a shitty, greedy, narcissistic human being. In the context of this information about his motivations for starting the Stanford Review... I'm updating my opinion of him to include "racist". I *do not* believe he has any intrinsic interest in western classics, I think he recognized it as an issue he could make hay over while a student.
Admitting being wrong is hard, I get it.
My criticism of them is that they cannot understand what it is to revere a poem. I mentioned Seth Schoen's detailing the relevant grammar as evidence of his reverence for the text -- maybe something a bit like reverence for the Torah. And I'm sure you grasped that. Why pick a detail supporting my main point, pretend it's my main point, then complain that my main point is an absurd nitpicking detail? You want me to get serious? How about you get fair.
Your criticism is entirely imagined and has no basis in reality.
Tell that to my friend on here, the atheist who twitted me with not understanding Scripture because he could read Classical Greek and I, he assumed correctly, could not.
If you can't even koine Greek Bible, dude, then what use are you? 🤣
Hmm, idea that people who read the Bible in English can't understand scripture doesn't ring true to me. I mean, the Odyssey is poetry. It's a story, but it's also a cathedral of words. The Bible is a mix of myths, people's testimonies, and, I dunno, religious teachings. It was never intended to be a work of art, where the language is a thing of value in itself. (Though I do think much of the King James Version is magnificent language.)
I never get this impression from these kind of people at all. I am sort of one of them, and I certainly learned 20X more about almost all subjects from my own personal readings than college. Fuck I took 3! astronomy courses in college for fun because I wanted to learn something about it and didn't learn one single thing I didn't already know from general reading.
And that was pre-internet/youtube. The point is you don't need some professor to make reading Cicero interesting, and if you don't find it interesting a professor isn't going to help.
Wait, what impression from these kind of people? I don't see the connection between my little written caricature of Thiel and your rant about the limitations of college. In fact I actually agree with you about the limitations of college. But what has that got to do with my complaining (perhaps unfairly) that Thiel and Gibson don't understand what it is to revere a poem? Did you think I was saying that the only way to learn to appreciate Homer is to listen to some college professor's lecture about him? I neither said nor implied anything like that.
The kind of people who find university/college tedious and an unnecessary hoop to jump through and think society should put many fewer people through it.
They are generally not uncultured boors, which is exactly what you accused them of. I would find myself very much aligned with them regarding college (though I am not a libertarian like Theil at all), and I for instance think vastly fewer people should be going to college. And yet I was reading my 6 year old the Odyssey. So clearly I think it has value.
There is a history (which you partook in with your comment) of accusing people criticizing modern liberal arts education as people who hate the liberal arts. It often comes across to me like church fathers decrying the translation of the bible into the vernacular because the peasants might get ideas. No one needs college to learn/love the liberal arts, like at all, and it is what college is the worst for.
College is great if you want to become an Aerospace engineer.
You're right, I did accuse them of being uncultured boors, and I may be wrong about that. But the rest of what you're mad at me about is ideas you are importing from somewhere inside your head, not ideas that I have. I already told you that I *agree* with you about the limitations of college. As for the liberal arts -- I don't know what to do about that. It seems to me that interest in literature is declining greatly, and that makes me sad. The age of the written word is ending, I think. We are moving on to new modalities -- video, virtual reality, forms of communication where the quality of the prose is not important. But I certainly agree that making people who want skills they can earn a living with go through 4 years of liberal arts education, paying huge sums to do so, is ridiculous. I do not think everyone interested in business, start-ups etc. is a boor -- that's an idea you imported.
As I've said, I really do not know much about Thiel. Maybe my mind has tarred him with the brush of Gibson. Do you at least agree with me that Gibson's not real impressive? He doesn't *think* well. Look how Scott quickly lays bare the shallowness of Gibson's thinking about alternatives to our present system of education:
"For example: what, exactly, is Gibson’s alternative to the education system? The back-of-book-blurb says Paper Belt On Fire is about “how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow” - but evolve how? What exactly has been proven here? A few of the very brightest young people, hand-picked by an expert young-person-picker and given $100K, can become billionaires or make great discoveries without a college degree. What are the implications? . . . And if you don’t have a good answer to this question - the one relevant to 99.9% of education system inmates - have you really launched a challenge to the educational system?"
I don't know Gibson at all really, but from what is presented here yeah it seems pretty shallow. And yes I was lumping you in with a class of people you are likely not a member of. Sorry about that.
I am just sick of the reflexive "you hate the Odyssey", to the comment "maybe we should not be teaching future office monkeys about Foucault and how to properly analyze James Joyce when they don't even know how to work Excel or what a mortgage is".
As for my answer, it would be taking most of the B and C level students in college, and preparing them to be office workers and mid level managers and tradespeople via vocational schooling.
I would much rather hire someone who took 2 classes on business behavior and etiquette, 2 classes on microeconomics, and 2 classes on the MS Office suite than someone who has a 4 year degree (if that was an option).
> But the rest of what you're mad at me about is ideas you are importing from somewhere inside your head, not ideas that I have.
In the context of having the same experience about Theil's ideas, this is deliciously ironic. :)
Warning (50% of ban) for this comment. High temperature + low effort; you sound pretty vicious but I don't have the slightest idea why you think this is true.
I don't think you should talk about the queen's annus in public like that
The solution to the problem is to find some less expensive mechanism than college to generate the information about someone that going to college generates. If you do that you could both get rich and do good.
One possibility is to develop apprenticeship programs for the sort of jobs college graduates end up with, paying a low wage but producing evidence of ability. That's suggested by a paper I saw an account of which looked at people who had been admitted to top colleges, comparing the wages of those who went to those colleges to the wages of those who didn't. The conclusion was that the Harvard graduates made more money in their first job but not thereafter, presumably because the student who was accepted by Harvard but went to San Jose State demonstrated in his first job that he was as good as the one who went to Harvard.
If it was that easy it would be happening, so the problem is finding out why it isn't and how that can be changed. Or finding another way of producing public information of quality. Adverse selection, after all, comes from information asymmetry.
Are you familiar with Triplebyte? Their business model is to be the first pass of hiring for programmers, replacing each company's resume screening with a centralized in-depth interview. Seems to be aimed directly at this.
They just shut down: https://triplebyte.com/blog/karat-acquires-leading-adaptive-assessment-technology-from-triplebyte
Oof!
It does seem like they (the team) were acquihired, but 'Triplebyte' itself will be shutdown. (I'd guess Karat won't provide anything like the same service.)
Even just for recruiting 'tech' workers, this seems like a *really* hard social-coordination problem – none of the companies trying this seemed to have had any durable success. Triplebyte was one of – if not *the* – best of the one's of which I'm aware.
The problem is one of the things college is a strong signal for is willingness to conform to societal expectations. It's very difficult to come up with an alternative signal of conformity.
I wonder to what extent military service is, or has been in the past, a substitute signal.
Perhaps there is some way to use Mormon missionary service? Tricky to disentangle the bundle of signals there, but there ought to be some way. Even just an audit study with all its imperfections might be informative at a baseline if you were to randomize mention of a mission relative to a resume with other shared signifiers (e.g. byu grad, from Utah, etc.) but no mission.
The book "How Children Succeed" (section 2.7) mentions some research by Carmit Segal in 2006 suggesting that military-recruitment tests are a good predictor of lifetime earnings. Quote:
"What the coding-speed test really measured, Segal realized, was something more fundamental than clerical skill: the test takers' inclination and ability to force themselves to care about the world's most boring test."
It's a network effect problem. The more people you have in this system the more valuable it is - so it's between hard and impossible to start small and compete with the mainstream.
Arguable, even the Thiel Fellowship can't succeed in scaling up. It only works now because to be selected means you're exceptional, and so people pay attention to you (and yes, people paying attention to you is absolutely essential in building a billion dollar company). If they tried scaling in any way, even by keeping the same enrolment criteria but just casting a wider net, the perception would be they're less exceptional - and thus they'll automatically be less successful.
Without the PR of the "Thiel" name and the small numbers, you have to compete with the old system - and this means getting enough employers to take you seriously so young people chose you. This is hard.
It has to be done on a large enough scale so employers recognize it, but that doesn't require anything close to the scale of the present system. And the problem is smaller if you initially specialize, develop your alternative for particular niches. I gather it has already happened for computer programming, that there are paths other than going to college, such as participating in open source projects, by which potential employees can demonstrate their competence.
For my part, I just wish my college ( a state school, nothing special) had offered classes/tools on starting a business for non-business majors.
I eventually got there, but it would have been a lot smoother if I'd been integrated with the right resources early, and some common pitfalls had been pointed out.
Could you perhaps give examples of such pitfalls? Just curious.
(did you mean to subscriber-lock this one? it doesn't seem controversial in any way...)
At first I was really confused about one of scifi's greatest legends having anything to do with Peter Thiel, and then realized it was some other Gibson I'd never heard of.
Definitely some self-serving bias here, but I'm increasingly sympathetic to all such forms of the idea that, the greater share* of societal gains from education are skimming the cream of brilliant folks...the regular system kind of works for this, albeit in a very costly and lossy fashion. But at least it's institutionally automated, no need for eccentric VC Supermen to intervene. Something to be said for that. Pressure to drop tracking, AP courses, etc. is disappointing in this regard. Yeah, some very particular smart kids will do just fine even without school. There's millions of candidates though, and I'm highly doubtful even a dozen versions of Thiel Fellowship could adequately screen them all. And ironically, the more we sabotage internal identification of promising students, the more incentive there is for doing TF-type things. (The end result might be good for everyone, but it's still playing defect with The System, and that's not a sustainable equilibrium. The ogre can smack down such potshots a whole lot harder if it really cares to. For now it's just the buzzing of flies.)
It's frustrating though, that one of the only credible alt-credentials is so libertarian-aligned. Maybe it's true that the Fellows are more diverse than the media likes to claim. Merely being associated with Thiel and VC though...that's its own kind of baggage, and puts selection pressures on who'd ever consider the offer. There's good reasons, of course - if the left is aligned with traditional education, then splintering off alternatives is betraying the coalition. (Not a coincidence which direction lotsa charter schools and proponents skew.) The school prison pipeline problem is a hard one to crack. Maybe LLMs will make MOOCs finally work, shrug.
*Which doesn't mean the other share, of educating the median and the lower end, isn't also high ROI. All things that draw out people's latent potential are good investments.
>"It's frustrating though, that one of the only credible alt-credentials is so libertarian-aligned."
Not exactly surprising though, right? Those who are less deferential to the powers-that-be in one context are also not deferential in another.
I went spelunking into the SEC website to see if I could figure out the Luminar transaction. I found out that Luminar was merged into a SPAC in 2021. SPACS trade at around $10 until they announce a deal. This was the right technology at the right time for the market and after the merger the stock spiked to $37. It now trades at about$7. Symbol is LAZR..
Like most early stage technology companies, LAZR loses a prodigious amount of money.
I couldn't find any filings about sales by the 1517 Fund, but that may be because they ceased to be an affiliate at some point after the merger with the SPAC (not a director and under 5% of the stock).
No question that the founder of Luminar was a great hire by 1517 and no question this was a successful financial transaction for the 1517 investors. I'll be interested now to see the company's ultimate fate.
This seems to disregard entirely that studying is a great amount of fun. A lot more fun than working IMO at least. I really miss my student days. It helps that I'm not American though, so I don't really feel the need to revolt against the system when it doesn't have gen ed requirements and I don't pay a lot of tuition.
I don't know if these people disregard it so much as they don't care? Even in their ideal world, if you wanted to go to college to study, they probably don't really care (although in this real world I'm sure Thiel is furious about gov't subsidies etc). I think they're just concerned about the people who would prefer to try interesting and ambitious things right away but are prevented by credentialing needs.
Oh, I see that you're right now. I guess it's a very reasonable thing to be concerned about.
Yeah lots of people can have fun taking out $30k in debt/year to hang out with friends and occasionally attend classes. It was a blast. Doesn't mean it is a productive use of societies or an individual resources.
OBJECTIVIST TO THE RESCUE!
(yes, I _will_ keep doing this).
How to start this virtuous cycle? One word answer: apprenticeships. Germany has (or had - don't get me started) a solid system of apprenticeships. Meaning, you could just leave high school, start learning something you'd be paid for, and that would be the basis of further career. I have a PhD and I am slightly jealous of the people who took that route and are buying their second, or third, houses...
There is a solid apprentice-to-middle-management pipeline, as well as the understanding that you can always go back to University to pick up the skills that would let you go from middle-management to senior management (e.g., the way some people get MBAs).
Would this work in all cases? I am more hard pressed to think of cases where it wouldn't work (okay, medicine). But even the sciences it'd work. You can really easily learn how to do most lab experiments, and someone with a few years of doing actual experimental work would succeed far better if later he got some courses in the science of his choice.
And companies _could_ do this really easily! Offer high-school kids a chance to apprentice as whatever. Yes, the money would be a pittance, but so's the money for internships etc. A company could easily drum up good publicity for this program ("Here we are helping the underprivileged").
This'd be one step back from the "Society of Status" and one step towards the "Society of Contract" (terms courtesy of Isabell Patterson, Rand's mentor).
There's your solution.
Side note: is there anyone, I mean anyone on earth, who doesn't regard the media as being complete and utter scum? Just curious.
Hmm yeah I sorta agree. But as a counter point: Way back in the 80's I was biking around Europe for the summer. At one point I hooked up with this guy from Switzerland who was in an apprentice program. He didn't like it all that much and was jealous of the American system that let late bloomers (like himself) go back to college and do what they wanted, rather than being somewhat trapped in the system he was in. Granted this is a single data point from 40 years ago.
It also doesn't hurt that Germany distinguishes between university in the "liberal arts" sense, technical university (TU) and "polytechnic" (Fachhochschule) all of which offer slightly different "services" to the student. Berlin alone for example has good institutions in all three categories, and as far as I can tell even nowadays there's less of the status signaling from what kind of place you went to, that you get in the US. Also, by comparison with the US, I think tuition is still practically free (minus a small registration fee and the cost of textbooks)?
All true.
> This'd be one step back from the "Society of Status" and one step towards the "Society of Contract" (terms courtesy of Isabell Patterson, Rand's mentor).
This distinction is originally due to Henry Sumner Maine, in his 1861 book *Ancient Law*, where he describes the "movement from Status to Contract".
I was not very impressed by the Stark Therapeutics website. They have three AAV siRNA candidates which are in the "early preclinical" stage at best (meaning, they've just started testing them out in mice, probably). This was cutting-edge in roughly 2004. It might work, but it's not especially innovative.
Yeah -- and specific concept of the lead (RNAi interference for type 2 diabetes) looks like a specifically bad idea, as I elaborate below. This is less "establishment hates iconoclasts" and more "people who know what they're doing don't back doomed projects."
Yes, I fully agree with your comment below
I'm a biotech guy. Have worked in AAV gene therapy. And even without deep perusal of the technology, I can understand why Stark Tx was regarded as un-financible.
Problems include (but are not limited to):
1. AAV, though a promising technology for gene transfer is still expensive to produce, and carries significant safety risks at high dose. Does this sound like the type of drug modality you want to try for type 2 diabetes? A disease which can typically be well managed by safe-as-houses standard of care drugs? (typically only very bad type 2 patients even move onto insulin).
2. Gene therapy has generally succeeded in areas of high biological certainty. If your cells don't produce clotting Factor VIII, you have hemophilia. If I can use an AAV vector to transduce some % of the cells in your liver so they now produce Factor VIII, that will very likely mitigate your hemophilia. (spoiler: it does). But do we know with high certainty which gene(s) will work for Type 2? No, we don't -- and because carrying capacity for AAV is only 4.7 kb, it had better be only one gene, and not a too big one. Or else we are delivering multiple vectors (each one a new IND and new manufacturing!)
3. High biological certainty is also helpful because it gives you confidence that if your medicine works in a mouse or a large animal model, it will work in man. Hemophilia is like this. Knock out Factor VIII and hey presto, your beagle is a Romanoff! But is diabetes in a mouse similar to diabetes in a human. No it is not! So you'll get very little reduction of biological risk until you've dosed humans (and spent ~$20-$40M)
4. And even if you do show human POC, the path to approval in diabetes is long and expensive. And (as noted above) the standard of care is relatively inexpensive and has (literally) millions of years of patient safety data.
So why did The Biotech Establishment (which, for diabetes has funded, among others: cell therapy, novel antibody therapy, and of recent not, the fabulously successful GLP-1 peptide drugs) pass on Stark? Because they were threatened by pathbreaking innovation and an unconventional weirdo founder? Maybe! But more likely because most people with expertise in drug development would regard the lead program as (very) unlikely to work, unlikely to be competitive if it does work, very expensive to get to the point where you have any reduction of risk. It's a bad project!
Whenever Batman critics at the comic book store would complain, "Why is the world's smartest man wasting his time punching muggers in the face in back alleys? Ooh, it's so unrealistic!" my default riposte was to bring up Marilyn vos Savant.
Ironman is smarter than Batman.
Oh, NOW we fight!
You ever see Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy?”
Ben Affleck and Jason Lee are comic book artists. Lee is the inker or ‘tracer’ as someone insists at a comic convention
Someone has a t shirt suggesting what Marvel can do as far as he is concerned. It’s pretty crass so I won’t even do the thing with the asterisks.
Oh, and Silent Bob speaks in this one.
Isn't Silent Bob's schtick that he talks (once) in every movie?
I do love so much about Chasing Amy, including the nostalgia of seeing a comic convention in the Puck Building…
It was an unusually long riff for Bob.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FlYZnd7dEPw
They're smart in different ways. And it depends which version of the comics characters we're talking about, since both of them have undergone the same kind of power creep over the decades.
Anyway, we all know Reed Richards is the smartest 😁
True, Reed Richards is gospel.
I'm a Marvel guy more than a DC guy, but people come into comic stores with *strong and vociferous* opinions about Batman.
So that gray hair at his temples. That was there when JFK was president. I haven’t seen a FF comic in a while. Does he have more gray hair now?
He's presumably somewhat older since his kids have been allowed to gradually age, but Marvel's sliding timeline keeps that well under the sixtyish real-world years since those early stories.
The way Bart Simpson has remained 10 years old for over 30 years
Yes, the 1940's Batman is the best. Rich enough for a house on a hill and rich enough to leave work to fools and horses, but not super duper billionaire. Brave, but a glass jaw. Avenging his parents, but not nuts about it, it's just something worth doing. Like the Hatfields and McCoys.
Modern versions (I'm thinking of you, "Gotham") tend to go heavy on the dark, brooding, Gothic flavour. The 40s and 50s Batman was much lighter in tone; Bruce Wayne was smart and capable, not lurking in the dark cave, and was able to pull off the "social butterfly" role convincingly.
I was a kid in the 70s so that's my reference point for Batman and Superman, and let's say the 70s were... colourful 😁 Those, and the campy 60s show which I didn't pick up on because I was a young child, and watched it uncritically with my granny.
I remember saving my pocket money to buy an annual and one of the stories was a variation on "The Picture of Dorian Grey". The Bronze Age version is the one which has cemented itself as 'my' Batman; I didn't follow the series into the 80s but I did have Strong Opinions as Jason Todd as the new Robin (mainly "there is only ONE Robin and who is this brat and hurry up and kill him off").
https://batman-news.com/2022/05/15/the-great-eras-of-batman-comics-1969-1981/
70s Batman comics trended more serious than the Silver Age/Batmania era. (Though in those days reprints and backups were a lot more common, so comics in the rack presented a mix of eras.) But Bruce Wayne didn't go from well-adjusted pillar of society to brooding obsessive till the 80s.
Frank Miller was the main inflection point, and even he initially did that as a possible future Batman whose war on crime had gone on too long. Then after that became a mega-hit, he projected it back to Year One and collected a posse of imitators.
Jason Todd was likewise retconned from blond Dick Grayson retread to so delinquent the fans voted to kill him off, leading to the round-Robin that ultimately wound up with the Batman Family being bigger than Superman's supporting cast.
You're right about the 70s era, but they did still leave some horror, magic, and SF-tinged stories through. They didn't go full-on grim, brooding, dark, gothic, constantly rainy Gotham until the 80s.
I have very mixed feelings about Frank Miller. I don't like what he did with the character, but I acknowledge that it was wildly successful. The problem was, as you say, it was such a mega-hit that instead of leaving it as an AU Batman, it was crowbarred in as a retcon for everything.
The movies were dreadful. DC has never known how to manage its properties, and until the recent flops Marvel was streets ahead in turning them into movies everyone would want to see. DC on the other hand seemed to think the solution was "Make Batman campier. Make Superman grittier". After the first two Tim Burton ones, I didn't go near the rest of them. And don't talk to me about Ben Affleck - I dislike him as an actor, so the mere thought of his scowly petulant face under the Batmask makes me shudder.
I did think Michael Keaton as Batman wouldn't work, either, but Burton managed to pull that off. I've seen some reviews of the new Flash movie that say when Keaton's Batman shows up, that's the best part of it (and I can believe it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je-qP9CBXGI
I suppose the version we read/saw at a particular age is the one that will be the Platonic form for our notion of what the character should be, so yeah: 70s Bats and Supes for me!
https://www.cbr.com/the-history-of-batman-and-supermans-comic-book-fights/
I always appreciated the characterization of DC's second Mr. Terrific as "the third smartest man on Earth". Exactly the right way to establish that he's the smartest man in virtually every room and someone that other supergeniuses have to take seriously, while being openly unbothered about the ultimate superlative, (which those who care can argue between Batman, Luthor, Brainiac 5, etc).
I’m in higher ed. Believe me, there’s *plenty* of legitimate criticisms of higher ed that can be made. But one that I am sick to death of seeing is “we make 18-22 year olds spend a fortune on college when they don’t really need it to go get a job.” Even worse is when the sole focus is on the smartest and most driven who would succeed under any conditions. And people accuse higher ed of being elitist! Here’s the thing: universities were never designed to produce workers. We are here to create, curate, and disseminate knowledge. Full stop. Back when few people went to college, higher education really was a luxury item for the gentry. People who didn’t have to work in the mines got to go on a Grand Tour of Europe, or own fancy jewelry, or got to read Homer, Byron, and Nietzsche and learn calculus, the latest in physics, and the development of representational art.
When college became available to the middle class, and even a possibility for the lower class, that was a wonderful way of making these fruits of civilization more widely available. Then business opportunistically saw that they could outsource job training to colleges, making future job applicants pay for their own training. On top of that, higher ed became so expensive that non-rich students became obsessed with “what course of study will get me my first job?” So now even people who should know better just think of higher ed as preparation for employment and criticize it on that basis. It’s as if we had a fad of eating peas off a knife and some critics come along to say that’s stupid—a fork or a spoon would work better. I agree! But that just shows we’ve somehow forgotten the true reason for a knife. It doesn’t mean that knives lack value or aren’t necessary.
Oh dear, for the struggling masses college has almost always been about preparation for employment. The ~$100k cost of (four years at) a state college, makes that almost mandatory. I'm in the happy situation of having my two kids graduated and working in their chosen field, one went to school to be a music teacher and the other an engineer. Focus on career from day one.
Yes, but not career *alone*. Scott makes an off-hand comment about the Gen Ed class, and while it may be the annoyance it sounds like, the idea is to try and fulfil the purpose of going to university - not to be stuffed with the tools of your chosen trade like a Strasbourg goose, but to get at least a taste of the whole world of culture and learning.
From 1941 letter of Tolkien, in response to request for something about the late Professor George Stuart Gordon:
"Gordon was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds from 1913 to 1922. Later, he was Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, from 1922 to 1928; President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Professor of Poetry there, and Vice-Chancellor (1938–1941).
A personal contribution of his was his doctrine of lightheartedness: dangerous, perhaps, in Oxford, necessary in Yorkshire. No Yorkshireman, or woman, was ever in danger of regarding his class in finals as a matter of indifference (even if it did not have a lifelong effect on his salary as a school teacher): the poet might 'sit in the third and laugh', but the Yorkshire student would not. But he could be, and was, encouraged to play a little, to look outside the 'syllabus', to regard his studies as something larger and more amusing than a subject for an examination. This note Gordon struck and insisted on, and even expressed in print in the little brochure which he had made for the use of his students. There was very little false solemnity, except rarely and that among the students."
That is incorrect. The high cost of college is a relatively new phenomenon, on the order of 30+ years. I was an undergrad at a well-regarded SLAC in the 1980s and my $14,000 academic scholarship completely paid for two years there. $14k in today’s money is just over $42k, which might get you one year of just tuition at the same place. State colleges were far cheaper.
OK college is part of the cost disease that has struck lately. I went to a state college in the 80's. It was still all about getting a job for at least 90% of the people I was there with.
>We are here to create, curate, and disseminate knowledge.
Wow do you (generally, not specifically) do a shit job of it...
I do totally agree that there is an important place for college. At maybe 1/3 the current enrollment figures, possibly less.
But it seems pretty actively hostile to creating/curating/disseminating knowledge these days. Not somewhere I would want to be if I had any interested in pursuing the truth about anything, and especially anything even vaguely politically adjacent. They might as well be medieval monasteries, and should suffer the same fate.
It seems like arguing over the true purpose of the silverware is less important than figuring out how to stop spending huge amounts of money on it?
> We are here to create, curate, and disseminate knowledge. Full stop.
You may want to talk to the universities about that, I'm pretty sure they'd disagree. Loudly.
I was just reading this today:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls
But even if you don't agree with this viewpoint, the academia nowadays is quite officially out of the "pure knowledge" camp.
I’ve been a professor for 30 years. I’ll keep my own counsel, thanks.
"If you’re a future budget analyst or middle manager who wants to drop out of college without it sending the wrong signal, what do you do?"
I assume Thiel doesn't care about the middle managers, right? Not much is lost when society has to wait a couple of extra years for a bureaucrat.
Maybe for society at large it would be a much better tactic to create some sort of barebones 2-year college that is inexpensive and difficult enough to serve as a good signal, get geniuses to go there, and force people to accept that as an alternative to college. But I assume that's not at all what Thiel's after (and would require getting entangled in the paper belt so he'd lose I guess)
No one likes middle managers and other purveyors of bureaucratic bullshit. But unless you have a better idea for how to organize billions of people in a. Complex economy, you’re basically the same as the people who say “we just have to end capitalism and we can fix all the world’s problems”.
I think this is spot on.
This is likely self serving, as I am on the cusp of middle-manager-hood, but I think the contempt for middle managers almost exclusively comes from people who have never worked for a semi-sizable company (or sour grapes from people who peak somewhere below middle management).
As far as I can tell, a main role of middle management is to be a mediation layer between the metis of the company, held by the rank-and-file, and upper management's attempts at running a company in a High Modernist way. This is an important and difficult task!
This is an important and difficult task. In fact, I believe that it is SO difficult that only in the constant competition of the private sector is middle management kept lean and focused on the important tasks. In the public sector, it's easier to just add more and more layers of middle management to insulate yourself from the difficult parts, and then nobody is really good at the important parts.
For various reasons the moral of the Thiel story reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's short story Asleep at the Switch, within the novel Jailbird:
“Asleep at the Switch” is a story about the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor angel at the Gates of Paradise had to say to him. It was some story about how Einstein could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc².
“But there you were—asleep at the switch again,” said the auditor angel.
“Yes,” said Einstein politely, “it does seem rather typical.”
“So you see,” said the auditor, “life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not.”
“Yes, I see that now,” said Einstein.
“Would you mind saying that in so many words?” said the auditor. “That life was fair.”
“Life was fair,” said Einstein.
“If you don’t really mean it,” said the auditor, “I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox—even though you had only five more years to live—” The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.
“I would have been rich?” said Einstein.
“‘Comfortable,’ shall we say?” said the auditor smugly. “But there you were again—” And again his eyebrows went up. “Asleep at the switch?” asked Einstein hopefully.
The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. “So you see, Doctor Einstein,” he said, “we can’t blame God for everything, now can we?” He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.
So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.
But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.
A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters and himself into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.
There was Harvard again.
All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn’t only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.
It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.
So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors’ motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.
The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts’ respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein’s fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is one of those authors of whom I need to read all their works.
Good idea.
Yes.
Ooh, wonderful story.
Who needs a Rolex when the night sky is free?
Nice, I don't know what to do. Our system has become too ossified. I wanted to say that we needed some college to break the mold and give students a chance to learn the skills they'll need at their jobs. But that would mean having some company willing to take a chance on these students from a non-traditional school. It's a chicken and egg problem. (I'm recalling a story about the birth of MIT and how it was supported by the industries that wanted to hire the graduates.) I guess the only sure thing I can say is that the idea that everyone needs to go to college is dumb.
I didn't really decide I wanted college until fifteen years after I dropped out. I kept meeting college grads who weren't exactly rocket scientists, and saw homeless people driving new cars. Of course, I changed from English to Education, then finally graduated in history. On the way, I 'wasted' a year and a half in education and more than seven psychology courses, and earned a BA after 180 units.
But I learned a degree is no big thing, and doesn't require any particular vigor. It's just jumping through hoops. But unless I had experienced the challenge and success, I wouldn't know that. So I learned something: I learned how to learn.
I dislike business books, self-help books, and business self-help books, plus I am not a libertarian so I should hate this, but I'm laughing too hard to spin up any bile.
"Our commercial printer had misunderstood our request and printed them on seven-foot-long scrolls"
That's what you get for trying to emulate a squabble of German monks, Michael. You shoulda stuck with Leo X! Did Luther have a pet elephant that, when it died, Raphael was commissioned to create a fresco for its burial place? No, he did not!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_(elephant)
All the same, when Gibson is talking about dropping out of school because talent doesn't need formal education, I note that he and his colleague are not touring high schools looking for kids before they go to college, he's touring colleges on his version of the milk run. That would seem to indicate that there is *some* value in the college selection and admission process.
"Proving that people can become billionaire tech founders without college degrees implicitly suggests they can be successful middle managers or budget analysts without college degrees. So the sort of companies that need middle managers and budget analysts should also consider hiring people without degrees, and the sorts of average-level-of-talent-and-motivation people who want these jobs should consider skipping college."
I think, no? Because as we've seen with FTX (don't mention the war, sorry) when you have smart people in charge who have wonderful ideas and are throwing out the stuffy old ways of doing business because they are smart and know modern stuff, you really do need some of the older guys and gals in office business wear who cut their teeth on the stuffy old ways to step in and make sure you do things like have a set of accounts, not just 'everyone dip in to the kitty and take what they need for their great idea'.
The smart drop-out founders with the bright ideas may not need the formal qualifications, but if they're going to get anywhere implementing their bright ideas, they need a structure, and that needs the less bright people who slogged along and got the relevant piece of paper and worked as a middle manager or budget analyst. Maybe the lower levels don't need the college degree, but they need some kind of training, and professional bodies are not just gatekeeping to create artificial scarcity so they can hike up salaries for their members.
> I think, no? Because as we've seen with FTX (don't mention the war, sorry) when you have smart people in charge who have wonderful ideas and are throwing out the stuffy old ways of doing business because they are smart and know modern stuff, you really do need some of the older guys and gals in office business wear who cut their teeth on the stuffy old ways to step in and make sure you do things like have a set of accounts, not just 'everyone dip in to the kitty and take what they need for their great idea'.
Eh. SBF is going to jail because, regardless of his intent, he primarily fucked up accounting and kept bad records in an excruciatingly heavily regulated old boys club style industry that had a run.
SV has classically hated regulated spaces because it's not too far off from having to placate the Ellsworth Toohey class to succeed.
A typical tech company does not implode if they make the mistakes SBF made. They rarely get stuck irrevocably giving their wealth away in a matter of hours because of bugs or idiocy and then get to go to jail just for it.
Having the older guys and gals is only important if you need to be a welcome member of the older guys and gals club.
"SBF is going to jail because, regardless of his intent, he primarily fucked up accounting and kept bad records in an excruciatingly heavily regulated old boys club style industry that had a run."
So you regard "let's keep records of:
(1) Who gave us money
(2) How much money
(3) Where we put that money
(4) What happened that money
(5) Who did we give that money to"
is all "old boys club style"?
I hope you'd be happy with a bank that went "Oh hey hi, MIke! Uh, you want your account balance? Dude, who knows? You want your money? Sorry guy, the guy who deals with that is on three weeks vacation, call back then?
Have we your money? Man, who can say, how should I know? Probably? Maybe? Remind me, how much did you deposit again?"
I find myself curiously ambivalent, since my own history embodies elements demonstrating both sides of the conflict.
I guess I would say that, if you expect college to teach practical skills or true theoretical knowledge, you’re mistaken about it. If you genuinely want those things, and go to college to get them, unless you’re very lucky, the college itself will be little help. They don’t have some magic procedure that will give you skills or knowledge from sitting in a classroom and filling out test/homework forms.
But college is still an essential institution, in that it brings together cadres of people who care about the thing you’ve gone there to study. Together with them, you can learn it much better than on your own or from a college course.
(I’m telling you this like I discovered it; but actually, I was taught this by college professors, many of whom are very self-aware. They know that the students who really learn, learn from each other.)
It sounds like maybe Thiel and Gibson built a business model on poaching from these cadres; luring away from colleges the only thing that ever made them genuinely useful: the brightest, most self-directed students, with the strongest leadership abilities. I.e. the ones who are responsible for most of the actual learning that happens on college campuses.
I don't get this attitude " if you expect college to teach practical skills or true theoretical knowledge, you’re mistaken about it."
I went to a small liberal arts college for a Chemistry degree. I mention "small liberal arts" because there were no "gen ed" classes. We had to take classes from a sufficiently broad range of subjects to graduate; I mostly did music, cog sci, and film classes when I could. All of those classes gave me the distinct impression that the professors were attempting to train us to, at the very least, be good academics in those fields. The cog sci classes were quite obviously designed for pre-meds or students going for a PhD in cognition/psychology or whatever. The econ 101 class I took was, while extremely basic (barely covered more than I got in AP econ in high school), laying the foundation necessary for anyone planning on becoming an economist.
And I mentioned I was a chemistry major because **COLLEGE CHEMISTRY CURRICULUM INCLUDES A COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF JOB-RELATED SKILLS TRAINING** like everything we did in labs, which we had every week, for almost every chemistry class. Sure, 90% of labs I did in college had nothing to do with my current job (as a chemist), but at least 90% of labs were relevant for *someone's* career.
I would believe that my perspective isn't broad enough. Good for chemistry departments!
It seems like there are two rather different goals here that are being jumbled together: attacking the higher education system and increasing opportunities for innovation. These don't seem to have a lot of overlap, as far as I can tell. The number of 18-22 year olds with eight figure ideas in their heads that no one else thought of would figure to be vanishingly small. From my experience, a lot of innovation comes from industry insiders who came up with an idea how to do something new or different or better. Example: my old company had a modestly successful startup as a client that made software for optometrists and ophthalmologists' practices. The founders were five optometrists who apparently thought to themselves "hey, it'd be nice if we had software that did X; I'll bet other practitioners would pay to have software that did X. Let's try making software that does X and see what happens."
The issue, of course, is that it's difficult to generate those kinds of insights unless you're one of those practitioners in the first place. The goal, I think, for Gibson and Co., if they want to really start a fire, needs to be finding ways to get people from know-nothing high schooler to optometrist without having to pass through extractive institutions like our modern "2k per credit hour to be taught by grad students and adjuncts" university system.
"your plan might still get shot down because a planning commissioner thinks its glass windows are “a statement of class privilege”
So I clicked on the link to find out what was going on there, saw the objector's name, looked her up and within one line went "Aw yeah, that explains it":
"Myrna Melgar is an American politician currently serving as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for District 7 since January 8, 2021."
What the heck is it with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? I first became aware of this unique and special entity way back when it was issuing resolutions calling on Cardinal Levada to do what they wanted, not what the Church taught, in relation to Catholic doctrine and practice:
https://www.sfbos.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/resolutions06/r0168-06.pdf
WHEREAS, It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great City's existing and established customs and traditions such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need; and
…WHEREAS, Cardinal Levada is a decidedly unqualified representative of his former home city, and of the people of San Francisco and the values they hold dear; and
WHEREAS, The Board of Supervisors urges Archbishop Niederauer and the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to defy all discriminatory directives of Cardinal Levada; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors urges Cardinal William Levada, in his capacity as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican (formerly known as Holy Office of the Inquisition), to withdraw his discriminatory and defamatory directive that Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Francisco stop placing children in need of adoption with homosexual households."
Well, that was back in 2006, we've moved on to new fights now.
But that is a terrible objection. There are better ones (I actually agree with her that the design looks awful, boxes stacked on boxes with floor-to-ceiling windows so that passersby have little choice but to get an eyeful of what you like to do at home) - so the lack of privacy, the lack of safety (can that mostly-glass structure be up to code?) and the expenses that heating and cooling those apartments will incur because all-glass = no insulation, which also means environmental impact.
Talking about how the poor don't have windows so this is a slap in the face for them? Ah, missus, just re-introduce the Window Tax and get some revenue off the ostentatious rich with their big windows, why don't you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
"The tax was introduced in England and Wales in 1696 under King William III and was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax."
The right comparison pic is of longevity founder/VC Sebastian Brunemeier!
https://twitter.com/sebastian_gero
Another possible criticism of Gibson's thesis (to which I'm broadly sympathetic, fwiw) is that it seems like to some extent he's free-riding on the sorting mechanisms of the system he wants to do away with. By which I mean, why spend so much time hanging around MIT in particular? Why not one day at MIT and one day at, say, Framingham State?
Maybe Gibson thinks MIT is useless to the people who go there. But if they all started believing that and stopped putting in applications to MIT (and the like), then people with the kinds of cognitive dispositions Gibson wants to recruit wouldn't be congregating in one place anymore, making the Gibsonian project of matching talent to capital that much less efficient.
“Everything you do illegally, you do efficiently. This, of course, is perfectly obvious. For one thing, you do not write at all because writing on an illegal project is suicide. For another thing, you work with whatever equipment you have on hand, and of course, you do everything on your lunch hour, which starts at 8:00 in the morning and finishes at 5:00 in the evening. Another thing, when it doesn’t work well and it is illegal, you drop it very quickly and kill the project. When it is legal, you carry it on to doomsday, hoping that somebody else will carry it on, so that when it finally fails you won’t be blamed. If an illegal project does succeed, you will be a hero, but if it fails you would like no one to know about it, so you bury it quickly. Illegal projects are very, very efficient from many points of view. We were allowed to do much of this.”
Jacob Rabinow. “The Individual in Government Research and Innovation,” in Innovation and U.S. Research: Problems and Reccomendations, ed. W. Novis Smith and Charles F. Larson (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1980), 161.
You are a bona fide funny guy Scott. Really enjoyed this one.
Philosophy major who grew up in poverty, and with a lot of ill-advised behaviors I was working through from 16-26, but who started a successful consulting firm at 32 that is now 9 years old, and has done very well given my educational and professional background.
So I am in strong agreement with a lot of this.
I am hoping to not need to send my kids to college, it doesn't seem to me like the value is much there for people already bright and academically inclined (the 9yo already has lots of opinions on say the French Revolution and Roman political policy). You can learn just as much, probably more online, and spend the time you would spend in school developing actual professional skills.
>If you’re a future budget analyst or middle manager who wants to drop out of college without it sending the wrong signal, what do you do?
Well in my case I will hope to provide my kids with enough professional advice/support and financial backing that they can make it work. I am evidence that if you are good enough at something people just stop asking what your credentials are (as long as you are NOT applying for a job). Which is why it is great being a consultant. I am known as the best at what I do, no one even asks what my background is (though by now I do have a lot of relevant professional experience). I don't even have a website. All word of mouth.
When I was 29 and first breaking into this industry and giving multi-billion dollar projects advice, I was included in rooms/meetings I would have NEVER been allowed into if I needed to be there as an actual employee.
I do agree that most people probably won't have my ability/desire to start helping the current educational paradigm burn down.
" I am evidence that if you are good enough at something people just stop asking what your credentials are (as long as you are NOT applying for a job). "
The problem is, to get to the point where people know you are very good at your job and you can then leverage that into "I don't need the fancy piece of paper", you have to have something to back that up, which in general is experience and evidence of successful projects.
And to get the "I have ten years experience of wrangling seniors at Cambridge", you have to be hired on first. Which, as you imply, does mean you need the fancy piece of paper. Some places may take a chance on hiring on Joe with 2 years of community college rather than Frederick with his MBA from Harvard, but it's a lot easier for Frederick rather than Joe to get his foot on the first rung of the ladder.
Even for you, the advantage your kids (and Bryan Caplan's kids, and Taylor Cowen's kids) have is that you are established, you have the contacts and knowledge to help them. You can always ask your good old buddy or that last place you consulted for to give your kids an internship. Joe's parents, the turnip farmers, don't have that advantage.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying "wouldn't it be nice, but that's not our current world".
Yeah but my parent was for all intents "a turnip farmer", and I definitely didn't get where I am with my piece of paper from "directional state" in "philosophy".
I didn't have a fancy piece of paper at all. And had to job hop a lot in my twenties to move up the ladder, and then luckily broke into an area where most of the current people were fairly incompetent.
My point was that there is a path for success that doesn't involve college and/or fancy pieces of paper. And yes I intend to make that path easier for my kids than it was for me. Who wouldn't?
I might be misreading your post but it seems like you did indeed complete your undergraduate education. So you wouldn’t really be an example of what you’re describing would you? I’m generally in agreement with you but it seems like in our current job market if you forego college you’re limited to an entrepreneurial path.
My point wasn't that there isn't "credentialism" out there. There obviously is.
My point is I am evidence that you can overcome this. I was literally pretty much nowhere at age 25. I had a CV that said I had a BA from directional state in philosophy, had worked part time as a standardized test grader since then, and didn't have any network connections or special skills/certifications other than I was in actual fact smart and in actual fact good with computers.
Scott's piece was despairing "if you want a future for you kid what do you do?". I am saying I am a partial example that it isn't all as bleak as that. I did end up on an entrepreneurial path, but isn't that the best path there is anyway? In control of your own fortunes, not beholden to the whims and vicissitudes of others' foibles?
I agree with you that you can overcome not having a degree. I'm curious whether you think having the degree helped you at all between the ages of 25-32? The reason I'm asking is this. I went to the Canadian equivalent of a magnet high school, where all of my classmates had (at some point) scored in the top 2% of an IQ test equivalent. I'm sure the test/process isn't perfect, but generally I'd feel comfortable saying that most of my former classmates are in actual fact smart. I still keep in touch with some of them, and the ones who didn't finish college express a lot of regret about not obtaining an undergraduate degree. They face difficulty applying for jobs, and they would go back and finish their degree if there was a way to do so without taking 4 years off work or taking classes part time for 6+ years. Now we're all still in our 20s, so maybe by 32 they'll feel differently, but it really seems to me that your options are greatly limited if you don't have a degree. Looking at job postings I get the same feelings, even companies who don't explicitly list a degree as a requirement mention wanting either the degree or experience in lieu of the degree, which is a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
>I'm curious whether you think having the degree helped you at all between the ages of 25-32?
Oh for sure it did. The friendships and connections I made with 1 or 2 students and a half dozen faculty were highly valuable to me intellectually/socially. But in retrospect none of that required being a student. The clubs I was in were not restricted to students, neither are the classes, you can audit them.
So in terms of enrolling what I got was a bunch of time wasted on stuff I didn't need and a piece of paper at the end in exchange for $60,000 or whatever.
"but it really seems to me that your options are greatly limited if you don't have a degree."
For sure especially at the start. Once you work your way up a bit less so. My sister
dropped out of college repeatedly, made a huge mess of her life, worked her way up in medical insurance, and then switched to politics and is now a highly paid political consultant. My sister in law who is a dummy, dropped out of several colleges, pursued the trades for a while, then pursued another career, then decided at 35 she wanted to be a civil engineer, went to school and actually finished.
Like if my son wants to be a geologist I will tell him to go to college. You cannot "break into" geology very easily as far as I know. But if he is like 75% of college students who just wants to vaguely studying "something" and then will begin as an office monkey, I would tell him to just start as an office monkey now. Also my son is 9, so I am also betting here that in say 2035 not having a degree is going to be seen as less of a problem than it is today.
I would also tell you that in my "peer group" almost everyone was underutilized and underemployed and felt the job market sucked at 25-30. And now at 35-40 we are almost all highly successful. Some of it is really jsut about putting in your dues and demonstrating to people that you are effective and getting some actual experience.
Also I would encourage you to ignore job requirement sin applications if you thin there won't be many applicants. They get ignored a lot.
Of course everyone wants to help out their kids, but do you see yourself the argument that the persons who did it the hard way by "went into work soon as I left school, had to job-hop around, it took a while before I got enough experience to be taken seriously" are eager to help their kids cut out some of that by "send them to college"?
"send them to college" isn't some guarantee of success either. LOTS of kids take 6 or 7 years, and some of them don't even finish their degrees. Or they could go to college and get convinced that studying "art history" is a good idea. Happens all the time.
The question isn't:
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with no degree and little/no work experience"
or
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with a degree and little/no work experience".
It is:
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with no degree and substantial work experience"
or
"will their job prospects be better at 22 with a 80% chance of degree, little/no work experience, $100,000 in debt and their mind filled up with a bunch of nonsense".
It depends on the work experience. "Left school at 18, worked in hospitality industry" may be great if you want to move up the ranks to be a hotel manager, but "have done hours upon hours standing on my feet taking orders and mopping floors" is not going to impress a potential employer if they're hiring for 'can you work on our overseas investments desk?'.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but the whole "skip college and get a good life" only works for certain bright kids who are bright in particular areas which fit the demands of high-paying jobs in certain businesses.
As we're seeing with the current tech layoffs, that route is getting choked off right now; if companies do hire on, they'll be using "must have X degree" as a filter for job applications. I'm probably prejudiced by my own experience, leaving school in 80s Ireland just in the teeth of an economic recession then, and having experience of applying for jobs that were "yeah we've got 300 people applying, you don't have a degree".
I worked a summer temporary job (unpaid, because that was back in the days of "if you volunteer to work for the employer for free, they'll see you're such a good employee they'll offer you a full-time job" as advice not alone from school guidance counsellors but the government as to 'how to get a real job') and was well capable of doing the tasks, and they were happy with me. But when it came to a full-time job - "sorry, you need a degree in dairy science".
This, despite the fact that when short-handed for the summer milk rush, they'd pull a guy out of the yard and give him rudimentary training on how to do the Kjeldahl test: https://www.gerhardt.de/en/know-how/application-notes/determination-n-and-protein-in-milk-and-milk-products/
That was simply a screening method because of the volume of applications every vacancy received. So while I agree about the credentialism and how it's often unnecessary, I still have the inclination that "better to have, and not need, then need, and not have".
OK I hope that works out. For me and my kids, going without the credentials was not an option. It all worked fine for them and my only complaint is the cost, which is out of control compared to when I went to college. (I had enough resources such that my kids ended debt free, but we were 'lucky' that way.)
Great post! Is it meant to be subscriber-only? Seems good enough and not-controversial enough to show to the masses
Educational credentials serves the same purpose that reputation used to serve. In a small local society with low mobility, you can judge people based on their reputations. This isn't entirely legible, but because everyone knows everyone else, it doesn't have to be legible.
In our modern society, where people regularly move across the country for jobs, we need some replacement for reputation. And an important and irreplaceable of reputation is that it is developed painstakingly over years of behavior.
School is a necessary evil. While I do think on the margin, society should replace credentialism with job-specific testing when possible, it's really useful from a societal perspective to have a legible ranking for someone's rough potential to do indepedent cognitive work--a ranking that has a clear interpretation anywhere in the country.
What can--and should change--is that college needs to cost *way* less. If we are going to force you people to spend the best years of their life signalling, at least don't put them in debt for the priviledge to do it.
Certification of some kind is a necessary evil, but there's nothing that suggests the university system is. I imagine the system would look very differently if our training and certification institutions were distinct entities. Instead, we pass occupational licensing laws requiring a bachelor's degree from a verified school, and do nothing to incentivize the schools to be efficient in moving qualified people through the system.
Oh that seems right. If any school could be certified by some other entity.... who pays for the certifying institution? Ideally it would be the businesses hiring the college grads.
The student, most likely. Same process as taking any post graduate certification, like you see in accounting, we just don't require school on top of proving your competence.
Oh, the student pays. So ~10% of your tuition pays for the certifying entity. (Or maybe we are talking along different paths? I didn't understand the part of not requiring schools? I was thinking about how you give accreditation to schools/ departments.)
I'd like to completely separate the schools from the certifiers. I think it's a conflict of interest that we let the schools certify whether they did a good job teaching you
Yeah I agree with this. So how do we make college cheaper?... besides having the tax payers pay for it. (Which is why my tuition was low. In 1980 NY State picked up most of the tab.) OK lots of people think we should pay for it with taxes on everyone, but this seems wrong to me. Giving a leg up to those who need it the least.
I haven't looked in-depth at the economics of higher education, but my understanding is that demand is artificially subsidized through student loans and the supply is restricted via liscencing and weird tax stuff. We should stop doing both of those market-distorting things and see what happens.
On a philosophical level, I think it would be better for everyone involved if we openly talked about how, for the majority of people, school is showing your worthiness to your employer. A lot of the irrationality surrounding school is that there is this mythology around being Educated that does more harm than good, I think.
Re: loans. Well those are sometimes needed. I like P. Thiel's idea of having the colleges be 1/2 signees on any student loans needed to complete the education. Making student loan debt non-cancellable in bankruptcy was a mistake. Someone with money needs to co-sign the loan.
And yes ease of licensing for schools.
Philosophy-wise, it would be nice to have a closer tie between college and the businesses employing the graduates. That seems in everyone's interest. But you can see how a business would not want to invest in someone and then have them go work somewhere else.
The loans needn't (and probably shouldn't) be Federal. Unwinding just that part would go a long way towards a sane equilibrium.
Can I get some clarification on this? Do the proponents of "college is just virtue signalling" think that people *don't* learn anything while going to college? That they could just sit in a library (or I suppose use the Internet today), read all the relevant textbooks, and bingo, now they're trained to walk into a pharmaceutical plant and start pulling levers (not on the factory floor, the higher level jobs)?
Because whatever training or education I got, I *needed* it. I would not have learned it on my own, and just reading the textbooks wouldn't have done it for me. I needed practical instruction as well, and the advice and insights that the tutors had which were not written down in the textbooks.
Or is the "college is just signalling" crowd simply indicating - well, I don't know what? They seem to be saying "my four years in college were a waste of time, I could just have gone straight to my first job doing what I'm doing when I was eighteen and finished high school". And for some jobs, maybe that works. But not for all!
Hmm, well I loved college and spent way too much time there. But let me try to answer some. I'm going to talk about an engineering degree, because that's what I ended up getting. The first signal you send is that you were smart enough to get into that college. Then once in college for engineering you need to be able to pass the first year courses in calculus, chemistry and physics. Some people aren't prepared for that. Once in the engineering program there are many required courses. Some of those are taught by good instructors, and others are rather blah. (I always told my kids to find out who the good instructors are and try and get into their courses.) Now you certainly learn a lot in those courses, but only maybe 10% of it will you use in your job. Engineering training is more about how to think about problems and less about specific skills.
So in closing, college is great and necessary for some people, but it's not for everyone. And "The rent is too damn high!"
" Now you certainly learn a lot in those courses, but only maybe 10% of it will you use in your job."
But you never know which 10% until you go to work? 😀
Thanks for your response, I do get the impression from some of the talk that "college doesn't do anything except give you a piece of paper for money" is the major view. I never went to college but I'd like to think *some* kind of useful information was imparted.
I think there are two main threads to the "just signaling" idea:
First, for fields of study like George H.'s example of engineering, the value is mostly-to-all in the classes specific to your major (or prerequisites thereto), so the sizeable chunk of the total time/effort/money spent on all the other requirements for the degree are wasted.
Second, for the remainder of fields (exemplified by the set of "<blank> studies" but also including a large portion of, e.g., English or psychology majors), there isn't anything in particular learned that's useful in a subsequent career (and for many of the "<blank> studies" degrees, much that's actively detrimental), so we at least shouldn't collectively be writing blank checks for students to pursue them.
I learned a lot of things in college/graduate school but mostly I forgot them and/or they were useless to begin with. I definitely could have started my career right out of high school without my many years of higher education and the world would have been better off, although college was enjoyable.
Maybe we should use an analogy to sports. The very best high school sports players (except for football) more or less skip college and go pro. The ones left playing college ball are good but not usually among the very most elite. So the decision to skip college and go into the real world should be framed as "I'm forgoing college to go straight to the pros". That sends a kind of talent signal, by analogy.
In the last 10 years I’ve hired 30+ people into engineering, marketing, etc roles who didn’t have anything like a bachelor’s degree. The job descriptions for the open roles at my company explicitly say “university degree not required.” We’re a pure software company just shy of 200 people now, and VC-funded.
I believe this is where the rubber meets the road on creating a cycle. Make it clear to the future founders in my company, most who probably do have BS or grad degrees, that it can be effective to hire people without degrees. So that when they go found their companies, and I join their Angel rounds, they have experience and an advisor reminding them to ditch degrees as a criteria.
It wasn’t like I came to this position through nature or nurture. School was easy, ended with an Ivy grad degree, and plenty of indoctrination in the power held by alumni and fellow-travelers. My education in the lack of necessity of hiring elite school grads came first, then an education in the rare but exceptional talent present in equal count in the pools of people without degrees as the pools of grads. It was counter-intuitive for me, until it wasn’t.
We’ve toyed somewhat seriously with creating a potentially accredit-able work + training program for folks coming out of high school. Unfortunately we’re in the worst possible local env to source any of the future greats: Taiwan and East Asia. Zero parents locally will accept less than “do 4-6 hours of homework each night to get into the best school, then get the best job, then create a family, then support us when we get infirm.”
I think this bias of very-talented-people-centrism affects many of criticisms of the educational system in this community. I mean specifically k12 education. Of course school was child prison for people who can't or don't wish to get along with other random kids who are not like them in a social jungle, and who can very easily follow their curiosity to gain much more knowledge than the teachers can teach them in a class. But that's extremely unrepresentative of the median child, for whom this system is constructed (to the extent that it's constructed for some purpose and not just as a slow optimization process over many competing interests).
Actually, "(not) rich enough to afford it" is an important group, which is a good place to start if you want to both make money and hurt the ogre.
I don't think the point of the Thiel Fellowship is just to let a few highly successful people skip graduating college. It's to make them high-profile examples in everyone else's minds.
As you say, the problem with not having a college degree in our current system is that "most people will assume on priors that you’re part of the first category, and downgrade your expected value as an employee or business associate." If this program can create enough famous college-less entrepreneurs, maybe it can shift those priors toward the second category (or even a third category of "so competent that they didn't need college"). And then (like your model of fashion) maybe people who are close to the Thiel-Fellowship-tier, but not quite in it, will start to use dropping out as positive signaling.... and so on.
This is of course very optimistic. It probably needs a lot more people and publicity than it has, in order to create a virtuous cycle on college signaling. But I don't think it's fair to say that it doesn't have potential benefits for anyone outside the very best self-made entrepreneurs.
> 200 million people who weren’t smart to get in, rich enough to afford it, or motivated enough to finish.
s/smart/smart enough
If education is mostly signaling, and signaling unlocks market opportunity, it doesn't follow that we have to assume the only kind of signaling that matters is a college education. Younger generations have been using YouTube for just this purpose.
Despite the high bar of monetization and other challenges, YouTubers have a public transcript of their knowledge and ability to produce content. Does being a YouTuber translate by itself to any domain besides media? Maybe not.
But signaling is closer to something like (publicly-documented?) production for an existing market plus reviews. Signaling you can serve an existing market requires you start a business serving an existing market and share the reviews. Hyper-genius IQ not required.