6 ms·

I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the pat

I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the paths to success other than a handful of narrowly prescribed routes. I wonder how many of the greatest minds of our generation are flipping burgers or making coffee.

tyingq 9y ago
Both are iconic, but as far as I can tell, neither lived in a particularly eclectic dorm. RMS was at Currier house at Harvard, but rented an apartment at MIT. I don't know whether Jobs stayed in a dorm in his brief college stint. There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology_undergraduate_dormitories#Senior_House https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...
- jdietrich 9y ago
  It's not about this particular dorm, it's about a broader social trend towards greater conformity and fewer second chances. Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. RMS slept under his desk in the AI lab for many years and is notoriously bad at politicking, political correctness and basic etiquette. Would a young RMS survive the administrative culture of modern academia? Steve Jobs graduated high school with 2.65 GPA. How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    > How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA? Just as many as there used to be, it's just never been easy. Actually I thought about it some more, and there are actually probably more opportunities today than before with the internet and the democratization of knowledge. > Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. > Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. I think you're looking at it wrong, Woz and Jobs started selling niche items directly to a small group of customers, that still exists today, they just wouldn't be selling blue boxes, maybe it'd be an interesting SaSS today.
    - andrewflnr 9y ago
      > I think you're looking at it wrong... You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        I didn't think it was meant to be a political post. The entire thread is about a purported cultural shift that's starving out the environment that people like Steve and Woz thrived in. In fact, I would be disappointed if it was meant to be about politics because it'd come across as an attempt to shoehorn politics into a discussion about much broader social trends
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        What exactly do you beleive politics to be? This sort of thing is a prime example of politics, the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding. Politics isnt just voting for congress-critters and presidents.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        I don't feel it is useful to narrow this to a political issue rather than a broader social trend. I also don't particularly appreciate the tone of your replies and especially statements like "the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding", which come across as somewhat condescending and less about seeking a proper conversation than about attempting to lecture. So I won't be replying further to this thread.
    - soundwave106 9y ago
      Steve Jobs had an acquaintance in college named John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" in the hacking world) who if I remember right taught Jobs said blue box skills. He possibly represents the endpoint which the OP fears. I've met him at a couple of raves back in the 1990s back when he was basically wandering around the rave scene. My impression: brilliant guy, but incredibly eccentric. I don't know much more about him beyond Wiki articles etc., but apparently he has had a bit of a tough time employment wise, due to a combination of his phone fraud convictions and his eccentric personality. This despite his heavy tie-in to early Apple history, and a fairly strong coding resume. Then again, from what I saw, his personality is not the type that would embrace Standard Corporate to begin with, I'm sure. But said personality means he never got rewarded much for what he did. If I remember right, he actually had to crowdfund for some medical issues recently. I think its fair to say at any rate that his talent potential ended up being underutilized. You are right that it's possible that there are more opportunities for these sort of weirdos, but in order for that to exist, there has to be a space for the small corporation that is more willing to give eccentricity space. One of the dangers of corporate consolidation is exactly this: large corporations are probably more likely to exclude people with mild criminal records because checklists, and they are less likely to give space to people that don't fit into corporate cultures. Consolidation tends to kill innovation; perhaps this is one of the ways. Likewise, from a university perspective, it won't matter as much if Big University kills off culture that "doesn't fit in" if there are small universities that welcome the eccentric weirdo. However, if only the Big University Degree matters in life, then it's also entirely possible for the eccentric but brilliant weirdos will end up being outside the system. Maybe they will form their own collective and create something new. The alternative is the Draper like scenario where one more just drifts.
  - TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
    Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard. I don't know what Elon Musk's GPA was, I don't think anybody cares. I don't see a trend towards conformity...in the real world.
    - seriff 9y ago
      Those are significantly rare outliers and not the reality for the vast majority of people.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  Steve Jobs lived in a commune with some millionaires who went to prison for selling LSD. Certainly not a path most MIT students (or current Reed students) would be encouraged to take today.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    And for a tie-in back to the main article here, it is a path lots of MIT students took in the past. Bexley House manufactured LSD for quite a while back in the 1970s. Bexley closed four years ago for repairs, and was demolished with no plans to open a new dorm as a continuation. This seems unpleasantly relevant.
breadmaster 9y ago
Hey, Administrators need to feel like they're doing something.
- daemin 9y ago
  Basically like Politicians, have to be seen doing something, even if it's completely useless or gets reversed soon after. Otherwise why have so many Administrators, or need to hire more Administrators if there is not enough to do?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mtreis86 9y ago
All the brilliant weirdos I know are independent. Lampworkers, machinists, turbine engineers, fabricators, inventors. None affiliated with any educational system, no degrees. None making burgers either. All 'shop rats,' in garages, sheds, and machine shops.
- dmartinez 9y ago
  I've noticed this pattern too. I think people who manage to make it in profitable physical trades seem to have a stronger grasp on what is an illusion and what is real. Artist/bohemian collectives across the US harbor these same kinds of people as well.
indigochill 9y ago
I was chatting with a guy on the plane the other day who was bemoaning the disappearance of old-school BBSes and rise of homogeneous social media sites. I think my answer to his concern and yours are the same: There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits). Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.
- wolco 9y ago
  Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.
  - indigochill 9y ago
    https://www.hackthebox.eu/en https://www.hackthebox.eu/en is one There's also http://3564020356.org/ http://3564020356.org/ (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)
    - totony 9y ago
      I tried hackthebox.eu... https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg
      - Veelox 9y ago
        I think that is what you are suppose to see.
pc86 9y ago
If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too. I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit. Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >RMS? really? The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.
  - AlphaSite 9y ago
    I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.
      - eropple 9y ago
        The BSD license predates the GPLv1.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        GNU as an organization pushing the idea of free software long predates the GPL. The people creating the BSD licensed BSD NET/2 explicitly aknowledged the GNU influence on their decision to release.
    - wrs 9y ago
      He started the free software "movement" to _preserve_ the existing ethos of software sharing at MIT and elsewhere, which he saw as being destroyed by corporate influence.
cynisme 9y ago
It's not like I have done a comprehensive study on this but at least here at umich there are still places to live that embrace weirdness, they are just not owned by the university. These days I think it is just too hard for a big university to let things fly for a multitude of reasons. I hope there will always be such places and it is sad to see such an iconic and important one go but I have faith that brilliant weirdos are very capable of finding space for themselves.
ThomPete 9y ago
The good thing is that today you don't need an education to educate yourself dorm rooms aren't the only places where weirdos han out. I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.
rb808 9y ago
SJ didn't go to a big university but do I fear for MIT/Stanford type schools. To get in now you need to be a robot who can ace standardized tests, who spends their whole childhood doing math problems and has no real contact with the real world aside from two pieces of flair suggested by a guidance counseller in order to get into an ivy.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I think the idea was that MIT and Stanford don't even care about the "two pieces of flair" (i.e. extracurriculars), but most successful applicants to those schools will have them so they can also apply to Harvard etc., which effectively require them. The result is that even the non-academic stuff those students have done has an academic target.
dsr_ 9y ago
20+ years ago I had this conversation with a senior mentor, who was bemoaning that I was the only young person he had met in the last few years who seemed to "get it". That every college student was taking underwater basketweaving or "management information science", which meant COBOL and flowcharts. Survivorship bias is real. Things sneak up on you when you aren't looking. Linux had only just made it into the 1.2 kernel series.

tyingq 9y ago

Both are iconic, but as far as I can tell, neither lived in a particularly eclectic dorm. RMS was at Currier house at Harvard, but rented an apartment at MIT. I don't know whether Jobs stayed in a dorm in his brief college stint. There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology_undergraduate_dormitories#Senior_House https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...

jdietrich 9y ago
It's not about this particular dorm, it's about a broader social trend towards greater conformity and fewer second chances. Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. RMS slept under his desk in the AI lab for many years and is notoriously bad at politicking, political correctness and basic etiquette. Would a young RMS survive the administrative culture of modern academia? Steve Jobs graduated high school with 2.65 GPA. How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  > How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA? Just as many as there used to be, it's just never been easy. Actually I thought about it some more, and there are actually probably more opportunities today than before with the internet and the democratization of knowledge. > Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. > Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. I think you're looking at it wrong, Woz and Jobs started selling niche items directly to a small group of customers, that still exists today, they just wouldn't be selling blue boxes, maybe it'd be an interesting SaSS today.
  - andrewflnr 9y ago
    > I think you're looking at it wrong... You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      I didn't think it was meant to be a political post. The entire thread is about a purported cultural shift that's starving out the environment that people like Steve and Woz thrived in. In fact, I would be disappointed if it was meant to be about politics because it'd come across as an attempt to shoehorn politics into a discussion about much broader social trends
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        What exactly do you beleive politics to be? This sort of thing is a prime example of politics, the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding. Politics isnt just voting for congress-critters and presidents.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        I don't feel it is useful to narrow this to a political issue rather than a broader social trend. I also don't particularly appreciate the tone of your replies and especially statements like "the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding", which come across as somewhat condescending and less about seeking a proper conversation than about attempting to lecture. So I won't be replying further to this thread.
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    Steve Jobs had an acquaintance in college named John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" in the hacking world) who if I remember right taught Jobs said blue box skills. He possibly represents the endpoint which the OP fears. I've met him at a couple of raves back in the 1990s back when he was basically wandering around the rave scene. My impression: brilliant guy, but incredibly eccentric. I don't know much more about him beyond Wiki articles etc., but apparently he has had a bit of a tough time employment wise, due to a combination of his phone fraud convictions and his eccentric personality. This despite his heavy tie-in to early Apple history, and a fairly strong coding resume. Then again, from what I saw, his personality is not the type that would embrace Standard Corporate to begin with, I'm sure. But said personality means he never got rewarded much for what he did. If I remember right, he actually had to crowdfund for some medical issues recently. I think its fair to say at any rate that his talent potential ended up being underutilized. You are right that it's possible that there are more opportunities for these sort of weirdos, but in order for that to exist, there has to be a space for the small corporation that is more willing to give eccentricity space. One of the dangers of corporate consolidation is exactly this: large corporations are probably more likely to exclude people with mild criminal records because checklists, and they are less likely to give space to people that don't fit into corporate cultures. Consolidation tends to kill innovation; perhaps this is one of the ways. Likewise, from a university perspective, it won't matter as much if Big University kills off culture that "doesn't fit in" if there are small universities that welcome the eccentric weirdo. However, if only the Big University Degree matters in life, then it's also entirely possible for the eccentric but brilliant weirdos will end up being outside the system. Maybe they will form their own collective and create something new. The alternative is the Draper like scenario where one more just drifts.
- TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
  Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard. I don't know what Elon Musk's GPA was, I don't think anybody cares. I don't see a trend towards conformity...in the real world.
  - seriff 9y ago
    Those are significantly rare outliers and not the reality for the vast majority of people.
JustAnotherPat 9y ago
Steve Jobs lived in a commune with some millionaires who went to prison for selling LSD. Certainly not a path most MIT students (or current Reed students) would be encouraged to take today.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  And for a tie-in back to the main article here, it is a path lots of MIT students took in the past. Bexley House manufactured LSD for quite a while back in the 1970s. Bexley closed four years ago for repairs, and was demolished with no plans to open a new dorm as a continuation. This seems unpleasantly relevant.

breadmaster 9y ago

Hey, Administrators need to feel like they're doing something.

daemin 9y ago
Basically like Politicians, have to be seen doing something, even if it's completely useless or gets reversed soon after. Otherwise why have so many Administrators, or need to hire more Administrators if there is not enough to do?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mtreis86 9y ago

All the brilliant weirdos I know are independent. Lampworkers, machinists, turbine engineers, fabricators, inventors. None affiliated with any educational system, no degrees. None making burgers either. All 'shop rats,' in garages, sheds, and machine shops.

dmartinez 9y ago
I've noticed this pattern too. I think people who manage to make it in profitable physical trades seem to have a stronger grasp on what is an illusion and what is real. Artist/bohemian collectives across the US harbor these same kinds of people as well.

indigochill 9y ago

I was chatting with a guy on the plane the other day who was bemoaning the disappearance of old-school BBSes and rise of homogeneous social media sites. I think my answer to his concern and yours are the same: There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits). Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.

wolco 9y ago
Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.
- indigochill 9y ago
  https://www.hackthebox.eu/en https://www.hackthebox.eu/en is one There's also http://3564020356.org/ http://3564020356.org/ (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)
  - totony 9y ago
    I tried hackthebox.eu... https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg
    - Veelox 9y ago
      I think that is what you are suppose to see.

pc86 9y ago

If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too. I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit. Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.

jdietrich 9y ago
>RMS? really? The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.
- AlphaSite 9y ago
  I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.
  - dublinben 9y ago
    You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.
    - eropple 9y ago
      The BSD license predates the GPLv1.
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        GNU as an organization pushing the idea of free software long predates the GPL. The people creating the BSD licensed BSD NET/2 explicitly aknowledged the GNU influence on their decision to release.
  - wrs 9y ago
    He started the free software "movement" to _preserve_ the existing ethos of software sharing at MIT and elsewhere, which he saw as being destroyed by corporate influence.

cynisme 9y ago

It's not like I have done a comprehensive study on this but at least here at umich there are still places to live that embrace weirdness, they are just not owned by the university. These days I think it is just too hard for a big university to let things fly for a multitude of reasons. I hope there will always be such places and it is sad to see such an iconic and important one go but I have faith that brilliant weirdos are very capable of finding space for themselves.

ThomPete 9y ago

The good thing is that today you don't need an education to educate yourself dorm rooms aren't the only places where weirdos han out. I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.

rb808 9y ago

SJ didn't go to a big university but do I fear for MIT/Stanford type schools. To get in now you need to be a robot who can ace standardized tests, who spends their whole childhood doing math problems and has no real contact with the real world aside from two pieces of flair suggested by a guidance counseller in order to get into an ivy.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I think the idea was that MIT and Stanford don't even care about the "two pieces of flair" (i.e. extracurriculars), but most successful applicants to those schools will have them so they can also apply to Harvard etc., which effectively require them. The result is that even the non-academic stuff those students have done has an academic target.

dsr_ 9y ago

20+ years ago I had this conversation with a senior mentor, who was bemoaning that I was the only young person he had met in the last few years who seemed to "get it". That every college student was taking underwater basketweaving or "management information science", which meant COBOL and flowcharts. Survivorship bias is real. Things sneak up on you when you aren't looking. Linux had only just made it into the 1.2 kernel series.