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19 year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout Andrew Hsu is Changing Education

90 points by jmtame 15y ago

MisterMerkin 15y ago
I was wondering how he had 3 B.S.'s and was a drop out. And then I saw the next line. He dropped out of the Ph.D. program. At 19. ... Hats off.
rkon 15y ago
- Labeled as a “genius” from IQ testing at 6 years old "I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.
- jmtame 15y ago
  It didn't feel like I was talking to an alien who had no understanding of the problem with education today when I interviewed him. He started having attention problems in 4th grade (which is the age he's targeting), and all of the problems he described to me lined up with my own beliefs. I know it reads as blatantly bragging, but from my interactions with Andrew (having met him at his office personally and then having done the interview over Skype), he didn't come across that way. It sounded to me like he had explained it many times before and was trying his best to succinctly give a straight answer. He seemed pretty normal by social standards, and I have some engineering friends who are sincere assholes with an ego much larger than Andrew's, if that's how you perceive him. I think most hackers and especially programmers have some amount of that cockiness though, that's not something we're all immune to. Even the CS professors admit that CS students walk around feeling more entitled than liberal arts students (and it's scribbled on the bathroom stalls: "Liberal arts degree dispenser below" right above the toilet paper roll in an engineering building on the campus I went to). Anyway, that wasn't the vibe I got from him, although I can see how you could read it that way. It's an interesting point brought up: has he had enough painful experience with education to build a solution to it all? I don't know. I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now. But I'm really interested in seeing what his team comes up with, and if someone wants to work on education, I'm more than supportive of those efforts because that whole process sucks right now.
  - Hyena 15y ago
    "I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now." Why so?
    - pjscott 15y ago
      The world of gaming has put a lot of work into discovering how to motivate people to keep going, even if what they're doing isn't actually that fun. Think of grinding in an MMORPG, or whatever the hell people do on Farmville: it's not that fun, probably significantly less fun than playing Super Mario Brothers 3, and yet people spend hours and hours on it. And yet teachers have trouble getting students to learn anything.
      - Hyena 15y ago
        I think this is inaccurate both in its presumed comparison and in the premise which underlies it. First, grinding (really farming, no one outside of Korea grinds anymore, which I'll get to) in an MMO or playing Farmville is pretty low intensity mentally, it does not require that much of your attention. Multi-tasking is easy, for example. I'm not so sure that you would be able to grind away at mentally taxing activities. It generates fatigue. Second, though, is that video games have not figured out a way to effectively reward boring activities. Let's use MMORPGs. When I played Final Fantasy XI, grinding was so tedious I quit before level 20. EverQuest 2 was better, but not too much more. WoW was fairly easy. RIFT was a breeze. Each new release is easier than the last, indicating that grinding is something game developers have learned to avoid rather than create ways of rewarding it. As an empirical test, it seems like a resounding rejection of thesis. I'm not sure gamification is going to get much done on the education front. I think this idea resounds with techies because they like video games, they often like to show their accomplishments and they like the ego-stroke the concept of displacing education with games brings.
      - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
        Khan Academy has to some extent gamified educational exercises and [video] study. I have reservations about this sort of thing as it focuses on reward fulfilment rather than fostering a love of the topic by engaging the learner.
- epidemian 15y ago
  > I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I didn't think he sounded arrogant at all actually. He stressed that he thinks genetics play a small role. He then explains much more thoroughly the systematic approach he used to maximize his studying proficiency. I, in fact, think he was quite humble about his merits. But if that's not the case, I wouldn't blame him either. He's human after all. So he is conditioned by his environment as much as we are. If I would be labeled as genius at 6, have 3 B.S. degrees by the age of 16, and pretty much everyone agreed I was "special", I think it's pretty expectable that I might end up believing that.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  It is not easy to grow up being labeled as a genius. One day you realize that most of the people of your age are so far, far below your ability it's just sad. You try to help them, but everyone know it's not easy at all. All the work you've done to get to this level seems to be very natural for you after all these years, and you have no idea that most of the kids were not doing _anything_ in their childhoods. Then you got this feeling that all your "genius" skills came undeservedly and it's really depressing, because they constitute your person, and you really would like to believe that you got there by your own work, cause it does not feel fair otherwise. To work out this cognitive dissonance, you start to look what you did differently than your peers and you notice that you were doing math (or cs, or electronics, or biology or whatever) as early as you remember, while your averagely performing mates from university only started doing something serious in university classes or maybe in high school. This feels like a pretty good explanation, especially when one takes into account a 10 000 hours rule, but being a rationalist (who you surely are), you cannot discard the impact of your genes, but as long as it is not measurable, you can believe it's small. That's how you come to the state of mind when saying things similar to the quoted ones seems pretty natural and not at all out of touch with reality. (I say this from my own experience, so it's easy for me to sympathize -- I'm not as brilliant as the guy from the article, but I'm getting two bachelors (math and cs) next year, by then being 20.)
  - palish 15y ago
    As a genius, I can attest to the fact that this is spot-on. Every time I look around, I go "Man, those poor people. Don't they realize what they've missed? They could have been doing math!" Ok, tongue out of cheek. In all seriousness, I've repeatedly felt that whatever (minor) financial success I've had is pretty undeserved. I have a fairly nice career as a graphics programmer, and I worked on an extremely popular online videogame. And why did I get that opportunity? Well, as far as I can tell, dumb luck. I happened to decide in ~5th grade that I wanted to learn programming. By 9th grade, I was sleeping through class every day, then going home and teaching myself game/graphics programming all afternoon and all night. For years. I happened to find it interesting. And people happen to currently value my experience from it. But it feels less like I'm a genius and more like I just got lucky. But my friends and family all have the impression that I'm some kind of genius or something, and if I had an ego, I'd probably start thinking of myself as one. But I know I'm not. I'm just a hard worker who was interested in a field that turned out to be valuable. I occasionally play a certain online game, and I've been friends with someone on there for a couple years now. He's about my age, still lives with his mom, and isn't really doing anything with his life. But I can tell you for a fact he's just as intelligent as me, and just as capable. I feel so bad knowing that the only thing he probably has to look forward to is a job in construction. Conversely, it's hard not to be... condescending... of certain people I see every day. They believe their opinion is so perfectly accurate, and that they're so capable, when every objective measurement would show the opposite. And so you wind up getting into a strange state of mind, where you feel you're somehow "better" than them. I try to resist feeling that way.
- blackboxxx 15y ago
  Andrew is stating a fact. I didn't catch even a wisp of arrogance in that statement. He's merely telling the truth.
- mahyarm 15y ago
  If someone has a great interest in something, finds the work energizing, has a goal, is organized and people around him always set the bar a little bit higher and are there to help, I can see how that can bring you most of the way there to finishing high school by 12. I can become a genius violinist if I had an all consuming drive to become one. It's that bloody motivation issue.
- temphn 15y ago
  He's trying to be self-deprecating there, and saying (I think incorrectly) that genetics plays only a small part. Genuinely curious, what do you think he should have said?
glimcat 15y ago
TIL grad students who have second thoughts about their PhD program are the new college dropouts.
- edwardy20 15y ago
  Yeah it seems a bit of a stretch to call someone with 3 degrees a dropout...
- dstein 15y ago
  It's probably a marketing thing, since people with PhD's aren't usually the entrepreneur-type.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    You'd be amazed by how many entrepreneurs have PhDs.
    - xal 15y ago
      I would be. Is this really common? My own story is the common one of highshool dropout who dropped about because he was bored in school and this is something I hear about in many of my peers.
      - glimcat 15y ago
        The attributes of good entrepreneurs and good research students are highly correlated. It's quite common in engineering, but less so in other fields where research isn't as likely to have direct commercial applications.
        dstein 15y ago
        You guys are going to have to come up with some evidence. I don't see how someone who could go through the entire University process all the way to a research PhD if what they really wanted was to start their own business.
Alex3917 15y ago
"In college, there’s far less social pressure to maintain popularity, and you’re actually valued for your intelligence. [...] The major difference to me in high school vs. college is the work in college–for me at least–is actually challenging and intellectually interesting." I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students. Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.
- shareme 15y ago
  I agree the interview does not get to the gist.. some new theories and applications to learning are coming out of neuroscience but I am unsure if Andrew specialized in that area at least from the interview. The older neuroscience stuff we are already aware of that humans remember in 3s, 5s, and 7s of items, several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used, etc.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    Even if he did specialize in that area of neuroscience, it's largely irrelevant. Sociology and psychology are much more important for understanding how to do education right, followed by anthropology and cognitive development. There are definitely a few good insights from neuroscience, but it's not really a field that's produced many game changers, at least not yet. Even history is more important than neuroscience at this point.
    - wcarss 15y ago
      Hi, I don't feel great about "calling you out", but I want to ask if you hold a degree, or have pursued extensive study (perhaps to the point of publishing a peer-reviewed article) in any of the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, cognitive development, or educational research? Your reply comes off as highly authoritative, but I don't want to just default to trusting that you are an expert in every (or even any) field mentioned, and hence, are able to produce an authoritative hierarchy of their usefulness as applied to a specific unsolved problem. Sorry to be that guy!
hugh3 15y ago
OK, this guy sounds very impressive, but his educational experiences were so very atypical that I'm concerned whether he'd have any real grasp of how normal people learn. I get the feeling that going to his classes would be like getting swimming lessons from a mermaid.
- neoveller 15y ago
  And why shouldn't I want to take swimming lessons from a mermaid? Sounds like a dream.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    I originally wrote "merman", I should have stuck with that. Yes, if you want to look at boobies then learning swimming from a mermaid is a good idea, but if you want to learn to swim it's non-ideal. "OK, now thrash your tail" "I don't have a tail!" "Oh... uhhh, so do those leg things move independently or what?"
- dools 15y ago
  Success through atypical educational models is something we desperately need to counteract the overwhelming failure of the typical ones.
eeperson 15y ago
Weird, I think I went to college with him.
- crocowhile 15y ago
  You don't remember if a 12 yo was in college with you?
johnrob 15y ago
This person is very smart, but (as far as I can tell) he's never instructed everyday students before - is that a problem?
grandalf 15y ago
I think most people on HN could have completed high school academics by age 12 or 13 with sufficient discipline and focus. This is not all that remarkable intellectually, but it's rare that a child that age has the will (or opportunity) to make it happen.
- jackpirate 15y ago
  I think the same thing. The question is, should we? I wonder how many people who go on to do Nobel-quality work were in college at the age of 12? My intuition is very few. I think something very important is lost when bored 12-year-olds don't learn how to experiment on their own. Essentially 100% of the pioneer hackers cut their teeth this way. Of course, I'm probably just jealous that I didn't matriculate early and have 3 BS's by 19.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    I agree. In an ideal world people with these capabilities would be able to spend their childhoods in an environment tailored to very bright children their own age, with materials and curriculum tailored to their strengths and with attention paid to cultivating passion and minimizing overspecialization.
    - dan-k 15y ago
      I really like that you included minimizing overspecialization. Academics is getting so hyper-compartmentalized that overspecialization is not only ignored in most disciplines, but it's even encouraged in many (computer science included). That's one of the reasons I'm starting to rethink my longstanding plans of going to grad school after finishing college next year. People who focus all of their waking lives on one thing will tend to get more attention for how quickly they progress in it than the rest of us, but that's not really good for that much beyond press coverage or your name in a record book. Truly revolutionary accomplishments require much more than an uncanny dedication to memorizing algorithms or chemical names, but those are precisely the sort of traits that will move you quickly through formal education (or get you that coveted expert status from the 10,000-hour rule). Though I certainly won't bash someone with three college degrees by 16, especially without knowing more about them personally, even Andrew Hsu shows evidence of that, with all of the degrees being in biochem-related fields. I strongly suspect that the next discovery that completely alters our paradigms of thought and/or creates a new field of study will come from someone with a broader background, who can synthesize expertise from many fields into insights that everyone else overlooks.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
What I wouldn't give for a TLDR. All I want to know is how his strategy for improving education diffs from Khan Academy, who I think is the frontrunner right now in that endeavor, without wading through the author's rant and a discussion on some kid's gaming habits.
dweekly 15y ago
This dude is my mentee as part of 20 under 20. He is super sweet, super humble, and super curious about the world in a way that is refreshing to see for someone so accomplished at his age. This "Zen mind is beginner's mind" mentality is a harbinger of success IMHO. <3
mvzink 15y ago
You know he's looking toward the future when he calls the Khan Academy videos "archaic" :P
seagaia 15y ago
I'm sure (if he hasn't already) he could definitely go to a few public schools (some of the rather worse ones, say in urban L.A. or something) to see how they work out. Might give him good ideas. It's a vital step to experience that stuff first hand.
zackattack 15y ago
Education is mostly about emotional communication. If you can communicate Emotional Space and Respect to someone and you can give them a compelling Emotional desire for why to learn something, and you consistently exemplify the skill, learning is very automatic. It happens in the animal kingdom all the time.
emit_time_n3rgy 15y ago
Gaming has been addressed for years by others as it pertains to learning and the future. There are also others working in areas that are proving very useful. (one of the best videos I've seen) http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-gamepocalypse-possible-futures-waking-up-thinking-and-creating-a-better-world/ http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-game... "Serious games" http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.html http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.ht... http://www.gamesforchange.org http://www.gamesforchange.org Child-driven education http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ Music + hands-on creative work http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015.html http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015... There's an incredible story (inspiring & practical) of a boy without healthy legs gaining access to salvaged computers and free software to apply his graphics skills to pull his way out of the slums....it's less than 3/4 of the way through this speech by Eben Moglen called "Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century" http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/audio/DSG-CUNY-BeforeAndAfterIP.mp3 http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/audio/DSG-CUNY-BeforeAndAfter... I've been collecting a ton of related links and posting them at http://re-configure.org/drupal/node/33 http://re-configure.org/drupal/node/33
- emit_time_n3rgy 15y ago
  Russian president calls for World of Warcraft-like game for Russian history - http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/russias-prez-wa.php http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/russias-prez-wa.php
ap22213 15y ago
I worked in 'educational technology' for years trying to solve 'issues' in education, training, and general Human learning. We called the field advancing Human Potential. During this time, we tried out all sorts of concepts, worked with world leaders and world class theorists and researchers. We built all sorts of systems, and products, simulators, interactive games, expert systems, individual tutors, and other things of blended nature. These products were built for governments, research institutes, and commercial companies. Some of the 'products' had empirical results that surprisingly showed that they were 'useful', too. However, there weren't ever any revolutions in education or learning or educational theory, while I was there. I eventually dropped out from this field from burnout. Why? Because of the people. This area of interest seems to attract people with very similar personality traits. Reading this article and the subject reminds me of the type of people who want to 'solve' education. It is not at all unusual to work with people in this field who complete advance degrees while still in puberty. I worked with a guy who ended up the chair of mathematics at world-class university before he was 20. These are all 'geniuses', as they have been taught and trained to think. And, interestingly they all seem to clamor around this tall flag of solving education. I believe the failure of this field is actually that most of these people running it are very 'left brain' analytical thinkers. They think that they can solve these very dynamic, chaotic educational systems by decomposition and reductionism. It's kind of funny actually. Smart people get addicted to being smart, and they want to encourage the use of the systems that gave them the personal 'high' to begin with.
sireat 15y ago
On one hand, I admire the guy for tackling such a worthwhile problem and also having accomplished so much so young. On the other hand, I wonder if this may be the case of being extremely book smart and not so streetwise. Why not wait till you finish your PhD at the young age of 22? You will be more mature by then and know quite a bit more. If you already had built a working prototype(doesn't even have to be MVP) and experienced some sort of positive feedback, sure drop out. Otherwise, continue working on your ideas in your spare time. Bill, Larry and Sergey only dropped out when they had something happening. For those already in the workplace example of patio11 is very admirable. The interview mentions that they are just getting started and are at least 6 months from a prototype. Unless Andrew has some sort of edge from his studies, this venture doesn't have any inherent advantages. Disclaimer: I dropped out at 19 partially because I heard the PhD guys I was writing software for complaining so much about their progress. It took me 15 years to get back into school.

90 points by jmtame 15y ago

I was wondering how he had 3 B.S.'s and was a drop out. And then I saw the next line. He dropped out of the Ph.D. program. At 19. ... Hats off.

rkon 15y ago

- Labeled as a “genius” from IQ testing at 6 years old "I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.

jmtame 15y ago
It didn't feel like I was talking to an alien who had no understanding of the problem with education today when I interviewed him. He started having attention problems in 4th grade (which is the age he's targeting), and all of the problems he described to me lined up with my own beliefs. I know it reads as blatantly bragging, but from my interactions with Andrew (having met him at his office personally and then having done the interview over Skype), he didn't come across that way. It sounded to me like he had explained it many times before and was trying his best to succinctly give a straight answer. He seemed pretty normal by social standards, and I have some engineering friends who are sincere assholes with an ego much larger than Andrew's, if that's how you perceive him. I think most hackers and especially programmers have some amount of that cockiness though, that's not something we're all immune to. Even the CS professors admit that CS students walk around feeling more entitled than liberal arts students (and it's scribbled on the bathroom stalls: "Liberal arts degree dispenser below" right above the toilet paper roll in an engineering building on the campus I went to). Anyway, that wasn't the vibe I got from him, although I can see how you could read it that way. It's an interesting point brought up: has he had enough painful experience with education to build a solution to it all? I don't know. I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now. But I'm really interested in seeing what his team comes up with, and if someone wants to work on education, I'm more than supportive of those efforts because that whole process sucks right now.
- Hyena 15y ago
  "I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now." Why so?
  - pjscott 15y ago
    The world of gaming has put a lot of work into discovering how to motivate people to keep going, even if what they're doing isn't actually that fun. Think of grinding in an MMORPG, or whatever the hell people do on Farmville: it's not that fun, probably significantly less fun than playing Super Mario Brothers 3, and yet people spend hours and hours on it. And yet teachers have trouble getting students to learn anything.
    - Hyena 15y ago
      I think this is inaccurate both in its presumed comparison and in the premise which underlies it. First, grinding (really farming, no one outside of Korea grinds anymore, which I'll get to) in an MMO or playing Farmville is pretty low intensity mentally, it does not require that much of your attention. Multi-tasking is easy, for example. I'm not so sure that you would be able to grind away at mentally taxing activities. It generates fatigue. Second, though, is that video games have not figured out a way to effectively reward boring activities. Let's use MMORPGs. When I played Final Fantasy XI, grinding was so tedious I quit before level 20. EverQuest 2 was better, but not too much more. WoW was fairly easy. RIFT was a breeze. Each new release is easier than the last, indicating that grinding is something game developers have learned to avoid rather than create ways of rewarding it. As an empirical test, it seems like a resounding rejection of thesis. I'm not sure gamification is going to get much done on the education front. I think this idea resounds with techies because they like video games, they often like to show their accomplishments and they like the ego-stroke the concept of displacing education with games brings.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      Khan Academy has to some extent gamified educational exercises and [video] study. I have reservations about this sort of thing as it focuses on reward fulfilment rather than fostering a love of the topic by engaging the learner.
epidemian 15y ago
> I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I didn't think he sounded arrogant at all actually. He stressed that he thinks genetics play a small role. He then explains much more thoroughly the systematic approach he used to maximize his studying proficiency. I, in fact, think he was quite humble about his merits. But if that's not the case, I wouldn't blame him either. He's human after all. So he is conditioned by his environment as much as we are. If I would be labeled as genius at 6, have 3 B.S. degrees by the age of 16, and pretty much everyone agreed I was "special", I think it's pretty expectable that I might end up believing that.
xyzzyz 15y ago
It is not easy to grow up being labeled as a genius. One day you realize that most of the people of your age are so far, far below your ability it's just sad. You try to help them, but everyone know it's not easy at all. All the work you've done to get to this level seems to be very natural for you after all these years, and you have no idea that most of the kids were not doing _anything_ in their childhoods. Then you got this feeling that all your "genius" skills came undeservedly and it's really depressing, because they constitute your person, and you really would like to believe that you got there by your own work, cause it does not feel fair otherwise. To work out this cognitive dissonance, you start to look what you did differently than your peers and you notice that you were doing math (or cs, or electronics, or biology or whatever) as early as you remember, while your averagely performing mates from university only started doing something serious in university classes or maybe in high school. This feels like a pretty good explanation, especially when one takes into account a 10 000 hours rule, but being a rationalist (who you surely are), you cannot discard the impact of your genes, but as long as it is not measurable, you can believe it's small. That's how you come to the state of mind when saying things similar to the quoted ones seems pretty natural and not at all out of touch with reality. (I say this from my own experience, so it's easy for me to sympathize -- I'm not as brilliant as the guy from the article, but I'm getting two bachelors (math and cs) next year, by then being 20.)
- palish 15y ago
  As a genius, I can attest to the fact that this is spot-on. Every time I look around, I go "Man, those poor people. Don't they realize what they've missed? They could have been doing math!" Ok, tongue out of cheek. In all seriousness, I've repeatedly felt that whatever (minor) financial success I've had is pretty undeserved. I have a fairly nice career as a graphics programmer, and I worked on an extremely popular online videogame. And why did I get that opportunity? Well, as far as I can tell, dumb luck. I happened to decide in ~5th grade that I wanted to learn programming. By 9th grade, I was sleeping through class every day, then going home and teaching myself game/graphics programming all afternoon and all night. For years. I happened to find it interesting. And people happen to currently value my experience from it. But it feels less like I'm a genius and more like I just got lucky. But my friends and family all have the impression that I'm some kind of genius or something, and if I had an ego, I'd probably start thinking of myself as one. But I know I'm not. I'm just a hard worker who was interested in a field that turned out to be valuable. I occasionally play a certain online game, and I've been friends with someone on there for a couple years now. He's about my age, still lives with his mom, and isn't really doing anything with his life. But I can tell you for a fact he's just as intelligent as me, and just as capable. I feel so bad knowing that the only thing he probably has to look forward to is a job in construction. Conversely, it's hard not to be... condescending... of certain people I see every day. They believe their opinion is so perfectly accurate, and that they're so capable, when every objective measurement would show the opposite. And so you wind up getting into a strange state of mind, where you feel you're somehow "better" than them. I try to resist feeling that way.
blackboxxx 15y ago
Andrew is stating a fact. I didn't catch even a wisp of arrogance in that statement. He's merely telling the truth.
mahyarm 15y ago
If someone has a great interest in something, finds the work energizing, has a goal, is organized and people around him always set the bar a little bit higher and are there to help, I can see how that can bring you most of the way there to finishing high school by 12. I can become a genius violinist if I had an all consuming drive to become one. It's that bloody motivation issue.
temphn 15y ago
He's trying to be self-deprecating there, and saying (I think incorrectly) that genetics plays only a small part. Genuinely curious, what do you think he should have said?

glimcat 15y ago

TIL grad students who have second thoughts about their PhD program are the new college dropouts.

edwardy20 15y ago
Yeah it seems a bit of a stretch to call someone with 3 degrees a dropout...
dstein 15y ago
It's probably a marketing thing, since people with PhD's aren't usually the entrepreneur-type.
- hugh3 15y ago
  You'd be amazed by how many entrepreneurs have PhDs.
  - xal 15y ago
    I would be. Is this really common? My own story is the common one of highshool dropout who dropped about because he was bored in school and this is something I hear about in many of my peers.
    - glimcat 15y ago
      The attributes of good entrepreneurs and good research students are highly correlated. It's quite common in engineering, but less so in other fields where research isn't as likely to have direct commercial applications.
      - dstein 15y ago
        You guys are going to have to come up with some evidence. I don't see how someone who could go through the entire University process all the way to a research PhD if what they really wanted was to start their own business.

Alex3917 15y ago

"In college, there’s far less social pressure to maintain popularity, and you’re actually valued for your intelligence. [...] The major difference to me in high school vs. college is the work in college–for me at least–is actually challenging and intellectually interesting." I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students. Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.

shareme 15y ago
I agree the interview does not get to the gist.. some new theories and applications to learning are coming out of neuroscience but I am unsure if Andrew specialized in that area at least from the interview. The older neuroscience stuff we are already aware of that humans remember in 3s, 5s, and 7s of items, several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used, etc.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  Even if he did specialize in that area of neuroscience, it's largely irrelevant. Sociology and psychology are much more important for understanding how to do education right, followed by anthropology and cognitive development. There are definitely a few good insights from neuroscience, but it's not really a field that's produced many game changers, at least not yet. Even history is more important than neuroscience at this point.
  - wcarss 15y ago
    Hi, I don't feel great about "calling you out", but I want to ask if you hold a degree, or have pursued extensive study (perhaps to the point of publishing a peer-reviewed article) in any of the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, cognitive development, or educational research? Your reply comes off as highly authoritative, but I don't want to just default to trusting that you are an expert in every (or even any) field mentioned, and hence, are able to produce an authoritative hierarchy of their usefulness as applied to a specific unsolved problem. Sorry to be that guy!

hugh3 15y ago

OK, this guy sounds very impressive, but his educational experiences were so very atypical that I'm concerned whether he'd have any real grasp of how normal people learn. I get the feeling that going to his classes would be like getting swimming lessons from a mermaid.

neoveller 15y ago
And why shouldn't I want to take swimming lessons from a mermaid? Sounds like a dream.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I originally wrote "merman", I should have stuck with that. Yes, if you want to look at boobies then learning swimming from a mermaid is a good idea, but if you want to learn to swim it's non-ideal. "OK, now thrash your tail" "I don't have a tail!" "Oh... uhhh, so do those leg things move independently or what?"
dools 15y ago
Success through atypical educational models is something we desperately need to counteract the overwhelming failure of the typical ones.

eeperson 15y ago

Weird, I think I went to college with him.

crocowhile 15y ago
You don't remember if a 12 yo was in college with you?

johnrob 15y ago

This person is very smart, but (as far as I can tell) he's never instructed everyday students before - is that a problem?

grandalf 15y ago

I think most people on HN could have completed high school academics by age 12 or 13 with sufficient discipline and focus. This is not all that remarkable intellectually, but it's rare that a child that age has the will (or opportunity) to make it happen.

jackpirate 15y ago
I think the same thing. The question is, should we? I wonder how many people who go on to do Nobel-quality work were in college at the age of 12? My intuition is very few. I think something very important is lost when bored 12-year-olds don't learn how to experiment on their own. Essentially 100% of the pioneer hackers cut their teeth this way. Of course, I'm probably just jealous that I didn't matriculate early and have 3 BS's by 19.
- grandalf 15y ago
  I agree. In an ideal world people with these capabilities would be able to spend their childhoods in an environment tailored to very bright children their own age, with materials and curriculum tailored to their strengths and with attention paid to cultivating passion and minimizing overspecialization.
  - dan-k 15y ago
    I really like that you included minimizing overspecialization. Academics is getting so hyper-compartmentalized that overspecialization is not only ignored in most disciplines, but it's even encouraged in many (computer science included). That's one of the reasons I'm starting to rethink my longstanding plans of going to grad school after finishing college next year. People who focus all of their waking lives on one thing will tend to get more attention for how quickly they progress in it than the rest of us, but that's not really good for that much beyond press coverage or your name in a record book. Truly revolutionary accomplishments require much more than an uncanny dedication to memorizing algorithms or chemical names, but those are precisely the sort of traits that will move you quickly through formal education (or get you that coveted expert status from the 10,000-hour rule). Though I certainly won't bash someone with three college degrees by 16, especially without knowing more about them personally, even Andrew Hsu shows evidence of that, with all of the degrees being in biochem-related fields. I strongly suspect that the next discovery that completely alters our paradigms of thought and/or creates a new field of study will come from someone with a broader background, who can synthesize expertise from many fields into insights that everyone else overlooks.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

What I wouldn't give for a TLDR. All I want to know is how his strategy for improving education diffs from Khan Academy, who I think is the frontrunner right now in that endeavor, without wading through the author's rant and a discussion on some kid's gaming habits.

dweekly 15y ago

This dude is my mentee as part of 20 under 20. He is super sweet, super humble, and super curious about the world in a way that is refreshing to see for someone so accomplished at his age. This "Zen mind is beginner's mind" mentality is a harbinger of success IMHO. <3

mvzink 15y ago

You know he's looking toward the future when he calls the Khan Academy videos "archaic" :P

seagaia 15y ago

I'm sure (if he hasn't already) he could definitely go to a few public schools (some of the rather worse ones, say in urban L.A. or something) to see how they work out. Might give him good ideas. It's a vital step to experience that stuff first hand.

zackattack 15y ago

Education is mostly about emotional communication. If you can communicate Emotional Space and Respect to someone and you can give them a compelling Emotional desire for why to learn something, and you consistently exemplify the skill, learning is very automatic. It happens in the animal kingdom all the time.

emit_time_n3rgy 15y ago

Gaming has been addressed for years by others as it pertains to learning and the future. There are also others working in areas that are proving very useful. (one of the best videos I've seen) http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-gamepocalypse-possible-futures-waking-up-thinking-and-creating-a-better-world/ http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-game... "Serious games" http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.html http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.ht... http://www.gamesforchange.org http://www.gamesforchange.org Child-driven education http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ Music + hands-on creative work http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015.html http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015... There's an incredible story (inspiring & practical) of a boy without healthy legs gaining access to salvaged computers and free software to apply his graphics skills to pull his way out of the slums....it's less than 3/4 of the way through this speech by Eben Moglen called "Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century" http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/audio/DSG-CUNY-BeforeAndAfterIP.mp3 http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/audio/DSG-CUNY-BeforeAndAfter... I've been collecting a ton of related links and posting them at http://re-configure.org/drupal/node/33 http://re-configure.org/drupal/node/33

emit_time_n3rgy 15y ago
Russian president calls for World of Warcraft-like game for Russian history - http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/russias-prez-wa.php http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/russias-prez-wa.php

ap22213 15y ago

I worked in 'educational technology' for years trying to solve 'issues' in education, training, and general Human learning. We called the field advancing Human Potential. During this time, we tried out all sorts of concepts, worked with world leaders and world class theorists and researchers. We built all sorts of systems, and products, simulators, interactive games, expert systems, individual tutors, and other things of blended nature. These products were built for governments, research institutes, and commercial companies. Some of the 'products' had empirical results that surprisingly showed that they were 'useful', too. However, there weren't ever any revolutions in education or learning or educational theory, while I was there. I eventually dropped out from this field from burnout. Why? Because of the people. This area of interest seems to attract people with very similar personality traits. Reading this article and the subject reminds me of the type of people who want to 'solve' education. It is not at all unusual to work with people in this field who complete advance degrees while still in puberty. I worked with a guy who ended up the chair of mathematics at world-class university before he was 20. These are all 'geniuses', as they have been taught and trained to think. And, interestingly they all seem to clamor around this tall flag of solving education. I believe the failure of this field is actually that most of these people running it are very 'left brain' analytical thinkers. They think that they can solve these very dynamic, chaotic educational systems by decomposition and reductionism. It's kind of funny actually. Smart people get addicted to being smart, and they want to encourage the use of the systems that gave them the personal 'high' to begin with.

sireat 15y ago

On one hand, I admire the guy for tackling such a worthwhile problem and also having accomplished so much so young. On the other hand, I wonder if this may be the case of being extremely book smart and not so streetwise. Why not wait till you finish your PhD at the young age of 22? You will be more mature by then and know quite a bit more. If you already had built a working prototype(doesn't even have to be MVP) and experienced some sort of positive feedback, sure drop out. Otherwise, continue working on your ideas in your spare time. Bill, Larry and Sergey only dropped out when they had something happening. For those already in the workplace example of patio11 is very admirable. The interview mentions that they are just getting started and are at least 6 months from a prototype. Unless Andrew has some sort of edge from his studies, this venture doesn't have any inherent advantages. Disclaimer: I dropped out at 19 partially because I heard the PhD guys I was writing software for complaining so much about their progress. It took me 15 years to get back into school.