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This remains a bundling of two levers that we at one time tangentially related, but have sharply diverged: learning difficult topics in a deep and time-efficien

This remains a bundling of two levers that we at one time tangentially related, but have sharply diverged: learning difficult topics in a deep and time-efficient way, and building a potent network. It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. The best universities (in the modern sense of the word) face and pretty much always faced a stark tradeoff between a faculty that were exceptional regarding novel research, and faculty that were chosen on the basis of educational outcomes, there's even a term for it: "teaching professor". Excellent researchers at the cutting edge of their field are only competent educators by coincidence, they're at a minimum different competencies, and arguably pull in opposite or at least different directions. Many of the best academic researchers in the world teach in some country where they learned the language they teach in late in life: every undergraduate in STEM has professors they struggle to even understand via verbal communication (people that smart can generally master written communication in another language far more easily than verbal communication). There are better lectures (even restricting the field to e.g. MIT OCW) online and social interaction in a lecture is, with a few exceptions, disruptive and frowned upon. And even if someone wants to listen to a university lecture in person, universities generally have a formal or informal mechanism for non-students to attend them without any acceptance criteria or a staggering bill at the end. The networking that happens at a top school is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to achieve any other way. I'm only interested in having this conversation if you're willing to address those points individually rather than as an atomic unit: they are not an atomic unit.

keiferski 3y ago
It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. This isn't an argument. Not everyone wants to stare at a computer for 15 hours a day. Maybe you do. Some people prefer in-person interaction and discussion, others don't. Yes, in 1-to-1 comparisons, a YouTube video about a topic may be better than a university lecture in which you are mute and can't interact with the professor. But university isn't just mutely watching less qualified professors give lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the entire university experience, which also includes: learning how to work with others, discussion groups, office hours with the professor, managing your time to complete tasks, building social skills, dating, on and on. It's a complete package. The key element is that you are immersed in this environment and interact with the community of people around you. A university is not merely a place that stores information. When you attend a quality university, all of these things are a part of the learning experience. They are not separate. To use myself as an example: I have a degree in philosophy from one of the higher-ranking programs in the world. The Internet and YouTube are full of lectures and podcasts and free books about philosophy. And yet – none of them comes even close to the experience of sitting in a room for 3 hours intensely discussing metaphysics, or logic, or Kant, or another complex philosophical topic with a small group of other students and professors. That doesn't happen on the Internet and no amount of innovative video formats is going to change it. When you directly interact with another human being face-to-face and discuss/critique ideas, (in my experience) you learn much better than just watching videos. There is a huge difference between someone that has merely read a lot of books on a topic, and someone that has been through a rigorous discussion and critique with qualified interlocutors. Finally, on the networking element: if you look at most of the actual top performers in the tech industry, they all have one thing in common: they know each other. Learning how to interact with people – and not merely acquiring information – is a key element of actually being successful. And that's still learning. It's not some nebulous hand-wavy thing that you can brush away. Building the next Google, which is what the original essay was about, necessarily requires you to build and navigate complex human social structures. It's not something you can just watch in a video. Merely having information in your head isn't actually that useful if your goal is build a company.
- benreesman 3y ago
  We've arrived at a point in the conversation where your assertions are (for the most part) correct in at least a narrow way. But there were several epistemological sleights of hand involved in getting from point A to point B that you as an eminent philosopher can trivially identify at least as easily as I can, at least in hindsight. First, you've elided the unambiguous context of the OP's essay and my response to it: I said it's dangerous for people who miss getting into and through an elite university education without burdensome and difficult-to-discharge debt to go for broke anyways: the typical outcome there is the typical outcome of modern university education in general, which is a pile of debt for a mediocre education with a lift on employment outcomes asymptotically approaching zero and trivially not justifying the cost of the debt and the debt service, and a network of principally personal social utility. When the cheese at the end of the maze is "getting rich", that's a bad play. Another important piece of context you've used as a wedge (because I didn't dissect his essay via cherry-picked quotes, assuming that everyone who cared had read it and internalized the broader context) is that pg is clearly addressing people who he hopes will become high-achieving technologists, at a point in life where the decision is around a STEM undergraduate education with large class sizes and and a decaying level of interaction with faculty or other eminent thinkers affiliated with the university. This is nothing like a philosophy degree from an eminent university that involves freewheeling face-to-face interaction with some of the sharpest and most disruptive thinkers in a field, and furthermore in a field with very subjective measures on short time horizons about who has or has not made lasting contributions. We argue to this day about the philosophical and epistemological impact of work done millennia ago: right off the top of my head people debate whether or not Augustine was a key figure in the development of a modern sense of personal identity, and the debate about who was worth listening in these areas was very old then [1]. There is no evidence that's ever been presented to me that we can identify worthwhile contributions to philosophy on a time scale measured in years or even decades: people who devote their lives to such pursuits are optimizing for posterity, a very worthy thing to optimize for in my opinion but rarely one a person ever knows the outcome on in their lifetime. Furthermore, the exact immersive scenario you're describing requires nothing like the nepotism, barriers to entry, or cost structure of a modern elite university: we've erected barriers around class dynamics, wealth dynamics, and admissions that had far better solutions with the cost structure of a coffee shop in recent history [2]. We've eradicated that institution intentionally or unintentionally in favor of something defense-procurement markup expensive, with admissions criteria constantly plagued by scandal and lawsuit [3] after scandal [4], which welcomes false positives on admissions when attached to wealth and power [5], and sees false negatives on groundbreaking contribution unambiguous in contribution [6] when not attached to wealth and power, at least until forced to by mathematical rigor. And in your conclusion you've linked learning, broadly construed, with learning how to operate in circles where people face no consequences, continue to act unilaterally on behalf of the commons, and fuck up constantly [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] to put any question about their innate capability at anything other than learning how to work the socio-economic, professional, and academic class systems and maintain those distinctions by stepping on people who were both right and doing the right thing [11] via thuggery [12]. Almost all destructive forces with actual power [13] [14] [15] trace clear intellectual, academic, and philosophical origins to the work of academics or other noted intellectuals on the wrong side of history [16] [17] [18] [19]. So the question for you here isn't whether or not the world currently works they way you're describing, for the elite few it does. The question is what team you're playing for from a post of extremely influential privilege. Things aren't going well for the non-elites, and I don't think pg was trying to send 1-3% of his audience into a decaying elite subsidized by leading the other 97% to the slaughter in the form of useless degrees with mountains of debt. He's backed the wrong horse on a few things, but he's a fundamentally good guy. [1] https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/146970470 https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/14697047... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-gay-resignation-harvard-plagiarism/676997/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-g... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences [5] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management [8] https://www.npr.org/2008/10/24/96070766/greenspan-admits-free-market-ideology-flawed https://www.npr.org/2008/10/24/96070766/greenspan-admits-fre... [10] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/tech/larry-summers-openai-board-sam-altman/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/tech/larry-summers-openai... [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born [12] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

keiferski 3y ago

It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. This isn't an argument. Not everyone wants to stare at a computer for 15 hours a day. Maybe you do. Some people prefer in-person interaction and discussion, others don't. Yes, in 1-to-1 comparisons, a YouTube video about a topic may be better than a university lecture in which you are mute and can't interact with the professor. But university isn't just mutely watching less qualified professors give lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the entire university experience, which also includes: learning how to work with others, discussion groups, office hours with the professor, managing your time to complete tasks, building social skills, dating, on and on. It's a complete package. The key element is that you are immersed in this environment and interact with the community of people around you. A university is not merely a place that stores information. When you attend a quality university, all of these things are a part of the learning experience. They are not separate. To use myself as an example: I have a degree in philosophy from one of the higher-ranking programs in the world. The Internet and YouTube are full of lectures and podcasts and free books about philosophy. And yet – none of them comes even close to the experience of sitting in a room for 3 hours intensely discussing metaphysics, or logic, or Kant, or another complex philosophical topic with a small group of other students and professors. That doesn't happen on the Internet and no amount of innovative video formats is going to change it. When you directly interact with another human being face-to-face and discuss/critique ideas, (in my experience) you learn much better than just watching videos. There is a huge difference between someone that has merely read a lot of books on a topic, and someone that has been through a rigorous discussion and critique with qualified interlocutors. Finally, on the networking element: if you look at most of the actual top performers in the tech industry, they all have one thing in common: they know each other. Learning how to interact with people – and not merely acquiring information – is a key element of actually being successful. And that's still learning. It's not some nebulous hand-wavy thing that you can brush away. Building the next Google, which is what the original essay was about, necessarily requires you to build and navigate complex human social structures. It's not something you can just watch in a video. Merely having information in your head isn't actually that useful if your goal is build a company.

benreesman 3y ago
We've arrived at a point in the conversation where your assertions are (for the most part) correct in at least a narrow way. But there were several epistemological sleights of hand involved in getting from point A to point B that you as an eminent philosopher can trivially identify at least as easily as I can, at least in hindsight. First, you've elided the unambiguous context of the OP's essay and my response to it: I said it's dangerous for people who miss getting into and through an elite university education without burdensome and difficult-to-discharge debt to go for broke anyways: the typical outcome there is the typical outcome of modern university education in general, which is a pile of debt for a mediocre education with a lift on employment outcomes asymptotically approaching zero and trivially not justifying the cost of the debt and the debt service, and a network of principally personal social utility. When the cheese at the end of the maze is "getting rich", that's a bad play. Another important piece of context you've used as a wedge (because I didn't dissect his essay via cherry-picked quotes, assuming that everyone who cared had read it and internalized the broader context) is that pg is clearly addressing people who he hopes will become high-achieving technologists, at a point in life where the decision is around a STEM undergraduate education with large class sizes and and a decaying level of interaction with faculty or other eminent thinkers affiliated with the university. This is nothing like a philosophy degree from an eminent university that involves freewheeling face-to-face interaction with some of the sharpest and most disruptive thinkers in a field, and furthermore in a field with very subjective measures on short time horizons about who has or has not made lasting contributions. We argue to this day about the philosophical and epistemological impact of work done millennia ago: right off the top of my head people debate whether or not Augustine was a key figure in the development of a modern sense of personal identity, and the debate about who was worth listening in these areas was very old then [1]. There is no evidence that's ever been presented to me that we can identify worthwhile contributions to philosophy on a time scale measured in years or even decades: people who devote their lives to such pursuits are optimizing for posterity, a very worthy thing to optimize for in my opinion but rarely one a person ever knows the outcome on in their lifetime. Furthermore, the exact immersive scenario you're describing requires nothing like the nepotism, barriers to entry, or cost structure of a modern elite university: we've erected barriers around class dynamics, wealth dynamics, and admissions that had far better solutions with the cost structure of a coffee shop in recent history [2]. We've eradicated that institution intentionally or unintentionally in favor of something defense-procurement markup expensive, with admissions criteria constantly plagued by scandal and lawsuit [3] after scandal [4], which welcomes false positives on admissions when attached to wealth and power [5], and sees false negatives on groundbreaking contribution unambiguous in contribution [6] when not attached to wealth and power, at least until forced to by mathematical rigor. And in your conclusion you've linked learning, broadly construed, with learning how to operate in circles where people face no consequences, continue to act unilaterally on behalf of the commons, and fuck up constantly [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] to put any question about their innate capability at anything other than learning how to work the socio-economic, professional, and academic class systems and maintain those distinctions by stepping on people who were both right and doing the right thing [11] via thuggery [12]. Almost all destructive forces with actual power [13] [14] [15] trace clear intellectual, academic, and philosophical origins to the work of academics or other noted intellectuals on the wrong side of history [16] [17] [18] [19]. So the question for you here isn't whether or not the world currently works they way you're describing, for the elite few it does. The question is what team you're playing for from a post of extremely influential privilege. Things aren't going well for the non-elites, and I don't think pg was trying to send 1-3% of his audience into a decaying elite subsidized by leading the other 97% to the slaughter in the form of useless degrees with mountains of debt. He's backed the wrong horse on a few things, but he's a fundamentally good guy. [1] https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/146970470 https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/14697047... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-gay-resignation-harvard-plagiarism/676997/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-g... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences [5] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management [8] https://www.npr.org/2008/10/24/96070766/greenspan-admits-free-market-ideology-flawed https://www.npr.org/2008/10/24/96070766/greenspan-admits-fre... [10] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/tech/larry-summers-openai-board-sam-altman/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/tech/larry-summers-openai... [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born [12] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault