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Reminds me of that great quote I heard about Rhodes Scholars: A Rhodes Scholar: someone with a great future behind him. The same type of lax logic can be ob

Reminds me of that great quote I heard about Rhodes Scholars: A Rhodes Scholar: someone with a great future behind him. The same type of lax logic can be observed in the world's infatuation with the dramatic rise of Japan in the 80s, dubbed the "Japanese Miracle". This logic can be seen, repeatedly, throughout human history, with more recent examples being Communism in the 60s, the "Asian Tigers" of the 90s, and the "New Economy" babble of pretty much every single human period. Indeed, I'm seeing the same kind of statements about China and India as the "New World Powers". Here's the reasoning (if you want to call it that): Look at that growth rate! If this keeps up - sooner or later they'll be stronger than America! Sigh Start low enough (19 year olds anyone?), and any growth will look enormous (startups; this applies to you too). If they kept at the growth rate you claim we'd end up with India and China being greater in size and scope than the entire universe. Look everyone! This kid got into MIT at 14 years old! Extrapolate that out a few years - he'll clearly be too awesome for us mere mortals to even comprehend! I mean really, that's honestly how people think. They never check back on said prodigy 10 years later, who has become, just as one would expect, a moderately accomplished human being (reversion to the mean). Indeed many just plain flame out and disappear from sight (a sad fact). Woo extrapolation! It works right? Come on, I mean it's not like these systems are complex at all! Statistics guy just shakes his head in complete disgust

kkowalczyk 14y ago
I find strawmen highly curious. I re-read the article to see where it claims that those kids will grown into super-human geniuses that would make Einstein feel small. It turns out: nowhere. You've debunked a "faulty reasoning" that you yourself fabricated.
- confluence 14y ago
  Feeling was implied I just gave it a cynical twist, and I quote: Ritik Malhotra (19, San Jose, CA) Ritik began programming at age 8; started a popular web forum at the age of 12 that grew to over 32,000 members; and ran a web hosting and software consultancy business at the age of 13, garnering over a 600x return on his initial investment. I wonder what he started with - $10? Taylor Wilson (18, Texarkana, AR) became the youngest person in history to create nuclear fusion. Since then, he has produced the lowest-cost and lowest-dose active interrogation system for the detection of enriched uranium ever developed. As a Thiel Fellow, Taylor will focus on both counter-terrorism and the production of medical isotopes for use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. I ... no ... I can't even address this. Omar Rizwan (18, East Hanover, NJ) wants to change the world through the control and analysis of information. Nothing big there. Just changing the world. Don't mind me. Jimmy Koppel (20, St. Louis, MO) has a passion for software engineering – and a plan to make it much more efficient. Modifying software today often involves hundreds of thousands of small, similar adjustments that require a great deal of time and money. James will fix that problem by developing new tools to automate the process. It's almost like software engineering is real work. But hey, this kid is going to "automate the process". Yoonseo Kang (18, Mississauga, ON, Canada) recognizes that society’s potential for innovation and abundance can only be achieved if knowledge and the factors of production are accessible for everyone. Yeah, what's the deal with all these governments. Who needs clean water, affordable food, stable electricity load, good laws, sewerage, and a safety net. People just need open hardware, and crowd sourced community blah blah blah - that'll solve all our problems. Right? RIGHT! Noor Siddiqui (17, Clifton, VA) is inspired to galvanize people for the good of others. As a Thiel Fellow, she will work to give students across the globe access to upward mobility – and industries access to an untapped work force – with the goal of mobilizing one billion people in the next decade. That's like MBA speak meets HR meets a Dilbert comic. You can't make this stuff up. It's insane. Clearly humble there. I mean, of course, no claims, apart from the MOBILISING ONE BILLION PEOPLE. But hey, that's just me little old me. What would I know? revolutionize our country’s antiquated system using technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he will focus on Flashcards There's a Youtube hit in that sentence somewhere. And here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4. Ilya Vakhutinsky (20, Fair Lawn, NJ) wants to revolutionize the way the technology and health care communities work together. Indeed, because a poor person's biggest problem with health care is how he will access his patient data. Money? What's that? When a person's age is next to their name, preceding all actual data, you just know some real _A class bullshit_ is coming your way. And hey, it holds true! Removed Einstein reference just to make you happy :D.
  - GuiA 14y ago
    This is a startup blog. Their goal is to make everything feel amazing, so that more people become fascinated with "entrepreneurship", so that they can get more readers. A few months ago, one of my colleague remarked that the main thing that tech blogs and new-gen incubators (ie ycombinator, thiel fellowship, etc.) did was make entrepreneurs out of people who wouldn't have created a company otherwise. I feel that there's some truth to that. Offtopic: confluence, I'd like to get in touch with you, btw. Feel free to reach out through contact info in my profile :)
  - tensor 14y ago
    Most of this is just bold claims without any backing. Every kid thinks they are the next Einstein, Jobs, or Gates. For the more technically oriented people, university provides the best environment for access to scientific papers and domain experts around. Hell, Thiel's own startup Palantir hires people "preferably with phd's." It's not the degree that matters, but what you learn during it. Thiel has some form of political agenda and this is just a stunt to try and further it. I do not claim to know what his agenda is, but if I had to guess, I'd say his aim is to promote his libertarianism ideals.
    - glenra 14y ago
      Thiel is convinced that college in its current form has become a waste of time and talent for the smartest students. He agrees with the "signaling" model of education whereby the primary "benefit" of having a degree is just that it proves you were the sort of person who could complete a degree; this project serves as a test of that model. If these kids do well, eventually "skip college and do something useful instead" might become a socially viable alternative to the default expectation that the smarter you are, the more time you should waste in college before you go out and try to do anything.
  - rfrey 14y ago
    I agree with your points in the large, but don't fault the kids. Youthful hubris, especially on the scale you've highlighted here, is ridiculous, hopelessly naive, indescribably arrogant, and... breathtakingly wonderful. That ill-founded self confidence will fail every single time - except when it doesn't, in which case the results are magnificent. My own optimism is nearly spent, which often leads me to hopelessness. That's held at bay by listening to these kinds of kids talk about their ambitions. Don't worry, they'll figure out it's hard, and in a few years some of them will laugh at their former innocence (or blush at their swagger). In the meantime they'll have swung a hammer a few times at the infinite brick wall. Please don't wish them away.
jeffchuber 14y ago
ironically Peter Thiel has quoted that quote about Rhodes scholars in the class he is teaching at stanford.
- confluence 14y ago
  I had no idea :D. Do you have a link or can you quote in context. I may have more in common with Peter Thiel than I first thought - or not :D.
  - dirtyaura 14y ago
    Class 4: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels...
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  Well seeing as that 3 US presidents (aproximatly 6% of them) have been Rhodes Scollars he might want to re think that :-)
  - confluence 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unite... states that only Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Who are the other two?
    - planetguy 14y ago
      I think you're right, it was just Clinton. Mind you there's only 1794 living Rhodes scholars in the United States and one of them is a former President, so it increases your chance of becoming PoTuS from one in eighty million to one in 1794, and that's not bad. Anyway, the point of all this isn't to pick on Rhodes Scholars but to point out the unreliability of child prodigies. In fact, Rhodes Scholars tend not to be the child-prodigy types at all. The selection process includes not just academics but also sport, social service and character requirements, completely inaccessible to the kid who has spent his entire childhood locked in a room being drilled on calculus. Rhodes Scholars tend to be smart but well-rounded, sociable and a bit conformist, exactly the sort of people who grow up to be politicians. A Rhodes scholarship is no guarantee of success, but if I could buy shares in someone's life I'd put my money into Rhodes scholars rather than teenage prodigies.
confluencesucks 14y ago
confluence was probably some MIT grad in like 2005 who still cant find a job
- planetguy 14y ago
  You created an account just to insult another user? WTF is wrong with you?
waterhouse 14y ago
Regarding that quote about Rhodes Scholars--since no one has mentioned it yet, I will mention the phrase: "regression to the mean". If, from a diverse population, you select a subpopulation with high scores on trait X measured by some noisy test, and you then re-test them sometime later (so that the noise is generated by fresh randomness the second time), you will likely find that they score worse. This is because it is likely that the subpopulation you selected mostly benefited from the noise, and being lucky the first time is unrelated to being lucky the second time. (That's one way to characterize luck.) The regression-to-the-mean effect is obviously proportional to the ratio of "noise" to "intrinsic qualities". If the amount of noise is close to zero, then the regression will be small; if the noise is gigantic or the intrinsic quality is zero, then the regression will be almost complete. To illustrate the second case, you might imagine a population rolling six-sided dice, and a silly researcher selecting all those who rolled sixes and being astonished that their average had dropped to 3.5 on the second roll. If you then imagine that each person had a private number from 0 to 50 that they added to their die rolls, then the test suddenly becomes much more meaningful. With that in mind, we can hope to be more than simple-mindedly impressed or simple-mindedly cynical about Rhodes Scholars, child prodigies, Thiel Fellowship recipients, and so on. How much "noise" is there, and what can be done about it? For example, suppose that they're looking for people who do amazing things. Suppose that most people who do amazing things do them because they're interested in them, and that there's a bunch of pseudo-randomness in what you happen to be interested in. Then... they'll pick a bunch of people who just happened to be interested in doing things that the scholarship people found amazing. What will these people be interested in doing next? there's a good chance it'll be completely not-amazing. (Yes, some people have a deep, established interest in some field that is unlikely to change--but even within a field or subfield, you will find interesting things that are amazing and interesting things that are not.) In that case, either they will look disappointing, or they will decide (probably due to feeling pressure) to try to work on amazing things even if they're not interesting. I doubt if it's impossible to pull off the second option, but it is (by stipulation) a significant mode change for these people, and some received wisdom[1][2] says it's not likely to go well. I hope that, instead, they are looking for people who have intense interests and great natural ability, and will try to shelter them from external pressure to produce "amazing" things, and that this press release is just crap they put out to please the media. Meanwhile, I guess there might also be successful people who thrive on that kind of pressure... I just identify most strongly with the first group. Also, it probably is a good thing to celebrate people's achievements. It just carries some danger with it... Anyway, I've described one type of amazing youth for which their apparent amazingness depends significantly on a capricious factor (what they're interested in). I'm confident about my qualitative description, because I know myself and some other people that I think are of this type. How significant is the interest factor? how capricious is it? can interest be deliberately controlled to some extent? Are there other types of amazing youth? is their current amazingness also subject to significant amounts of randomness? This, at least, would enable us to judge how much disappointingness we'd expect simply from the regression-to-the-mean principle. Do people do serious scientific investigation about this sort of thing? Seems like the Thiel Foundation had better, given that they're working in this exact field. But charity-style things probably don't have systematic incentives to perform well... maybe we can hope that Peter Thiel will apply the kind of ruthless determination to succeed that I feel he has [maybe they're in fact selecting youths who exhibit this trait, which certainly seems it'd be more deterministic than "interest"], and figure this stuff out. Maybe. [1] http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html [see: "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in."]

kkowalczyk 14y ago

I find strawmen highly curious. I re-read the article to see where it claims that those kids will grown into super-human geniuses that would make Einstein feel small. It turns out: nowhere. You've debunked a "faulty reasoning" that you yourself fabricated.

confluence 14y ago
Feeling was implied I just gave it a cynical twist, and I quote: Ritik Malhotra (19, San Jose, CA) Ritik began programming at age 8; started a popular web forum at the age of 12 that grew to over 32,000 members; and ran a web hosting and software consultancy business at the age of 13, garnering over a 600x return on his initial investment. I wonder what he started with - $10? Taylor Wilson (18, Texarkana, AR) became the youngest person in history to create nuclear fusion. Since then, he has produced the lowest-cost and lowest-dose active interrogation system for the detection of enriched uranium ever developed. As a Thiel Fellow, Taylor will focus on both counter-terrorism and the production of medical isotopes for use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. I ... no ... I can't even address this. Omar Rizwan (18, East Hanover, NJ) wants to change the world through the control and analysis of information. Nothing big there. Just changing the world. Don't mind me. Jimmy Koppel (20, St. Louis, MO) has a passion for software engineering – and a plan to make it much more efficient. Modifying software today often involves hundreds of thousands of small, similar adjustments that require a great deal of time and money. James will fix that problem by developing new tools to automate the process. It's almost like software engineering is real work. But hey, this kid is going to "automate the process". Yoonseo Kang (18, Mississauga, ON, Canada) recognizes that society’s potential for innovation and abundance can only be achieved if knowledge and the factors of production are accessible for everyone. Yeah, what's the deal with all these governments. Who needs clean water, affordable food, stable electricity load, good laws, sewerage, and a safety net. People just need open hardware, and crowd sourced community blah blah blah - that'll solve all our problems. Right? RIGHT! Noor Siddiqui (17, Clifton, VA) is inspired to galvanize people for the good of others. As a Thiel Fellow, she will work to give students across the globe access to upward mobility – and industries access to an untapped work force – with the goal of mobilizing one billion people in the next decade. That's like MBA speak meets HR meets a Dilbert comic. You can't make this stuff up. It's insane. Clearly humble there. I mean, of course, no claims, apart from the MOBILISING ONE BILLION PEOPLE. But hey, that's just me little old me. What would I know? revolutionize our country’s antiquated system using technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he will focus on Flashcards There's a Youtube hit in that sentence somewhere. And here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4. Ilya Vakhutinsky (20, Fair Lawn, NJ) wants to revolutionize the way the technology and health care communities work together. Indeed, because a poor person's biggest problem with health care is how he will access his patient data. Money? What's that? When a person's age is next to their name, preceding all actual data, you just know some real _A class bullshit_ is coming your way. And hey, it holds true! Removed Einstein reference just to make you happy :D.
- GuiA 14y ago
  This is a startup blog. Their goal is to make everything feel amazing, so that more people become fascinated with "entrepreneurship", so that they can get more readers. A few months ago, one of my colleague remarked that the main thing that tech blogs and new-gen incubators (ie ycombinator, thiel fellowship, etc.) did was make entrepreneurs out of people who wouldn't have created a company otherwise. I feel that there's some truth to that. Offtopic: confluence, I'd like to get in touch with you, btw. Feel free to reach out through contact info in my profile :)
- tensor 14y ago
  Most of this is just bold claims without any backing. Every kid thinks they are the next Einstein, Jobs, or Gates. For the more technically oriented people, university provides the best environment for access to scientific papers and domain experts around. Hell, Thiel's own startup Palantir hires people "preferably with phd's." It's not the degree that matters, but what you learn during it. Thiel has some form of political agenda and this is just a stunt to try and further it. I do not claim to know what his agenda is, but if I had to guess, I'd say his aim is to promote his libertarianism ideals.
  - glenra 14y ago
    Thiel is convinced that college in its current form has become a waste of time and talent for the smartest students. He agrees with the "signaling" model of education whereby the primary "benefit" of having a degree is just that it proves you were the sort of person who could complete a degree; this project serves as a test of that model. If these kids do well, eventually "skip college and do something useful instead" might become a socially viable alternative to the default expectation that the smarter you are, the more time you should waste in college before you go out and try to do anything.
- rfrey 14y ago
  I agree with your points in the large, but don't fault the kids. Youthful hubris, especially on the scale you've highlighted here, is ridiculous, hopelessly naive, indescribably arrogant, and... breathtakingly wonderful. That ill-founded self confidence will fail every single time - except when it doesn't, in which case the results are magnificent. My own optimism is nearly spent, which often leads me to hopelessness. That's held at bay by listening to these kinds of kids talk about their ambitions. Don't worry, they'll figure out it's hard, and in a few years some of them will laugh at their former innocence (or blush at their swagger). In the meantime they'll have swung a hammer a few times at the infinite brick wall. Please don't wish them away.

jeffchuber 14y ago

ironically Peter Thiel has quoted that quote about Rhodes scholars in the class he is teaching at stanford.

confluence 14y ago
I had no idea :D. Do you have a link or can you quote in context. I may have more in common with Peter Thiel than I first thought - or not :D.
- dirtyaura 14y ago
  Class 4: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels...
mjwalshe 14y ago
Well seeing as that 3 US presidents (aproximatly 6% of them) have been Rhodes Scollars he might want to re think that :-)
- confluence 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unite... states that only Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Who are the other two?
  - planetguy 14y ago
    I think you're right, it was just Clinton. Mind you there's only 1794 living Rhodes scholars in the United States and one of them is a former President, so it increases your chance of becoming PoTuS from one in eighty million to one in 1794, and that's not bad. Anyway, the point of all this isn't to pick on Rhodes Scholars but to point out the unreliability of child prodigies. In fact, Rhodes Scholars tend not to be the child-prodigy types at all. The selection process includes not just academics but also sport, social service and character requirements, completely inaccessible to the kid who has spent his entire childhood locked in a room being drilled on calculus. Rhodes Scholars tend to be smart but well-rounded, sociable and a bit conformist, exactly the sort of people who grow up to be politicians. A Rhodes scholarship is no guarantee of success, but if I could buy shares in someone's life I'd put my money into Rhodes scholars rather than teenage prodigies.

confluencesucks 14y ago

confluence was probably some MIT grad in like 2005 who still cant find a job

planetguy 14y ago
You created an account just to insult another user? WTF is wrong with you?

waterhouse 14y ago

Regarding that quote about Rhodes Scholars--since no one has mentioned it yet, I will mention the phrase: "regression to the mean". If, from a diverse population, you select a subpopulation with high scores on trait X measured by some noisy test, and you then re-test them sometime later (so that the noise is generated by fresh randomness the second time), you will likely find that they score worse. This is because it is likely that the subpopulation you selected mostly benefited from the noise, and being lucky the first time is unrelated to being lucky the second time. (That's one way to characterize luck.) The regression-to-the-mean effect is obviously proportional to the ratio of "noise" to "intrinsic qualities". If the amount of noise is close to zero, then the regression will be small; if the noise is gigantic or the intrinsic quality is zero, then the regression will be almost complete. To illustrate the second case, you might imagine a population rolling six-sided dice, and a silly researcher selecting all those who rolled sixes and being astonished that their average had dropped to 3.5 on the second roll. If you then imagine that each person had a private number from 0 to 50 that they added to their die rolls, then the test suddenly becomes much more meaningful. With that in mind, we can hope to be more than simple-mindedly impressed or simple-mindedly cynical about Rhodes Scholars, child prodigies, Thiel Fellowship recipients, and so on. How much "noise" is there, and what can be done about it? For example, suppose that they're looking for people who do amazing things. Suppose that most people who do amazing things do them because they're interested in them, and that there's a bunch of pseudo-randomness in what you happen to be interested in. Then... they'll pick a bunch of people who just happened to be interested in doing things that the scholarship people found amazing. What will these people be interested in doing next? there's a good chance it'll be completely not-amazing. (Yes, some people have a deep, established interest in some field that is unlikely to change--but even within a field or subfield, you will find interesting things that are amazing and interesting things that are not.) In that case, either they will look disappointing, or they will decide (probably due to feeling pressure) to try to work on amazing things even if they're not interesting. I doubt if it's impossible to pull off the second option, but it is (by stipulation) a significant mode change for these people, and some received wisdom[1][2] says it's not likely to go well. I hope that, instead, they are looking for people who have intense interests and great natural ability, and will try to shelter them from external pressure to produce "amazing" things, and that this press release is just crap they put out to please the media. Meanwhile, I guess there might also be successful people who thrive on that kind of pressure... I just identify most strongly with the first group. Also, it probably is a good thing to celebrate people's achievements. It just carries some danger with it... Anyway, I've described one type of amazing youth for which their apparent amazingness depends significantly on a capricious factor (what they're interested in). I'm confident about my qualitative description, because I know myself and some other people that I think are of this type. How significant is the interest factor? how capricious is it? can interest be deliberately controlled to some extent? Are there other types of amazing youth? is their current amazingness also subject to significant amounts of randomness? This, at least, would enable us to judge how much disappointingness we'd expect simply from the regression-to-the-mean principle. Do people do serious scientific investigation about this sort of thing? Seems like the Thiel Foundation had better, given that they're working in this exact field. But charity-style things probably don't have systematic incentives to perform well... maybe we can hope that Peter Thiel will apply the kind of ruthless determination to succeed that I feel he has [maybe they're in fact selecting youths who exhibit this trait, which certainly seems it'd be more deterministic than "interest"], and figure this stuff out. Maybe. [1] http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html [see: "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in."]