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While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things. I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began work

While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things. I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best. Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.

Ekaros 2y ago
You would expect there to be lot more people making their living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the end those making reasonable living is small fraction...
treflop 2y ago
The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. I think if you have to ask, you shouldn’t.
- ItsMonkk 2y ago
  It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out. Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
  - treflop 2y ago
    They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example. Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again. So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - rsanek 2y ago
      sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)
      - kamaal 2y ago
        If I do X I will get lucky != Lucky people can do X and win. Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.
    - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena. While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
    - ItsMonkk 2y ago
      What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose. Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed? All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got. And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.
- mhuffman 2y ago
  >The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can be very useful in success, it turns out.
- danielscrubs 2y ago
  The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it. Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay... I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since. Anyone else with similar experience?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there. There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way. Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose? Greed has a lot of history too. Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.
wheresmycraisin 2y ago
And staying in school through college is a great way to be in debt for the rest of your life and regret having a useless degree.
- electriclove 2y ago
  So true.. we need to make college ultra low cost, accessible to all, AND useful
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - drakonka 2y ago
      Are students less motivated or disciplined in the US than other parts of the developed world where higher education is free/compensated?
      - ThrowawayR2 2y ago
        Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government funding for higher education in the US now mean that the student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the customer is always right". Institutions have financial motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating, and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition fees.
        WalterBright 2y ago
derbOac 2y ago
These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always something about them that seems really off and misguided at the same time. The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off. The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments. There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis. In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved. Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
fallingknife 2y ago
> Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy. That is only because our system is so heavily built around bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal if done against any other group.
- pyrale 2y ago
  Could it be that education actually has value sometimes?
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how to do that" despite having done that same thing in school. Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.
    - pyrale 2y ago
      You barely remember anything from your toddler years, but they were some of the most impactful in your education. Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I didn’t remember a thing, but it came back much faster than the first time.
      - fallingknife 2y ago
        I remember what I learned. I know how to walk, talk, and use a toilet.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences of normal subgroups, eh...) But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do, and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of outcome.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  I should have stated explicitly that the fallacy was selection bias. I agree with what you wrote though.
hinkley 2y ago
The world is full of “rules” that the best among us break. There is no progress from following exactly the path of people before you, but the world also has little capacity for people who break too many rules. You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  >You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong. This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    There’s definitely value in being able to steel-man the opposing view and then dismantle it anyway. For one it can mean sending fewer people to meetings if you can trust a person to present your side fairly even if they disagree. If an I Told You So moment comes later they are still on record as dissenting. Which is enough for some people.
kamaal 2y ago
>>Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy. The adult equivalent of this to quit your comfortable paying jobs to do a start-up. Fail bad, and realise you are landed way behind people with 9-5 jobs. Most of the times- "Do this scary thing and win" requires lots of luck going for you. In fact it can be attributed luck alone in nearly all cases. The problem is people think if they work hard enough that chances will be in their favor. That's rarely, if ever the case. By and large. Study well, get a job, save, invest, tend to your health and relationships. Just do the well set formula. You can't go wrong here.
TheCoelacanth 2y ago
Especially when we are talking pre-20th century. Child labor was the norm outside of wealthy families. It was more remarkable not to have a job at a young age than it was to have one.

Ekaros 2y ago

You would expect there to be lot more people making their living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the end those making reasonable living is small fraction...

treflop 2y ago

The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. I think if you have to ask, you shouldn’t.

ItsMonkk 2y ago
It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out. Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
- treflop 2y ago
  They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example. Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again. So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rsanek 2y ago
    sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)
    - kamaal 2y ago
      If I do X I will get lucky != Lucky people can do X and win. Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena. While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
  - ItsMonkk 2y ago
    What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose. Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed? All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got. And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.
mhuffman 2y ago
>The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can be very useful in success, it turns out.
danielscrubs 2y ago
The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it. Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay... I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since. Anyone else with similar experience?
- lazide 2y ago
  Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there. There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way. Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose? Greed has a lot of history too. Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.

wheresmycraisin 2y ago

And staying in school through college is a great way to be in debt for the rest of your life and regret having a useless degree.

electriclove 2y ago
So true.. we need to make college ultra low cost, accessible to all, AND useful
- fallingknife 2y ago
  We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - drakonka 2y ago
    Are students less motivated or disciplined in the US than other parts of the developed world where higher education is free/compensated?
    - ThrowawayR2 2y ago
      Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government funding for higher education in the US now mean that the student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the customer is always right". Institutions have financial motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating, and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition fees.
      - WalterBright 2y ago

derbOac 2y ago

These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always something about them that seems really off and misguided at the same time. The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off. The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments. There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis. In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved. Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.

paulryanrogers 2y ago

fallingknife 2y ago

> Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy. That is only because our system is so heavily built around bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal if done against any other group.

pyrale 2y ago
Could it be that education actually has value sometimes?
- Aerroon 2y ago
  Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how to do that" despite having done that same thing in school. Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    You barely remember anything from your toddler years, but they were some of the most impactful in your education. Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I didn’t remember a thing, but it came back much faster than the first time.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      I remember what I learned. I know how to walk, talk, and use a toilet.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences of normal subgroups, eh...) But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do, and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of outcome.

dghlsakjg 2y ago
I should have stated explicitly that the fallacy was selection bias. I agree with what you wrote though.

hinkley 2y ago

The world is full of “rules” that the best among us break. There is no progress from following exactly the path of people before you, but the world also has little capacity for people who break too many rules. You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.

potato3732842 2y ago
>You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong. This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.
- hinkley 2y ago
  There’s definitely value in being able to steel-man the opposing view and then dismantle it anyway. For one it can mean sending fewer people to meetings if you can trust a person to present your side fairly even if they disagree. If an I Told You So moment comes later they are still on record as dissenting. Which is enough for some people.

kamaal 2y ago

>>Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy. The adult equivalent of this to quit your comfortable paying jobs to do a start-up. Fail bad, and realise you are landed way behind people with 9-5 jobs. Most of the times- "Do this scary thing and win" requires lots of luck going for you. In fact it can be attributed luck alone in nearly all cases. The problem is people think if they work hard enough that chances will be in their favor. That's rarely, if ever the case. By and large. Study well, get a job, save, invest, tend to your health and relationships. Just do the well set formula. You can't go wrong here.

TheCoelacanth 2y ago

Especially when we are talking pre-20th century. Child labor was the norm outside of wealthy families. It was more remarkable not to have a job at a young age than it was to have one.