@Austen 10 years ago: my younger son discovers foil-wrapped pats of butter. https://t.co/Wxvm4PGCak

@michael_nielsen Science and religion are arguably in the same business, as sources of knowledge, so there is more reconciling to do.

@drewmurrdotcom @micsolana 1°C is roughly how much human carbon emissions have warmed the Earth so far.

@micsolana About 1°C less cool than it should be. So far.

@shri_shobhit Have a high ratio of rereading to editing. Then you'll notice immediately if some change messes up the flow.

@ATabarrok Is this due to some kind of artifact? For example, does it not include software?

@Bradley33317351 Your English teacher was paraphrasing E. B. White.

Being picky about writing makes the ideas in an essay better too, in the same way that shaking a bin will make the objects in it more closely packed. If you have to rephrase a sentence, you'll only rephrase it in a way that's at least as true.

@markessien Not everyone. Some of these people already openly applaud the killing of children. What could change that would make such a person ashamed?

@jonatanpallesen Whether these ideas are actually illiberal depends on how dangerous the disease is, and no one knew that at first. It's certainly possible to imagine diseases for which quarantines, for example, make sense.


@hyetigran @paultoo Or maybe "National"?

@paultoo Also: Watch out for countries with red flags.

@weshanon Here you go: https://t.co/owrYC46NAb

@stevenpeniche @ycombinator Definitely, in first drafts. I just don't like to publish it.

@pievalentin Zero. Reddit got sold to Conde Nast and then spun out again, so this is a separate entity from the company YC invested in. We're just happy for the founders.

@valentine13bx @mr_james_c @paultoo Actually it's not. People disagree about whether heretical statements are true, but there's little disagreement about which statements are considered acceptable to make publicly.

@Algon_33 @mr_james_c @paultoo Criticizing wokeness.

@paultoo @mr_james_c Yes, good point. Make that: he says heretical things and enables other people to as well.

@kartanis You clearly haven't been paying very close attention.

@Birdseed501 Poor performance how?


A Project of One's Own
June 2021
A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son
told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he
was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him
say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because
he'd discovered this way of working. Working on a project of your
own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking.
It's more fun, but also much more productive.
What proportion of great work has been done by people who were
skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.
There is something special about working on a project of your own.
I wouldn't say exactly that you're happier. A better word would be
excited, or engaged. You're happy when things are going well, but
often they aren't. When I'm writing an essay, most of the time I'm
worried and puzzled: worried that the essay will turn out badly,
and puzzled because I'm groping for some idea that I can't see
clearly enough. Will I be able to pin it down with words? In the
end I usually can, if I take long enough, but I'm never sure; the
first few attempts often fail.
You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't
last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do
it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way,
nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its
natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always
happy, maybe, but awake and alive.
Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of their
own. The hard part is making this converge with the work you do as
an adult. And our customs make it harder. We treat "playing" and
"hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear
to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long)
route from that to architecture or engineering. And instead of
pointing out the route, we conceal it, by implicitly treating the
stuff kids do as different from real work.
[
1
]
Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path
to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through
school. And unfortunately schoolwork tends to be very different from
working on projects of one's own. It's usually neither a project,
nor one's own. So as school gets more serious, working on projects
of one's own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread
off to the side.
It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their
backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning
about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made
Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building
treehouses than studying for exams.
If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and
working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick
the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because
I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive
value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care
about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their
own, I wanted to hear all about those.
[
2
]
It may be inevitable that school is the way it is. I'm not saying
we have to redesign it (though I'm not saying we don't), just that
we should understand what it does to our attitudes to work — that
it steers us toward the dutiful plodding kind of work, often using
competition as bait, and away from skating.
There are occasionally times when schoolwork becomes a project of
one's own. Whenever I had to write a paper, that would become a
project of my own — except in English classes, ironically, because
the things one has to write in English classes are so
bogus
. And
when I got to college and started taking CS classes, the programs
I had to write became projects of my own. Whenever I was writing
or programming, I was usually skating, and that has been true ever
since.
So where exactly is the edge of projects of one's own? That's an
interesting question, partly because the answer is so complicated,
and partly because there's so much at stake. There turn out to be
two senses in which work can be one's own: 1) that you're doing it
voluntarily, rather than merely because someone told you to, and
2) that you're doing it by yourself.
The edge of the former is quite sharp. People who care a lot about
their work are usually very sensitive to the difference between
pulling, and being pushed, and work tends to fall into one category
or the other. But the test isn't simply whether you're told to do
something. You can choose to do something you're told to do. Indeed,
you can own it far more thoroughly than the person who told you to
do it.
For example, math homework is for most people something they're
told to do. But for my father, who was a mathematician, it wasn't.
Most of us think of the problems in a math book as a way to test
or develop our knowledge of the material explained in each section.
But to my father the problems were the part that mattered, and the
text was merely a sort of annotation. Whenever he got a new math
book it was to him like being given a puzzle: here was a new set
of problems to solve, and he'd immediately set about solving all
of them.
The other sense of a project being one's own — working on it by
oneself — has a much softer edge. It shades gradually into
collaboration. And interestingly, it shades into collaboration in
two different ways. One way to collaborate is to share a single
project. For example, when two mathematicians collaborate on a proof
that takes shape in the course of a conversation between them. The
other way is when multiple people work on separate projects of their
own that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. For example, when one
person writes the text of a book and another does the graphic design.
[
3
]
These two paths into collaboration can of course be combined. But
under the right conditions, the excitement of working on a project
of one's own can be preserved for quite a while before disintegrating
into the turbulent flow of work in a large organization. Indeed,
the history of successful organizations is partly the history of
techniques for preserving that excitement.
[
4
]
The team that made the original Macintosh were a great example of
this phenomenon. People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and
Bill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They
were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by
Steve Jobs. There was a lot of collaboration between them, but
they all seem to have individually felt the excitement of
working on a project of one's own.
In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how they'd
come back into the office after dinner and work late into the night.
People who've never experienced the thrill of working on a project
they're excited about can't distinguish this kind of working long
hours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms,
but they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. That's why it's a
mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance." Indeed, the
mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and
life are distinct. For those to whom the word "work" automatically
implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters,
the relationship between work and life would be better represented
by a dash than a slash. I wouldn't want to work on anything that I didn't
want to take over my life.
Of course, it's easier to achieve this level of motivation when
you're making something like the Macintosh. It's easy for something
new to feel like a project of your own. That's one of the reasons
for the tendency programmers have to rewrite things that don't need
rewriting, and to write their own versions of things that already
exist. This sometimes alarms managers, and measured by total number
of characters typed, it's rarely the optimal solution. But it's not
always driven simply by arrogance or cluelessness.
Writing code from scratch is also much more rewarding — so much
more rewarding that a good programmer can end up net ahead, despite
the shocking waste of characters. Indeed, it may be one of the
advantages of capitalism that it encourages such rewriting. A company
that needs software to do something can't use the software already
written to do it at another company, and thus has to write their
own, which often turns out better.
[
5
]
The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems is
one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high. Not only
is the market price of unsolved problems higher, you also get a
discount on productivity when you work on them. In fact, you get a
double increase in productivity: when you're doing a clean-sheet
design, it's easier to recruit skaters, and they get to spend all
their time skating.
Steve Jobs knew a thing or two about skaters from having watched
Steve Wozniak. If you can find the right people, you only have to
tell them what to do at the highest level. They'll handle the
details. Indeed, they insist on it. For a project to feel like your
own, you must have sufficient autonomy. You can't be working to
order, or
slowed down
by bureaucracy.
One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are
two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects
outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale
financially, startups and open source projects have a lot in common,
including the fact that they're often run by skaters. And indeed,
there's a wormhole from one end of the scale to the other: one of
the best ways to discover
startup ideas
is to work on a project
just for fun.
If your projects are the kind that make money, it's easy to work
on them. It's harder when they're not. And the hardest part, usually,
is morale. That's where adults have it harder than kids. Kids just
plunge in and build their treehouse without worrying about whether
they're wasting their time, or how it compares to other treehouses.
And frankly we could learn a lot from kids here. The high standards
most grownups have for "real" work do not always serve us well.
The most important phase in a project of one's own is at the
beginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x to
actually doing x. And at that point high standards are not merely
useless but positively harmful. There are a few people who start
too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred
by fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeeded
if they had.
But if we couldn't benefit as kids from the knowledge that our
treehouses were on the path to grownup projects, we can at least
benefit as grownups from knowing that our projects are on a path
that stretches back to treehouses. Remember that careless confidence
you had as a kid when starting something new? That would be a
powerful thing to recapture.
If it's harder as adults to retain that kind of confidence, we at
least tend to be more aware of what we're doing. Kids bounce, or
are herded, from one kind of work to the next, barely realizing
what's happening to them. Whereas we know more about different types
of work and have more control over which we do. Ideally we can have
the best of both worlds: to be deliberate in choosing to work on
projects of our own, and carelessly confident in starting new ones.
Notes
[
1
]
"Hobby" is a curious word. Now it means work that isn't
real
work — work that one is not to be judged by — but originally it just
meant an obsession in a fairly general sense (even a political
opinion, for example) that one metaphorically rode as a child rides
a hobby-horse. It's hard to say if its recent, narrower meaning is
a change for the better or the worse. For sure there are lots of
false positives — lots of projects that end up being important but
are dismissed initially as mere hobbies. But on the other hand, the
concept provides valuable cover for projects in the early, ugly
duckling phase.
[
2
]
Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last
war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success
was to acquire
credentials
while ascending some predefined ladder.
But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How
awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and
thereby gave their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing
them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't
harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own
projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged
very easily.
[
3
]
The complicated, gradual edge between working on one's own
projects and collaborating with others is one reason there is so
much disagreement about the idea of the "lone genius." In practice
people collaborate (or not) in all kinds of different ways, but the
idea of the lone genius is definitely not a myth. There's a core
of truth to it that goes with a certain way of working.
[
4
]
Collaboration is powerful too. The optimal organization would
combine collaboration and ownership in such a way as to do the least
damage to each. Interestingly, companies and university departments
approach this ideal from opposite directions: companies insist on
collaboration, and occasionally also manage both to recruit skaters
and allow them to skate, and university departments insist on the
ability to do independent research (which is by custom treated as
skating, whether it is or not), and the people they hire collaborate
as much as they choose.
[
5
]
If a company could design its software in such a way that the
best newly arrived programmers always got a clean sheet, it could
have a kind of eternal youth. That might not be impossible. If you
had a software backbone defining a game with sufficiently clear
rules, individual programmers could write their own players.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld, Jessica
Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.


@ThatChrisRyan What incentive would they have to keep working once they reached that point, if they knew the government was going to take everything from then on? And Bezos hit that mark in 1998.

The existence of this vast literature is ordinarily hidden. Those who create it do not, for the most part, want to draw attention to their work; they just want it to quietly get them tenure. But if you try a few searches you'll see how much there is.

https://t.co/62DZl42gJo

There's a whole class of "research" based on saying nothing in an obscure enough way that no one can call you on it. Or at least, no human. It will be interesting if AI can expose such papers in the same way plagiarism detection software has exposed past plagiarism.

@uralbayhan0 Are you claiming the trend is reversed if you define middle class according to wealth rather than income, or use different thresholds?

@cutceo It's what we do already.

@ThatChrisRyan Ban great wealth and you also ban startups, and that won't somehow magically make people in the lowest decile richer. In fact it will probably make them poorer.

@lacker I always assumed it was inspired by San Jose.

Elizabeth Warren says her wealth tax will "rebuild America's middle class." Amusingly enough, that's true! The reason the middle class has been shrinking is not because more people are becoming poor, but because more are becoming rich. Her tax will reverse that trend. https://t.co/WJnp4YQRvv

@PirateWires The funny thing is that this bill would tend, as it claims, to "rebuild America's middle class." The reason there are fewer people with middling incomes is not because more people are becoming poor, but because more are becoming rich. This tax would help "fix" that.

We also have one of the best Molesworths Ronald Searle ever drew. https://t.co/W83Iq8ql3I


@vroe5868 How can you joke about the deaths of three children?

@TheKingOfArnhem How did these children ask to be killed?

@ORohm13240 You love it that three children were killed?

@Jackmac2439 Yes, that's who killed them.

@solnarium Children.

@farhadnoorzay Or joke about it. That's the most shocking thing you see in threads like this. I'm pretty old, and I'm still surprised how low some people can sink.

@kevntz Killing fewer children.

@Crypt0Panda Yeah. They're depressing, but they tell us something important.

@lovabler0gue That might be a rational response by their neighbors, but more importantly the rational response of the rest of the world to a monstrous country should be to pressure them to reform.

@AbdouSayedPG Unless something interrupts me.


Now that we have a terrier I really understand the whole "dog ate my homework" thing. I used to think it was funny because it was implausible. I wish. https://t.co/2NXj2S5t76

@elonmusk Surely you of all people know that  the head of the FAA is Michael Whitaker, who was unanimously confirmed by the senate in October 2023.

@amuse @SpaceX @Boeing @FAANews Calling @CommunityNotes: the current head of the FAA is Michael Whitaker, who has lots of aviation experience.

@RishfulThinking @peterboghossian If NPC means anything it's not going to be a minority of people.

@Boneyardsafari Tailstrike.

@BoyanSlat @wrathofgnon What river do you now believe to be #1?

@peterboghossian Having no opinions that differ from your peers'.

If the Democrats controlling the White House will enable tyranny, why don't they just do it now? They already control the White House.

@cwjones89 I've been thinking about that word for about 40 years and this is the first reference I've seen to it.

College admissions would be a lot fairer if admissions officers spent as much time analyzing their misses as YC does.


@BillyM2k The way I'd put it is zealots vs louts.

@halalflow Is this accurate? It seems too dramatic to be real, and I notice the sources are different for the two elections.

@kirtipatelmd I liked this because it's a brave thing to say on today's Twitter, but it's strange to read at the same time as I'm being called a pussy by an endless stream of right-wing trolls for saying that people should vote for Harris.

@lloydjf7 Yes. For many of its victims, cancellation was pretty catastrophic.

@soundboy Ron Conway is the first person who comes to mind. He gives huge amounts to charity without claiming credit for it, and will help any good startup without even thinking about whether they're a portfolio company or not.

The new right-wing Twitter trolls are dumber than the old left-wing ones, but at least they're not trying to get you cancelled. If you said something that offended the old left-wing trolls, they'd try to lure you into actual cancellable heresy. The new ones just call you names.

@NaithanJones Instead of this fine rhetoric, how about answering my question? Have you observed that the poor are more unprincipled than the rich? Because it doesn't seem to me that they are.

@DaghanAltas @elonmusk I get the impression that you think you're wittily scoring some sort of point off me, but I don't disagree. I know that buying Twitter was not primarily an economic decision for him.

@NaithanJones You're implying that the poor are more unprincipled than the rich, but I haven't observed that. Have you?

@MikeGuidone Neither.


Novelty and Heresy
November 2019
If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be
accused of some form of heresy.
To discover new things, you have
to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is
obviously good, other people are probably already working on it.
One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the
shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to.
But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to
contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it.  And you
will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken
assumption. Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon,
but it's probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new
ideas.
So it's particularly dangerous for an organization or society to
have a culture of pouncing on heresy.  When you suppress heresies,
you don't just prevent people from contradicting the mistaken
assumption you're trying to protect. You also suppress any idea
that implies indirectly that it's false.
Every cherished mistaken assumption has
a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it.  And the more preposterous
the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates.
There is a positive side to this phenomenon though.  If you're
looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by
looking for
heresies
.  When you look at the question this way, the depressingly
large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large
mines of new ideas.
Japanese Translation
Russian Translation
Simplified Chinese Translation


@robinhanson Someone being "rented" can opt out whenever they want.

@davgomdg @dapppunk Which universities do this and how do they do it? Can you refer me to a source?

People trying to suppress speech are almost always the bad guys. So if you defend freedom of speech you're defending more than that; you're usually also defending some good cause.

@MacaesBruno Confession: I don't know if this is a real Dali or AI-generated.

@dapppunk The most important thing I'd change would be to add a feedback loop, where you measure how your decisions turned out. It's very hard to make a fair admissions process without that.

@jerold9918 It would make it harder for them to hide that.

Part of the problem with college admissions is that the SAT is too easy. It doesn't offer enough resolution at the high end of the scale, and thus gives admissions officers too much discretion.

@aravkseth @garrytan YC is an example of one. It's what we wished we'd had when we started Viaweb.

@Itsjoeco I want your company to succeed if only so that you can do these things.

@sama On the first pass I read that as "news releases" and was very puzzled. Could OpenAI really be so integrated that high loads would even slow down news releases?


@TimCodesStuff The Palestinians will be better off with Kamala than they would have been with Trump.

@sentientist @StickerYou Do your design as two iron-ons that break the words in the middle. Each half will read to their filter as gibberish.

"The largest cohort of child amputees in modern history." https://t.co/SDQmlETD0Z

@aysegulsbn You would have loved living in Victorian England. They found things unacceptable that were considered ok by both the people before them and the people after.

I watched a couple episodes of a TV series made about 20 years ago with some people in the  entertainment business. It was striking how many things in it they said couldn't be done today. And this show wasn't even a controversial one.

@cremieuxrecueil This would have generated misleading results in 2021, because the most recent Republican presidential candidate was bad in ways that transcended the usual distinction between Republican and Democrat.

@hnshah Depending on the resolution of "rn," no one reading this.

@Austen I doubt there's anyone who consciously thinks that, but there have to be *some* undecided voters for whom an eloquent endorsement would have tipped the balance.

@jasoncrawford Way more than 150. People still use horses and donkeys.

@mattyglesias Why would Elon buying Twitter change what opinions VCs expressed?


How to Do Philosophy
September 2007
In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others.  One of the
less honorable was to shock people.  College was regarded as job
training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively
impractical thing to do.  Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes
or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms
of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion.
But I had some more honest motives as well.  I thought studying
philosophy would be a shortcut straight to wisdom.  All the people
majoring in other things would just end up with a bunch of domain
knowledge.  I would be learning what was really what.
I'd tried to read a few philosophy books.  Not recent ones; you
wouldn't find those in our high school library.  But I tried to
read Plato and Aristotle.  I doubt I believed I understood them,
but they sounded like they were talking about something important.
I assumed I'd learn what in college.
The summer before senior year I took some college classes.  I learned
a lot in the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy
101.  And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact.  It was
my fault I hadn't learned anything.  I hadn't read the books we
were assigned carefully enough.  I'd give Berkeley's
Principles
of Human Knowledge
another shot in college.  Anything so admired
and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.
Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley.  I have
a nice edition of his collected works.  Will I ever read it?  Seems
unlikely.
The difference between then and now is that now I understand why
Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand.  I think I see
now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.
Words
I did end up being a philosophy major for most of college.  It
didn't work out as I'd hoped.  I didn't learn any magical truths
compared to which everything else was mere domain knowledge.  But
I do at least know now why I didn't.  Philosophy doesn't really
have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other
university subjects do.  There is no core of knowledge one must
master.  The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various
individual philosophers have said about different topics over the
years.  Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten
who discovered what they discovered.
Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in
logic.  I don't know if I learned anything from them.
[
1
]
It does seem to me very important to be able to flip ideas around in
one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of
possibilities, or when one idea is the same as another but with a
couple things changed.  But did studying logic teach me the importance
of thinking this way, or make me any better at it?  I don't know.
There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy.  The
most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of
freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker.  I learned
that I don't exist.  I am (and you are) a collection of cells that
lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself
I
.  But
there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with.
You could conceivably lose half your brain and live.  Which means
your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each
transplanted into different bodies.  Imagine waking up after such
an operation.  You have to imagine being two people.
The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life
are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard.  Even a concept as
dear to us as
I
.  It took me a while to grasp this, but when I
did it was fairly sudden, like someone in the nineteenth century
grasping evolution and realizing the story of creation they'd been
told as a child was all wrong.
[
2
]
Outside of math there's a limit
to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad
definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise
meanings.  Everyday words are inherently imprecise.  They work well
enough in everyday life that you don't notice.  Words seem to work,
just as Newtonian physics seems to.  But you can always make them
break if you push them far enough.
I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the
central fact of philosophy.  Most philosophical debates are not
merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words.  Do we
have free will?  Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas
exist?  Depends what you mean by "exist."
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical
controversies are due to confusions over language.  I'm not sure
how much credit to give him.  I suspect a lot of people realized
this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than
becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way?  Can something people have spent
thousands of years studying really be a waste of time?  Those are
interesting questions.  In fact, some of the most interesting
questions you can ask about philosophy.  The most valuable way to
approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get
lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down
like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone
wrong.
History
Western philosophy really begins with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
What we know of their predecessors comes from fragments and references
in later works; their doctrines could be described as speculative
cosmology that occasionally strays into analysis.  Presumably they
were driven by whatever makes people in every other society invent
cosmologies.
[
3
]
With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition
turned a corner.  There started to be a lot more analysis.  I suspect
Plato and Aristotle were encouraged in this by progress in math.
Mathematicians had by then shown that you could figure things out
in a much more conclusive way than by making up fine sounding stories
about them.
[
4
]
People talk so much about abstractions now that we don't realize
what a leap it must have been when they first started to.  It was
presumably many thousands of years between when people first started
describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked "what is
heat?"  No doubt it was a very gradual process.  We don't know if
Plato or Aristotle were the first to ask any of the questions they
did.  But their works are the oldest we have that do this on a large
scale, and there is a freshness (not to say naivete) about them
that suggests some of the questions they asked were new to them,
at least.
Aristotle in particular reminds me of the phenomenon that happens
when people discover something new, and are so excited by it that
they race through a huge percentage of the newly discovered territory
in one lifetime.  If so, that's evidence of how new this kind of
thinking was.
[
5
]
This is all to explain how Plato and Aristotle can be very impressive
and yet naive and mistaken.  It was impressive even to ask the
questions they did.  That doesn't mean they always came up with
good answers.  It's not considered insulting to say that ancient
Greek mathematicians were naive in some respects, or at least lacked
some concepts that would have made their lives easier.  So I hope
people will not be too offended if I propose that ancient philosophers
were similarly naive.  In particular, they don't seem to have fully
grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy: that
words break if you push them too far.
"Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers,"
Rod Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work."
[
6
]
Something similar happened when people first started trying
to talk about abstractions.  Much to their surprise, they didn't
arrive at answers they agreed upon.  In fact, they rarely seemed
to arrive at answers at all.
They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at
too low a resolution.
The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is
how little effect they have.  No one after reading Aristotle's
Metaphysics
does anything differently as a result.
[
7
]
Surely I'm not claiming that ideas have to have practical applications
to be interesting?  No, they may not have to.  Hardy's boast that
number theory had no use whatsoever wouldn't disqualify it.  But
he turned out to be mistaken.  In fact, it's suspiciously hard to
find a field of math that truly has no practical use.  And Aristotle's
explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy in Book A of the
Metaphysics
implies that philosophy should be useful too.
Theoretical Knowledge
Aristotle's goal was to find the most general of general principles.
The examples he gives are convincing: an ordinary worker builds
things a certain way out of habit; a master craftsman can do more
because he grasps the underlying principles.  The trend is clear:
the more general the knowledge, the more admirable it is.  But then
he makes a mistake—possibly the most important mistake in the
history of philosophy.  He has noticed that theoretical knowledge
is often acquired for its own sake, out of curiosity, rather than
for any practical need.  So he proposes there are two kinds of
theoretical knowledge: some that's useful in practical matters and
some that isn't.  Since people interested in the latter are interested
in it for its own sake, it must be more noble.  So he sets as his
goal in the
Metaphysics
the exploration of knowledge that has no
practical use.  Which means no alarms go off when he takes on grand
but vaguely understood questions and ends up getting lost in a sea
of words.
His mistake was to confuse motive and result.  Certainly, people
who want a deep understanding of something are often driven by
curiosity rather than any practical need.  But that doesn't mean
what they end up learning is useless.  It's very valuable in practice
to have a deep understanding of what you're doing; even if you're
never called on to solve advanced problems, you can see shortcuts
in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down
in edge cases, as it would if you were relying on formulas you
didn't understand.  Knowledge is power.  That's what makes theoretical
knowledge prestigious.  It's also what causes smart people to be
curious about certain things and not others; our DNA is not so
disinterested as we might think.
So while ideas don't have to have immediate practical applications
to be interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will
surprisingly often turn out to have practical applications.
The reason Aristotle didn't get anywhere in the
Metaphysics
was
partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most
abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.
He was like an explorer looking for a territory to the north of
him, starting with the assumption that it was located to the south.
And since his work became the map used by generations of future
explorers, he sent them off in the wrong direction as well.
[
8
]
Perhaps worst of all, he protected them from both the criticism of
outsiders and the promptings of their own inner compass by establishing
the principle that the most noble sort of theoretical knowledge had
to be useless.
The
Metaphysics
is mostly a failed experiment.  A few ideas from
it turned out to be worth keeping; the bulk of it has had no effect
at all.  The
Metaphysics
is among the least read of all famous
books.  It's not hard to understand the way Newton's
Principia
is, but the way a garbled message is.
Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment.  But unfortunately
that was not the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from
works like the
Metaphysics
.
[
9
]
Soon after, the western world
fell on intellectual hard times.  Instead of version 1s to be
superseded, the works of Plato and Aristotle became revered texts
to be mastered and discussed.  And so things remained for a shockingly
long time.  It was not till around 1600 (in Europe, where the center
of gravity had shifted by then) that one found people confident
enough to treat Aristotle's work as a catalog of mistakes.  And
even then they rarely said so outright.
If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little
progress there was in math between Hellenistic times and the
Renaissance.
In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold:  that it
was not only acceptable to produce works like the
Metaphysics
,
but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a
class of people called philosophers.  No one thought to go back and
debug Aristotle's motivating argument.  And so instead of correcting
the problem Aristotle discovered by falling into it—that you can
easily get lost if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they
continued to fall into it.
The Singularity
Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract
new readers.  Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity
in this respect.  If you write in an unclear way about big ideas,
you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to
inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students.  Till one knows
better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand
because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like
a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas
it represents are hard to understand.  To someone who hasn't learned
the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive:
as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope.
That was what lured me in as a high school student.
This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense
built in.  When things are hard to understand, people who suspect
they're nonsense generally keep quiet.  There's no way to prove a
text is meaningless.  The closest you can get is to show that the
official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from
placebos.
[
10
]
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected
it was a waste of time just studied other things.  That alone is
fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims.  It's
supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people
would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might
have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating.  Bertrand
Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those
  who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that
  few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
[
11
]
His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.
I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery
that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging
from the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart
person who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it
further, but for how he acted in response.
[
12
]
Instead of quietly
switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside.  He was
Gorbachev.
The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein
gave it.
[
13
]
Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about
how words worked.  Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a
lot of philosophers do now.  Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the
metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do
literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like
"literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling
ambitious, plain "theory."  The writing is the familiar word salad:
Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which
  express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that
  corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express
  precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be
  moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive
  is not something in the thing as such.
[
14
]
The singularity I've described is not going away.  There's a market
for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There
will always be both supply and demand.  So if one group abandons
this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.
A Proposal
We may be able to do better.  Here's an intriguing possibility.
Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what
he did.  The goal he announces in the
Metaphysics
seems one worth
pursuing: to discover the most general truths.  That sounds good.
But instead of trying to discover them because they're useless,
let's try to discover them because they're useful.
I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised
criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering
off into a swamp of abstractions.  Instead of trying to answer the
question:
What are the most general truths?
let's try to answer the question
Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?
The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read
what we've written to do anything differently afterward.  Knowing
we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from
straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.
The goal is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a
different direction.
As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the
controlled experiment.  There's an idea that has turned out to be
widely applicable.  Some might say it's part of science, but it's
not part of any specific science; it's literally meta-physics (in
our sense of "meta").   The idea of evolution is another. It turns
out to have quite broad applications—for example, in genetic
algorithms and even product design.  Frankfurt's distinction between
lying and bullshitting seems a promising recent example.
[
15
]
These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general
observations that would cause someone who understood them to do
something differently.
Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely
defined.  Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're
doing math.  So starting from utility won't entirely solve the
problem I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical
singularity.  But it should help.  It gives people with good
intentions a new roadmap into abstraction.  And they may thereby
produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions
look bad by comparison.
One drawback of this approach is that it won't produce the sort of
writing that gets you tenure.  And not just because it's not currently
the fashion.  In order to get tenure in any field you must not
arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree
with.  In practice there are two kinds of solutions to this problem.
In math and the sciences, you can prove what you're saying, or at
any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not claiming anything
false ("6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the treatment").
In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions
(e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw conclusions
so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.
The kind of philosophy I'm advocating won't be able to take either
of these routes.  At best you'll be able to achieve the essayist's
standard of proof, not the mathematician's or the experimentalist's.
And yet you won't be able to meet the usefulness test without
implying definite and fairly broadly applicable conclusions.  Worse
still, the usefulness test will tend to produce results that annoy
people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe,
and people are often upset to be told things they don't.
Here's the exciting thing, though.  Anyone can do this.  Getting
to general plus useful by starting with useful and cranking up the
generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get
tenure, but it's better for everyone else, including professors who
already have it.  This side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope.
You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific,
and then gradually make them more general.  Joe's has good burritos.
What makes a good burrito?  What makes good food?  What makes
anything good?  You can take as long as you want.  You don't have
to get all the way to the top of the mountain.  You don't have to
tell anyone you're doing philosophy.
If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an
encouraging thought.  The field is a lot younger than it seems.
Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about
2500 years ago, it would be misleading to say the field is 2500
years old, because for most of that time the leading practitioners
weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or
Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading
army.  In the times when they weren't, philosophy was hopelessly
intermingled with religion.  It didn't shake itself free till a
couple hundred years ago, and even then was afflicted by the
structural problems I've described above.  If I say this, some will
say it's a ridiculously overbroad and uncharitable generalization,
and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from their
works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their
time.  So in a sense the field is still at the first step.
[
16
]
That sounds a preposterous claim to make.  It won't seem so
preposterous in 10,000 years.  Civilization always seems old, because
it's always the oldest it's ever been.  The only way to say whether
something is really old or not is by looking at structural evidence,
and structurally philosophy is young; it's still reeling from the
unexpected breakdown of words.
Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500.  There is a lot
more to discover.
Notes
[
1
]
In practice formal logic is not much use, because despite
some progress in the last 150 years we're still only able to formalize
a small percentage of statements.  We may never do that much better,
for the same reason 1980s-style "knowledge representation" could
never have worked; many statements may have no representation more
concise than a huge, analog brain state.
[
2
]
It was harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than
we can easily imagine.  The story of creation in the Bible is not
just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's roughly what everyone must
have believed since before people were people.  The hard part of
grasping evolution was to realize that species weren't, as they
seem to be, unchanging, but had instead evolved from different,
simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time.
Now we don't have to make that leap.  No one in an industrialized
country encounters the idea of evolution for the first time as an
adult.  Everyone's taught about it as a child, either as truth or
heresy.
[
3
]
Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse.  This must
have affected what they said.  If you try to write about the nature
of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation.  Prose
lets you be more precise, and more tentative.
[
4
]
Philosophy is like math's
ne'er-do-well brother.  It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked
at the works of their predecessors and said in effect "why can't
you be more like your brother?"  Russell was still saying the same
thing 2300 years later.
Math is the precise half of the most abstract ideas, and philosophy
the imprecise half.  It's probably inevitable that philosophy will
suffer by comparison, because there's no lower bound to its precision.
Bad math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense.  And
yet there are
some
good ideas in the imprecise half.
[
5
]
Aristotle's best work was in logic and zoology, both of which
he can  be said to have invented.  But the most dramatic departure
from his predecessors was a new, much more analytical style of
thinking.  He was arguably the first scientist.
[
6
]
Brooks, Rodney,
Programming in Common Lisp
, Wiley, 1985, p.
94.
[
7
]
Some would say we depend on Aristotle more than we realize,
because his ideas were one of the ingredients in our common culture.
Certainly a lot of the words we use have a connection with Aristotle,
but it seems a bit much to suggest that we wouldn't have the concept
of the essence of something or the distinction between matter and
form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.
One way to see how much we really depend on Aristotle would be to
diff European culture with Chinese: what ideas did European culture
have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, in virtue of Aristotle's
contribution?
[
8
]
The meaning of the word "philosophy" has changed over time.
In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in
scope to our "scholarship" (though without the methodological
implications).  Even as late as Newton's time it included what we
now call "science."  But core of the subject today is still what
seemed to Aristotle the core: the attempt to discover the most
general truths.
Aristotle didn't call this "metaphysics."  That name got assigned
to it because the books we now call the
Metaphysics
came after
(meta = after) the
Physics
in the standard edition of Aristotle's
works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later.  What
we call "metaphysics" Aristotle called "first philosophy."
[
9
]
Some of Aristotle's immediate successors may have realized
this, but it's hard to say because most of their works are lost.
[
10
]
Sokal, Alan, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,"
Social Text
46/47, pp. 217-252.
Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to be most attractive when it's
aligned with some axe the audience already has to grind.  If this
is so we should find it's most popular with groups that are (or
feel) weak.  The powerful don't need its reassurance.
[
11
]
Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912.  Quoted in:
Monk, Ray,
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
, Penguin, 1991,
p. 75.
[
12
]
A preliminary result, that all metaphysics between Aristotle
and 1783 had been a waste of time, is due to I. Kant.
[
13
]
Wittgenstein asserted a sort of mastery to which the inhabitants
of early 20th century Cambridge seem to have been peculiarly
vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been raised religious
and then stopped believing, so had a vacant space in their heads
for someone to tell them what to do (others chose Marx or Cardinal
Newman), and partly because a quiet, earnest place like Cambridge
in that era had no natural immunity to messianic figures, just as
European politics then had no natural immunity to dictators.
[
14
]
This is actually from the
Ordinatio
of Duns Scotus (ca.
1300), with "number" replaced by "gender."  Plus ca change.
Wolter, Allan (trans),
Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings
, Nelson,
1963, p. 92.
[
15
]
Frankfurt, Harry,
On Bullshit
,  Princeton University Press,
2005.
[
16
]
Some introductions to philosophy now take the line that
philosophy is worth studying as a process rather than for any
particular truths you'll learn.  The philosophers whose works they
cover would be rolling in their graves at that.  They hoped they
were doing more than serving as examples of how to argue: they hoped
they were getting results.  Most were wrong, but it doesn't seem
an impossible hope.
This argument seems to me like someone in 1500 looking at the lack
of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a process.
No, they were going about it wrong.  It turns out it is possible
to transmute lead into gold (though not economically at current
energy prices), but the route to that knowledge was to
backtrack and try another approach.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.
French Translation


Usually when I do office hours with a startup, there's at least something unresolved at the end. But yesterday with one startup we not only figured out everything they should do, but even found a new domain name. For the last couple minutes we just chatted. That was a first.

@thepriyadarshy I come back and do office hours every summer.

@louriealexandre Nothing. It's just a grant.

@pickover I've used a Gunter rule.

@gribneau With the nonprofits that YC has funded, the money is simply a donation.

Talking to the founder of a nonprofit that YC funded, and her big problem at the moment is that she has dengue fever. Nonprofit and for-profit startups have a lot of the same problems, but there are definitely some differences.

@lemonodor Clearly you should write more.

@Plinz You don't have to guess how it will go. You can just look at countries where it happened.

In the future everything will be scanned.

@elonmusk When you have to interpolate so much text into a quote, it's not a quote anymore.

If your worries are justified, it should be possible to find better evidence than this.


Hypothesis: The whole Greenland thing only started because it looks yuge in a Mercator projection.

A bold experiment by the ~26 year old John Singer Sargent. There's no eyeball in that socket, just shadow. I can imagine e.g. Tintoretto doing this to someone in a crowd scene, but it's a daring thing to do in a portrait. https://t.co/Z58O1dH74m

I didn't realize till now that this specific instance of mathematical illiteracy is why so many American conservatives are obsessed with this topic. I'd noticed they were, but I couldn't understand why.

When mechanical watches became obsolete around 1970 they represented almost exactly 700 years of refinement by some of the best minds of their time. That is a really long run.

I cast a shadow today. That felt novel.

Your social status ≈ your college.

Your college ≈ your SAT score.

Your SAT score ≈ your SAT English score.

Your SAT English score ≈ how much you've read.

∴ Your social status ≈ how much you read in high school.

(Successive ≈s leak a lot, but still rather surprising.)

It's important that people like Zuck and Larry Page are willing to move in response to the proposed wealth tax. It shows politicians what will happen if they try things like this. https://t.co/IJSr96f3qM

Jessica asked 17 yo if there was anything she could do to be a better mother. He said no. So either she is a great mother or he has become polite, either of which she'd take.

It was smart of them to name a number, because now people won't rest till they know the names of all 6.

"Next Gen" is the Tri-State Area of product names.


News from the Front
September 2007
A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised
me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.
For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good
college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up.
What was I?  A student.  To do that well meant to get good grades.
Why did one have to get good grades?  To get into a good college.
And why did one want to do that?  There seemed to be several reasons:
you'd learn more, get better jobs, make more money.  But it didn't
matter exactly what the benefits would be.  College was a bottleneck
through which all your future prospects passed; everything would
be better if you went to a better college.
A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I had
stopped believing that.
What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying
obsessively about what
kindergarten
your kids go to.  It seemed to
me this couldn't possibly matter.  Either it won't help your kid
get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't mean
much anymore.  And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?
It turns out I have a lot of data about that.  My three partners
and I run a seed stage investment firm called
Y Combinator
.  We
invest when the company is just a couple guys and an idea.  The
idea doesn't matter much; it will change anyway.  Most of our
decision is based on the founders.  The average founder is three
years out of college.  Many have just graduated; a few are still
in school.  So we're in much the same position as a graduate program,
or a company hiring people right out of college.  Except our choices
are immediately and visibly tested.  There are two possible outcomes
for a startup: success or failure—and usually you know within a
year which it will be.
The test applied to a startup is among the purest of real world
tests.  A startup succeeds or fails depending almost entirely on
the efforts of the founders.  Success is decided by the market: you
only succeed if users like what you've built.  And users don't care
where you went to college.
As well as having precisely measurable results, we have a lot of
them.  Instead of doing a small number of large deals like a
traditional venture capital fund, we do a large number of small
ones.  We currently fund about 40 companies a year, selected from
about 900 applications representing a total of about 2000 people.
[
1
]
Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal
test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator has been an
unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners.  One
of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters
where people went to college.
I thought I'd already been cured of caring about that.  There's
nothing like going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any
illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad.  And
yet Y Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'd
been to elite colleges.  We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard
or Stanford and sometimes find ourselves thinking: they
must
be
smarter than they seem.  It took us a few iterations to learn to
trust our senses.
Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard
or Stanford must be smart.  Even people who hate you for it believe
it.
But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite
college, how could this be true?   We're talking about a decision
made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a
cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications
submitted by seventeen year olds.  And what do they have to go on?
An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what
the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum;
a high school record that's largely an index of obedience.  Who
would rely on such a test?
And yet a lot of companies do.  A lot of companies are very much
influenced by where applicants went to college.  How could they be?
I think I know the answer to that.
There used to be a saying in the corporate world: "No one ever got
fired for buying IBM."  You no longer hear this about IBM specifically,
but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of
"enterprise" software companies that exist to take advantage of it.
People buying technology for large organizations don't care if they
pay a fortune for mediocre software.  It's not their money.  They
just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe—a company with
an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and
software that conforms to all the current fashions.  Not necessarily
a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you
down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice.  So companies
have evolved to fill that niche.
A recruiter at a big company is in much the same position as someone
buying technology for one.  If someone went to Stanford and is not
obviously insane, they're probably a safe bet.  And a safe bet is
enough.  No one ever measures recruiters by the later performance
of people they turn down.
[
2
]
I'm not saying, of course, that elite colleges have evolved to prey
upon the weaknesses of large organizations the way enterprise
software companies have.  But they work as if they had.  In addition
to the power of the brand name, graduates of elite colleges have
two critical qualities that plug right into the way large organizations
work.  They're good at doing what they're asked, since that's what
it takes to please the adults who judge you at seventeen.  And
having been to an elite college makes them more confident.
Back in the days when people might spend their whole career at one
big company, these qualities must have been very valuable.  Graduates
of elite colleges would have been capable, yet amenable to authority.
And since individual performance is so hard to measure in large
organizations, their own confidence would have been the starting
point for their reputation.
Things are very different in the new world of startups.  We couldn't
save someone from the market's judgement even if we wanted to.  And
being charming and confident counts for nothing with users.  All
users care about is whether you make something they like.  If you
don't, you're dead.
Knowing that test is coming makes us work a lot harder to get the
right answers than anyone would if they were merely hiring people.
We can't afford to have any illusions about the predictors of
success.  And what we've found is that the variation between schools
is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's
negligible by comparison.  We can learn more about someone in the
first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to
school.
It seems obvious when you put it that way.  Look at the individual,
not where they went to college.  But that's a weaker statement than
the idea I began with, that it doesn't matter much where a given
individual goes to college.  Don't you learn things at the best
schools that you wouldn't learn at lesser places?
Apparently not.  Obviously you can't prove this in the case of a
single individual, but you can tell from aggregate evidence: you
can't, without asking them, distinguish people who went to one
school from those who went to another three times as far down the
US News
list.
[
3
]
Try it and see.
How can this be?  Because how much you learn in college depends a
lot more on you than the college.  A determined party animal can
get through the best school without learning anything.  And someone
with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart
people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all.
The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elite
college; you learn more from them than the professors.  But
you should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make
a conscious effort to find smart friends.  At
most colleges you can find at least a handful of other smart students,
and most people have only a handful of close friends in college
anyway.
[
4
]
The odds of finding smart professors are even better.
The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially
in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the
list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the
math department.
So it's not surprising that we've found the relative prestige of
different colleges useless in judging individuals.  There's a lot
of randomness in how colleges select people, and what they learn
there depends much more on them than the college.  Between these
two sources of variation, the college someone went to doesn't mean
a lot.  It is to some degree a predictor of ability, but so weak
that we regard it mainly as a source of error and try consciously
to ignore it.
I doubt what we've discovered is an anomaly specific to startups.
Probably people have always overestimated the importance of where
one goes to college.  We're just finally able to measure it.
The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a
superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it.  A lot
of people, probably the majority of people in America, have
some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to
college.  The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest
liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is
your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something.  Colleges
are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect.  There is only one
real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know
you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't.  When you're excluded,
you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider.  But
invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life.
So it is with colleges.  Colleges differ, but they're nothing like
the stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be.  People aren't
what some admissions officer decides about them at seventeen.
They're what they make themselves.
Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to
college is not just that you can stop judging them (and yourself)
by superficial measures, but that you can focus instead on what
really matters.  What matters is what you make of yourself.
I think that's what we
should tell kids.  Their job isn't to get good grades so they can
get into a good college, but to learn and do.  And not just because
that's more rewarding than worldly success.  That will increasingly
be
the route to worldly success.
Notes
[
1
]
Is what we measure worth measuring?  I think so.  You can get
rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but getting rich
from a technology startup takes some amount of brains.   It is just
the kind of work the upper middle class values; it has about the
same intellectual component as being a doctor.
[
2
]
Actually, someone did, once.  Mitch Kapor's wife Freada was
in charge of HR at Lotus in the early years.  (As he is at pains
to point out, they did not become romantically involved till
afterward.)  At one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup
edge and turning into a big company.  So as an experiment she sent
their recruiters the resumes of the first 40 employees, with
identifying details changed.  These were the people who had made
Lotus into the star it was.  Not one got an interview.
[
3
]
The
US News
list?  Surely no one trusts that.  Even if the
statistics they consider are useful, how do they decide on the
relative weights?  The reason the
US News
list is meaningful is
precisely because they are so intellectually dishonest in that
respect.  There is no external source they can use to calibrate the
weighting of the statistics they use; if there were, we could just
use that instead.  What they must do is adjust the weights till the
top schools are the usual suspects in about the right order.  So
in effect what the
US News
list tells us is what the editors think
the top schools are, which is probably not far from the conventional
wisdom on the matter.  The amusing thing is, because some schools
work hard to game the system, the editors will have to keep tweaking
their algorithm to get the rankings they want.
[
4
]
Possible doesn't mean easy, of course.  A smart student at a party school
will inevitably be something of an outcast, just as he or
she would be in most
high schools
.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie
McDonough, Peter Norvig, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of
this.
French Translation


@SantiagoPombo Nope. No one has said that. This is the closest I've come to it: https://t.co/hcALxJX1FP

@mmay3r That's one of the biggest attractions of an ideology, the certainty it offers.

@robneal28 @anononchain You were the first to say it, as far as Google can tell, so it would be incorrect not to attribute it to you.

@groupreadaccess @robneal28 It's so weird. I would never have predicted that this would happen so often.

@RealJohnMaher77 @ahistoryinart It helped me have an insight that was critical to Viaweb: that ecommerce (in the 1990s) was more about high production values than transaction processing.

@Grice_D I get about the same number of ideas walking in Palo Alto and the English countryside. But there's not much traffic in Palo Alto. It would probably take up more attention if I was walking in a place where I had to avoid being run over.

@DaLoneModerate None at the top. There used to be a significant number lower down, but there are probably less now.

@ahistoryinart He's uneven but at his best very good. He's the artist whose work I spend the most time looking at; we have an interior of his next to our bed.

Being an ideologue is equivalent to (a) responding to queries out of your cache (b) when your cache has been prepopulated by someone else (c) with values that are often erroneous.

@brand_arthur Do you know anything about the 50 stolen works of art in her apartment? Do you recognize the paintings in the article?


@Noahpinion To be fair, if you're old enough to have grown up when it was run by southern Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, it might be.

@mattyglesias The number for hunter-gatherers is presumably an underestimate, because it ignores infanticide, which was widespread among them.

In school they taught us that one of the uniquely good things about the American government is the separation of powers. When one branch of government tries to take over, the others push back. Now we find out if it actually works. Come on, judicial branch!

@michael_nielsen Obviously there is a long tradition of reusing plots. But that's not the only thing driving woke remakes. The type and degree of change is not the organic, moderate kind you get from gradual social drift. It's more like propaganda.

@lcecreambar @wh00dle Clojure is a Lisp, not just a language that takes ideas from it.

@autumnpard You didn't realize you were saying it, but you are in fact saying it, when you say that not reimagining the classics "in essence... means 'only white people should play classic roles.'"

@autumnpard So you're saying that only European culture has classics? That there are no Indian or Chinese or African classics?

@Konemanen No, the default sense has just shifted to the pejorative one.

@charlescwcooke Streisand effect in action. I probably wouldn't have known that Buffett called the tariffs an act of war if this fool hadn't lied about his opinion.

@wh00dle Since Lisp is the asymptote that popular languages approach, my rule of thumb then was to ask which languages were taking the most ideas from Lisp. Maybe that's Julia now.


@19651029ab Do you honestly believe that Israel could kill every child in Gaza, and it would still be Hamas's fault?

@arydotexe Usually I keep working on the one I'm in the middle of, but "How To Do Great Work" began as a paragraph in  "Superlinear Returns," and since it seemed a much more important topic, I interrupted "Superlinear Returns" to turn it into its own essay.

@zackangelo I quote Kelly Johnson in the essay.

"I had an intensive care unit that was filled with maimed children, orphaned children, children who were the sole survivors of their families..."

If you made a logo for dictatorship, you probably couldn't do better than to base it on this graph. https://t.co/1exNaEjMR3

@arydotexe Depends what you count as juggling. If I made a list of essays I've been meaning to write, there might be over 100, but I never intentionally work on more than one at a time.

@sykhader I take notes with pen and paper when I'm out walking, but actual writing I've done in front of a computer since 1994.

@burningion That's part of getting the ideas right.

@robhennefer Whoever posted it to HN changed the title to just "Good Writing" and when I saw that I realized it was better.

@IterIntellectus Your attraction to shallow language games is leading you astray, because in fact this sentence is much less true of democracies. When things go wrong, they don't go this wrong. https://t.co/nD2rmMhNo0


@SALBcreates What would the startup do?

@eyeslasho You're into statistics. What does n=2 mean to you?

Combine this kind of risk tolerance with high intelligence and you have a startup founder.

@benboehme This is a good way to learn what YC was like early on:

https://t.co/0AX9HnGIDJ

@HarounHickman Sure. The startups aren't all deeply technical. And even the technical ones can benefit from founders who are good at sales.

@serpunketh He loves the parts of it that would bore or frighten or confuse a normal person.

Doordash has to win because Tony Xu is the optimal founder of such a business. If you were designing someone for the job, you wouldn't change a thing. So if there is a business there at all, which there clearly is, Doordash will inevitably dominate it.

@5harath I wouldn't start another one, but I see new ideas for startups constantly.

@ShaanVP It's not that surprising, because we started YC for fun.

@Paul47Insights It may be at the stage where it helps someone without a technical background to start a small online business, but it doesn't seem to be at the stage yet where it can help them start the next Google or Facebook.