
Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist’s Response - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/13/living-the-knowledge-life-a-thiel-fellowship-finalists-response/
======
yid
From TFA:

 _I dropped out of liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas because I’m behind
a social movement called UnCollege which supports Mark Twain’s mantra: “I have
never let school interfere with my education._

First, I think it's really silly basing life decisions on witty quotations by
dead people. Second, I can't wait till these kids re-discover FFTs or
randomized algorithms, or Bloom filters, or suffix arrays, or linear algebra,
or the SVD, or Bayesian networks, or countless other things that are effective
solutions to real-world problems.

Hope they know that they're part of a high-risk, no-better-than-average reward
experiment.

~~~
smanek
I have no idea why you think going to college is a requirement for
understanding those things. I don't have a degree, and have used all those
things in production (except FFTs - which I have used for fun)

\- I was a defense contractor with Top Secret clearance working on ML for the
airforce, which included research-level work with bayesian networks (I built
tractable heuristics for solving partially observable markov decision
processes).

\- I built a scheduling heuristic for an international law firm (an NP-hard
problem) using randomized algorithms.

\- I built a recommendation engine for my a multimillion dollar startup I
founded using SVDs.

\- Today I open sourced a bloom filter implementation I wrote
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443675>) that uses recent research to
be several times faster than a traditional implemention

\- I implemented very efficient Reed Solomon coding using numerical methods
and linear algebra for secret sharing

And I'm by no means unique. I know other dropouts who are doing world class
work in distributed systems research and NLP. There's absolutely no reason you
need to go to college to learn if you're motivated.

~~~
yid
I didn't say it was a requirement. I meant to say that _most_ students will
benefit from a structured curriculum, especially the parts that may initially
appear boring or useless.

Your accomplishments are very impressive, but you clearly are _not_ the norm,
which is why Thiel's advice can be damaging.

~~~
smanek
I personally know one of the finalists, and he's probably more impressive than
I am (and certainly more impressive than I was at that age).

Thiel is simply arguing that we need to make sure kids know about other
options available to them besides college.

Of course, if you want to be a medical doctor you need to go to formal school.
But, if you have the right kind of personality and the right goals, college
may not be the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.

And I don't think many people but Thiel are preaching that message.

------
icandoitbetter
I'm about his age, and I agree with his thesis. But this article is terrible.
No substantial arguments for how formal education fails and why unschooling is
a better alternative are presented. In Wadhwa's article, you can at least
easily identify his arguments and decide whether you agree or disagree with
them. His article is basically an enumeration of his opinions, as evidence by
the abundance of "I" sentences.

~~~
Mz
I imagine he is on pins and needles waiting to find out if he got it and I
imagine this was written fairly quickly so as to be relevant, time-frame-wise.
I doubt it was intended to be anything all that grand. I think the selling
point is "insider" and "right here, right now", so to speak, not "best
researched, most polished paper ever".

Peace.

~~~
icandoitbetter
No need for it to be grand. But it has to be substantial enough for anyone to
want to read it.

------
jasonyyun
All discussions about his article aside (whether it's a valid viewpoint at
all; whether it makes any real arguments), it's a little unclear to me exactly
_what_ he's doing. Can anyone clarify?

I've looked at uncollege.org, and the "What" page tells me that it's "a social
movement support self-directed higher education." This means very little sense
to me, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that.

Then he elaborates:

(1) "Writing a book about learning from life." Wait, what? This says
absolutely nothing! In order to help you learn on your own, I will write a
book about helping you learn on your own. But this is terrifically unhelpful;
"learning on your own" is a massive area that needs to be specific in order to
be of any use at all. As it stands, it's really no different from "PowerPoint
for Dummies"--which, while useful for some people, is hardly revolutionary in
sparking people to consider not going to college.

(2) "Developing experiential learning programs at existing colleges that are
truly student directed." Again, this says absolutely nothing to me. Of
_course_ we all want students to have valuable, interactive college
experiences. The problem is in determining _how_ to do that, not determining
that it should be done!

(3) "Building a platform to validate self-directed learning, allowing people
to demonstrate their talents in an online portfolio and bypass the college
degree." This gets somewhere, I think--he's finally coming up with some sort
of idea. But it's unclear how this is superior to existing solutions (people
already provide portfolios and examples of past work, and standardized tests
exist to address this to some degree), and--as with the other cases--the
execution is critical.

I don't mean to condemn everything about Stephens here. It does sound like
he's motivated toward a worthy cause, and while I think college still has
value for a lot of people, I think success in this realm would be fantastic.
But it seems clear to me that his ideas are very undeveloped, and I'm very
skeptical of the likelihood of his success based on what I've seen so far.
Thiel might think differently--that the fact that he dropped out indicates
some drive and initiative that'll lead him to success--but I disagree, and
think that this is just a prime example of why it's good for many people to
study for a few years.

