
What Happened to the Thiel Fellows - germinalphrase
https://backchannel.com/inside-peter-thiels-genius-factory-7bf38303c7be#.fjc1bmv7x
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jasonmp85
> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t
> go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal
> failure.

I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then
sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself.

But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a
prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If
you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college?

I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you
could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's
not. Not here.

~~~
Ilverin
An alternative view is: "If you're already successful, everything you could
learn at a college you can also learn out of college (see: the internet)".

~~~
azinman2
That would be an incorrect view.

First, few are so motivated that they'd devote years to self-learning at the
same scale as university provide. Next, it would be difficult to put together
a cohesive curriculum for yourself because you don't know what you don't know.
Relatedly, understanding the arc/trajectory to pick it difficult, and to do it
all alone with no guidance means there's no one qualified that you can ask
questions from on the daily. It also ignores the value of mentorship, learning
from your peers, and being inspired and pushed by your environment. It also is
isolating and does not give you any social benefits, business or personal
networks.

~~~
davidivadavid
You can be motivated without going to school. It would take seconds to find
curricula from major universities. You can find most textbooks for free on
Libgen. You can talk to people over the internet and find better mentors than
people you'd find in your local university. It's not isolating any more than
going to the university and staying in your dorm reading textbooks is.

So, yeah. It seems like a completely correct view. My guess is that it will
only become more and more correct with time, as the internet provides all the
building blocks that colleges provide currently. The knowledge is already
there. Credentials are there for some professions (Github > sheepskin).
Networking is probably the hardest part, but hardly sounds undoable.

~~~
azinman2
Pirating textbooks can be done in college or not in college, just as you can
buy textbooks in college or not. But if you're not in college, then you most
likely won't know what to buy, and certainly won't have anyone to explain it
all to you in depth.

It is difficult for most to self-motivate 4+ years worth of self-study in
isolation. Few would do that on their own. Further, getting a random stranger
to mentor you for any real period of time is a difficult proposition without
anything in return. Typically this only happens in extreme cases such as if
you are a superstar and "worth their time."

If all you do is stay in your dorm and never venture out, then you're not
getting much out of what the university offers, so that's not particularly
relevant. You can also just not attend any classes either but that's not much
of a comparison.

You're also ignoring majorly important components such as opportunistic
learning from peers, being motivated by your environment, and having others
guide you through subject matter when you don't know what you don't know. The
internet cannot replace any of that as effectively.

~~~
davidivadavid
Guess what, people in college don't know either what textbooks you should buy.
Maybe they're the teacher's favorite textbook, or a textbook the teacher wrote
him/herself. Will that be the best textbook for you? Maybe. Maybe not.

Regardless, as mentioned before, if you think colleges do choose the best
textbooks, you can find what textbooks they're using very easily.

My experience is that the best thing you can do is sample many textbooks and
keep the ones you like best and are most likely to learn from.

That few people are willing to self-motivate for 4 years doesn't invalidate
the possibility of doing it. I would also question the necessity to study for
4 years to learn most subjects.

The point about staying in your dorm is that if you're studying (i.e. not
going out with your friends), it doesn't matter whether you're doing it at
home or in a college dorm. You can socialize in other ways.

Serendipitous learning happens outside of colleges too. Etc. Etc.

Having been through college, and having learned a lot of things on my own, the
only thing I think (some) colleges provide is just sheepskin prestige. If you
want to work for a company that screens based on what university you went to,
don't make the mistake of skipping that part. Learning-wise? I don't think it
makes much of a difference.

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lambdasquirrel
It's kind of a big claim, that the most important thing that people got from
Thiel Fellowship was the network. If that's really and truly the case, then
how is this different from the universities of old?

I don't mean that as a challenge. I really do mean to pick it apart. You can
argue that this one is more meritocratic. It's also blatantly clear that it
had an admissions committee of one.

Edit: And as someone else pointed out, you don't get the hard skills training
that you get in university.

~~~
throwaway2016a
I think university networks are overrated a bit. When you're just one of
thousands of graduates you need to bring more to the table than just having
the same alma mater. All your peers are trying to leverage the same
connections to fit through a skinny pipe.

For every one time I leverage my college network I have 10 where I leverage my
network I built after college.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
That's true. Then what'd happen to the Thiel Fellowship if you were to scale
it the same way? I think you can likewise make the argument that it's kind of
an extra-fancy MBA.

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codingdave
The real long-term business value of an Ivy League education is also the
network. So if he really was trying to replicate that, he succeeded.

But as someone who went to a non-Ivy school, and spent my 4 years getting an
education that I truly feel has added a ton of value to my life, and to who I
am... I just get offended at his attitude that college is for dunces. (And
yes, it is my own problem if someone offends me, but that is a separate
discussion). I will never claim that college is the right path for everybody,
and I think that getting a job is the wrong reason to go. But the snide
attitude that going to college actually makes you a lesser person, and
recommending people drop out... that shows a deep misunderstanding of what
higher education is really about.

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sfthrowaway3776
Also let's be real here -- I know a lot of the fellows and all the ones I've
met definitely do not qualify as geniuses. Smart, motivated, sure, but when it
comes to solving real hard problems whether in physics, biotech, or AI they
are by far not the first people I'd turn to. There's a reason most of them are
working on knockoff consumer apps or got shunted into programs like the google
brain residency.

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kesselvon
Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an
education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful
breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out
mythos a little too much.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free
online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking
administrative and professorial class. When we outlawed IQ tests for
employment, we became unable to train engineers and other high-IQ professions
in house, as minds capable of doing these jobs are rare, companies need to
pre-filter before investing resources. As universities are allowed to use such
tests, we use education as a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, as we are
outlawed from directly measuring these characteristics. Thus the education
bubble.

Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering
alternatives an act of war?

~~~
tensor
No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone
seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making
breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be
in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO,
managers, etc.

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danielam
The trouble with modern universities is that they often conflate what are at
least three separate concerns: intellectual formation/pedagogy, job training
and research. Typically, when you ask someone why they want to go to college
or why they did go to college, the automatic answer that they've been taught
to give is "to get a job" (otherwise, you're going to "work at McDonald's").
The result, broadly speaking, is that these three concerns compete with each
other, causing the university to suffer in the process.

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dkarapetyan
> Abraham dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to run Milo, which
> sold to Amazon by the time he was 25.

Milo was sold to eBay, not Amazon.

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WheelsAtLarge
To me the premise to this argument was always incomplete. It's true that
college does not matter "to some people". You can always find individuals that
will be successful whether they go to college or not. There's a reason Thiel
hand picked the people that would get his money. He picked the best he could
find because he knew that they had a better chance to succeed. If he really
wanted to prove his point, he would have picked them at random from those that
were slated to go to college anyway. To me he has not proven anything, college
is still important to the great majority of people and telling people
differently does not help society worse yet it makes it more difficult on
those that follow his advice.

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saosebastiao
The network is what really matters: you go from someone who knows professors
and peers to someone who knows Peter Thiel and his peers.

I'm sure there is some meritocracy involved too, but I'm willing to bet that
as a Thiel Fellow, you would learn faster than a university would allow
(school of hard knocks?), while still accomplishing less than a more
experienced entrepreneur. Experience matters, and being a Thiel Fellow is just
a riskier but potentially faster way of acquiring it.

------
ThomPete
The way I look at is that you need to educate yourself, you mostly don't need
an education. All of those fellows are constantly educating themselves.

I am pretty sure Theil would agree that some things do require an education
such as hard science, medical or engineering. (Although it's certainly
possible without)

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gumby
What a vapid puff piece. For example:

> It became one of the most elite credentials for young entrepreneurs.

Umm, really? "Elite" in the classical sense of "drawn out of the larger pool",
sure, but in the sense of somehow being better than the run of the mill group,
I don't see it.

> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school.

Famously Michal Dell did to make his mum happy. Woz, under an alias.

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glenra
> _none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t
> go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal
> failure._

Steve Wozniak went back to school (UC Berkeley, using an alias) and finished a
degree. Though I suppose he's kind of a special case.

------
rokhayakebe
You have to think who says a 15 year old can't do Advanced Physics, Run a
Corporation, Perform Some Surgery. There are definitely works for which hours
of experience are necessary, but for most of the things we do today perhaps
age is really not a factor.

~~~
tensor
If experience isn't necessary for a task, you have to ask how hard it really
is and how much it should really be rewarded.

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elevensies
Anything that can create an alternative for universities is very valuable.
Stanford tuition has doubled in the past 20 years -- so has the price of
gasoline -- I don't see people suggesting government subsidized loans for
gasoline.

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brilliantcode
Don't fix something that isn't broken.

Can the institutionalized top down approach to education have room for
improvement? Yes. The education to economic output per student ratio can
always improve (I don't have a number for this).

But the role diploma, degrees, certificates play as _social credits_ that
gives preferential treatment over the have-nots in terms of opening doors is
understated.

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soneca
It looks like now more of a YC for necessarily young and solo founders than
any substitute for college.

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dmourati
Are these the blood donors?

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dkarapetyan
Can we change the title to "Entrepreneurship Factory" instead of "Genius
Factory"? The article is definitely not about genius. Let's not cheapen the
definition any further by misapplying it.

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zzzeek
Brilliant technical minds denied the opportunity to gain awareness of the
world through liberal arts exposure, are that much more easily pushed into
working towards essentially sociopathic endeavors (like making it easier to
sue media outlets wealthy people don't like out of existence).

~~~
dang
As a former literature grad student I was liking where the first clause of
your sentence was headed, but then you ruined it with the sort of denunciatory
name-calling ("sociopathic") that the HN guidelines ask you not to do in
comments here. We're trying for a discourse in which people don't hit each
other with such sticks, so please don't bring them in to conversation.

~~~
glup
I took the OP to mean "lacking in empathy, contextual awareness, and premised
on a specific—and potentially very damaging—notion of capitalism." Based on
the interviews I've read and the description of the Thiel fellows, this seems
like a fair characterization, if hyperbole.

Rather, I think "sociopathic" is deficient in that it underplays the
structural determinants of such behaviors, while placing judgment on the
fellows themselves. That's not fair—they are basically high schoolers, often
without the cultural capital and social analytical skills conferred by top
schools.

~~~
zzzeek
I was going for the "lacking in empathy" description completely - and in
description of specific endeavors, not individual people.

