Interview by a 15 Year Old
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I recently read Judd Apatow's book "Sick in the Head", wherein he interviews comedians, beginning in high school. Looking back, I wish I'd contacted more of my heroes. There's very real meaning that comes from it, even just to humanize people a teenager looks up to. I'd love to see more of this.
> At the time deGrasse Tyson was just a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx with dreams of being a scientist, but Sagan had invited him to spend a Saturday with him in Ithaca at Cornell University, after seeing his application to attend University there.
> He toured their labs there, and Sagan gave him a book, “The Cosmic Collection” and inscribed it “to a future astronomer”:
> DeGrasse Tyson describes how this influenced his entire life:
> At the end of the day, he drove me back to the bus station. The snow was falling harder. He wrote his phone number, his home phone number, on a scrap of paper. And he said, “If the bus can’t get through, call me. Spend the night at my home, with my family.”
> I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become. He reached out to me and to countless others. Inspiring so many of us to study, teach, and do science. Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations.
Is there anything else that isn’t taught to young students that you wish would be
incorporated into the material, or any other thoughts on education?
[0] Wiki def: intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action
Of course most don't, even though they know these platitudes are what they need to publicly espouse. It's a pretty big topic really...
I wonder if they make those anymore. Now I only see books of crosswords (they had those too when I was a child) and Sudoku (that fad was still a decade or two out).
It was really unpopular because: "I think philosophy is stuff you kinda already know deep down. So why study it?" And now it's no longer mandatory.
Apparently analyzing a poem is important, but analyzing an argument is not.
Really, there are many reasons that I left that country, but the high school education it provides (on average) is absolute world-class when it comes to the "soft" skills.
Critical thinking is simultaneously hard to teach and uncomfortable to teach. For one, when you teach someone to think critically, you now have them questioning everything else that you're teaching them. Many, many people define "critical thinking" as "thinking like I do." Which, of course, leads to them discouraging critical thinking.
I had a history teacher in high school who loved talking about critical thinking and how important it was that we question everything. He didn't like the fact that every single one of my papers (which were all about developing a viewpoint and explaining it) were diametrically opposed to his political opinions.
Looking back, I wrote some genuinely cringe-worthy shit, mostly just to wind him up. Hilariously, as mad as he got at me, I was probably one of the few kids in the class who really took his "critical thinking" lectures to heart.
This should be emphasized more. I was dating a guy who claimed to be a critical thinker, which actually was worse than what you described here. Essentially, his definition of critical thinking was "agreeing with me." This--among ample other reasons--is why he is an ex.
But later in life I realised it wasn't just him, a lot of other "intellectuals"[0], are like that.
[0]: I've grown to snort and snicker when I hear the word lately. I believe anyone who calls himself (or someone else, because they've given themselves the authority to decide who is and who isn't) an intellectual, is a pompous little shit.
The definition of "intellectual," as I see it, seems to be "Someone who studies society and proposes solutions for its problems." In and of itself, I think that this is a completely neutral concept, and I can name plenty of people who occupy that position. The issue is that intelligence (which is required to be an intellectual) is an intrinsically desirable trait, meaning that someone who is smart (even if they are nothing else) is often seen as more desirable or worth more than a less smart individual. More importantly, having this position implies leadership. If you're going to propose solutions, you're not very good at your job if no one is actually listening to you. And since we value leaders over followers, it follows that intellectuals are considered more valuable.
This means that calling someone an intellectual doesn't just define them as "someone who studies society and proposes solutions for its problems" - it defines them as someone who has insight regarding society and proposes worthwhile solutions for its problems.
This makes things weird. I can still call a shitty artist an artist. I can still call a shitty programmer a programmer. But when I call someone an intellectual, it's making a positive judgment regarding his ideas. After all, a shitty intellectual is just a guy with stupid ideas. And who am I, Omegaham, a random electron microscope technician from Oregon, to say that Noam Chomsky or Thomas Sowell has worthwhile ideas? I mean, I have opinions, but saying so definitively is way above my pay grade.
As a result, the term is so screwed up by connotation that I tend to use "intellectual" exactly the same as you - sarcastically. For me, an "intellectual" is "someone who would call himself an intellectual," with all of the misguided arrogance that doing so implies.
But would such a student actually become a critical thinker? Or would they simply become a regurgitator of logical fallacies, able to spot them in encountered arguments, but not able to discern whether the reasoning was ACTUALLY fallacious? Take, for instance, the "slippery slope" fallacy. Which is not necessarily a fallacy, because "doing A will lead to B" is valid if both A and B stem from the same principle C. If affirming A implies affirming its principle C, and if B is related to principle C in the same manner as A, then yes, "doing A will lead to B" is valid reasoning.
This is certain value in studying philosophy generally, and formal logic specifically. But it is not a fundamental subject in the same way that most HS subjects are, and it will be of no avail to students who have not already reached a high level of reasoning.
The mistake Paul and other technocrats make when calling for "critical thinking" is that they treat it as an actual subject matter. But there is not textbook for "critical thinking," with which a teacher can instruct a class. It is an intellectual virtue, like curiosity, or honesty. It is not taught directly, but indirectly, through other subjects. THROUGH the constraints and methods of science, one learns to think critically about evidence and causation. THROUGH reading and analyzing literature, one learns to detect intentions, both explicit and implicit, in the voices it encounters. THROUGH algebra and calculus, one learns to think about abstract objects and their relationships.
There is no "shortcut" to critical thinking, just like there is no shortcut to teaching children to be responsible or caring or hardworking. It is a skill that has to be practiced in the various arenas of life.
For the same reason people don't learn other skills. Accountants, when they hit partner, hit mid-6 figures in their 40s, but unless you enjoy finance and accounting, it's boring as hell.
People on HN might be shocked to find that most of the world finds programming extremely boring. My wife is extremely smart, smarter than me, but she couldn't last a year as a programmer simply because she finds it boring.
In college, I was at the cusp of applying to med school, and just before I stopped myself, because I didn't want the life of a doctor. It represented an incredible opportunity, but it just wasn't for me. Instead, I loved to code and am still doing it 20 years later. It's the passion and interest that matter, not the opportunity.
Man, I wish he had written this five years ago. I focused far too early and had to spend a lot of time correcting that course. Finally in the thick of exploring and loving it. Yes, there's hints in other essays about this but the hard age limit says that in a way the others don't. I was a incredibly dumb smart student.
So, if you think you want to start a company, that's great! Keep that goal in mind and work toward it. The first step would be to learn and experience as much as you can.
This needs a context: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Because Paul Graham (and probably Silicon Valley in large) clearly has different definition for a term 'startup' than the rest of the world. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start-up)
Here you go: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
This is consistent with the ideas behind BetterExplained [1] and Crash Course [2], both excellent learning resources that are really compelling.
"Learning is about a permanent shift in viewpoint, an Aha! moment, not memorizing facts that are quickly forgotten."
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This seems true and sad. What would be a first principles approach to "What should every kid learn" if we were to start from scratch you think?
I agree with the rest of your comment.
I would say that every kid should be exposed to enough experiences to support their natural human quest to understand themselves. But there are people who don't have much capacity or desire for introspection, so that breaks down quickly.
I don't think every kid needs the same things. Which is why the industrial education system fails for most. There is no perfect curriculum, there is no perfect law, etc.
Depends on socio economic class I would imagine. If you belong to middle class in India for example, you would want you kids to buy into 'the cult of achievement' where achievement is defined by how many people you can prove that you are better than. Because this is only one of the few methods available to Indian middle class to ensure that her child is not going to live a life of destitution. You probably won't care if your child is 'thinking critically'.
But I guess it is an interesting question as to what school would mean if you belong to upper class in America where you are free from social morality and hierarchies. I would imagine you want you child to learn how to be passionate about things so they can escape a life of constant boredom.
Give man a fish vs. teach to fish..
Larger percentage of humans are literate than ever before. Larger body of knowledge is in written form than ever before. I think we are going to rely more on text in the future, not less. Even with video content, you search, tag and label them with text. That is not going away.
Ted Chiang wrote an excellent story examining this issue (although not going as far as completely post-literate):
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
It's a question humans have been asking for centuries, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education
I wouldn't advise people to try to start startups before about 23. Before that you should be exploring. ------
> "don't start before 23"
Oh Silicon Valley. I've been in tech in the Bay Area for about 5 years now, regularly attending various events and being a part of the community, and most startup founders under 30-35 are ridiculously naive and boring, with very little to show over time. People over 30 with a decade or so of industry and work experience tend to be much more realistic and methodical about what they're doing (I'm 25).
PG is very successful and has some interesting things to say, but it's important to keep in mind that taking advice from someone whose vision of startups in the last 10 years came exclusively from manning YCombinator is going to be deeply biased.
Anyway this was interesting to me because most people tend to overly support youngster's into entrepreneurship but this looked more realistic and practical.
Both of these things are necessary on HN if you want to maximize the number of upvotes.
True. But the trouble with programming is that once you have the basic skills, you start thinking that anything is possible. Yet, the real problems start knocking on your door when you want to build large real-life long-lived systems with changing requirements.
Take for instance the issue of "technical debt" or "code rot". Someone who has had just a little exposure to programming might say that those issues don't exist (how could code "rot"?), whereas a manager with no programming experience will more easily accept them as part of life.
I'm willing to bet it will do more good for 90% of them than learning about Chemical Bonds, Hooke's law, solving quadratic equations, enumerating mass movement processes in geography, memorizing historic time periods, reading Dostoevsky/Kafka and whatever other nonsense we were supposed to learn during high-school education that I can guarantee you 90% of my peers (myself included) couldn't answer even at a basic level even if they passed an exam on it at some point with great scores.
Almost every office job I can think of can benefit from familiarity with programming concepts - not even knowledge - just a basic familiarity - enough so you can reason trough a simple SQL query or write a non trivial excel formula.
Plus it makes computers less frightening and magical since you have a bit of understanding of how they work.
where, may I ask, did you ever hear about Hooke's law, chemical bonds, quadratics or Kakfa? You're reference to these things, in the hopes they'd support your rather silly claim, shows that a multi-faceted education is a good thing. If you weren't the recipient of such an education, you couldn't prove your point.
problem solving, logic, etc can be taught outside of programming. I was taught first order logic through a philosophy course. it seems like you think programming can teach you all the important forms of reasoning.
Or I could have just googled "spring physics" as that's one of the few things I vaguely remember from highschool, named Kafka because that's one of the only two books I've actually read before deciding literature is boring/waste of time, chemical bonds - the same thing as "spring physics" and quadratics I actually needed in my day job which is why I said 90% - this kind of knowledge can be easily acquired if you need it.
Majority of that "multi-faceted" 4 year curriculum ended up being a waste of time, and ironically I am probably in the top % of my peers in the amount of knowledge I retained.
On the other hand basic programming is about as enabling as knowing how to do basic probability calculations or writing in formal tone. I never argued about first order logic or learning reasoning so I don't know why you're bringing that argument up - I said that basic programming lets you do stuff that's useful in majority of office work - it helps analyze/transform/collect data and interact with software in a more productive manner. You don't even need to learn programming just going trough the process should give you some insight so when you encounter a problem you can know what to search for and go trough the motions to use an existing solution (eg. knowing how to run a script you downloaded because you know what a script is and what it's supposed to do, or knowing how to modify some formula/query even if you couldn't write it from scratch)
man i feel so sorry for you. its amazing how sweeping ignorance is so easily transformed into arrogance.
I can't do that.
I have written few very basic python/java programs (maybe 200 lines max, very poor irc-bot was my triumph). And at the office I'm the local computer guru. "Let me show you how you can search a string in excel. Note that big and small letters aren't always the same thing." I shit you not.
I think over-learning this stuff really doesn't hurt. Maybe people would grasp what is easy to program and what is difficult. These days you sometimes run into attitudes like "we could ask this SQL data as excel chart, but it's probably ten thousand dollar coding project. So we don't even ask."
If you know enough programming to write a IRC bot I think you can.
I'm sure you'd figure out how to get data out of some Access like tool - eg. ERP system with tool to build custom query/reports, and I doubt you would have a hard time writing excel formulas with conditions and such.
Seeing how you used python if you found a script online that say converted some files you would know how to run that.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be a programmer but knowing the basics actually enables you to use computers much more efficiently and considering that computers are used literally everywhere nowdays it translates to productivity and real world problem solving.
I have to admit that so far I have been completely unable to use my coding skills for anything practical. There would have been a situation where HTML chart had to be converted to excel chart. It was way too corrupted to automate in any meaningful way.
But coding gives me perspective. If somebody tries to sell software at my job, I get to interview them. Nobody else there is quite as good at spotting computer related bullshit.
There is another goal though, and it mimics writing. If only the 'elite' know how to write, then history will be written by the powerful. If everyone knows how to program, this increasingly popular communication medium will be less under the control of a biased few.
Media and politicians right now are abusing the fact that a large amount of the population is tech-illiterate. People can't comment on issues that affect their lives in major, invisible ways because they don't know the implication of, say for example, banning encryption (cf. uk politics currently).
This has to change and it starts with education.
There's no reason to believe programming classes will be at all useful for anything, other than to impart false knowledge.
Programming/coding/software engineer is, probably, the only skill that provides high income opportunities, freedom to relocate, a global market and low financial cost of entry. Unless a kid is coming from a rich family, learning programming among other skills is her/his best bet at achieving a decent quality of life.
Also, saying that programming is just one of many skills is like saying that communication and persuasion is just one of many skills. Just as "people" skill, programming skill is a powerful multiplier.
The programmers of today have been lucky because the thing they loved to do anyway just happened to explode as an industry in a short period of time, leaving only a small supply of labour ready to fill the ballooning demand. There is no reason to think that will hold for the future. As every good investor will tell you, when everyone starts looking in the same direction, it is time to run the other way.
Some suggest that programming is something that only a small group of people can innately do. Others suggest that it is a task that the majority of the population detest. If these are true, then perhaps it will remain a viable career as most cannot or refuse to do what work needs to be done. I'm not sure I agree with either point. Programming tools like Excel are widely used already by the general population, demonstrating that they can program, that they are willing to program in some capacity, and that it doesn't meaningfully improve their economic standing when outside of a very narrow spectrum of programming – specifically what we seem to call software engineering.
I, personally, think programming related work will eventually trend towards what we see in entertainment, agriculture, etc. A small group of people will do very well, more will do the work for practically nothing just to do what they love, and everyone else will have no direct opportunity whatsoever, with, at best, passing relevance in what they do end up doing.
For a fifteen year old kid these days, if you graduate from college not knowing how to program then pretty much you are going to have a shitty life. You already need to know how to code to get pretty much any decent job -- not just for web developers, but also for marketers, designers, data analysts, biologists, filmmakers, finance, advertising, manufacturing, transportation, etc. You don't have to be a professional developer for your entire career, but if you don't know how to code then even if you want to go into marketing or whatever, pretty much the best job you'll be able to get is just harvesting leads for minimum wage and then entering the data into Excel.
Don't want to learn to code? Doesn't fucking matter, that's what society is willing to pay for.
Yeah, but they're the fraction that don't suck and aren't going away in ten years. And again, most people with jobs that require knowing how to code aren't actually developers. E.g. it's difficult to get hired as a customer retention marketer without knowing how to code, but most of those folks also aren't coding on a regular basis, if ever. It's just that when you have 500+ people applying for any decent job, the person who thought it wasn't a good use of their time to spend 3 months teaching themselves to code is almost always going to lose out to one of the other folks who did, just on the off chance that those skills actually come in handy or whatever.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But that's just how it works.
If you were to look at my HN comments from the early days of the site, you'd see that I was pretty much the poster child for saying that learning to code wasn't necessary. And back then I don't think it was, because the tools were so shitty that to be any good at it pretty much meant that you had to forgo being good at anything else, including other skills that were potentially much more valuable like business or marketing or whatever. And it's hard to pinpoint exactly when, but at some point over the past ten years that has definitely changed.
Imagine if we could expect a basic level of programming skill from everyone. Not the ability to write an operating system kernel from scratch; just the ability needed to put together a shell pipeline to get a job done, or a twenty-line script to automate some tedious task. Imagine how much that would change everyday life.
How would mass-market applications change if a tiny bit of scripting skill wasn't too much to ask? How would people's behavior change if their first reaction to any kind of tedious task was "I should automate this", and sometimes they actually could? How would public policy (especially on technology) change?
We're moving towards a future run heavily by computers; raising the baseline level of understanding seems critical to me, and it doesn't seem like too much to ask.
We still have that, in 1st world countries. (I've used the wikipedia entry for the US, but rates are similar across EU)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Well unfortunately like learning a foreign language if you don't constantly use those skills they are near worthless. Especially as you get older. And in one way it's quite a bit different than learning a foreign language. There is a great deal of latitude to make mistakes in, say, Spanish. If you don't have it even slightly correct people can still piece together what you are saying. With programming as everyone knows it's got to be near 100% accurate in syntax or it's not going to run and/or give correct results. I agree that being able to do things in the shell is helpful if you are somewhat regularly doing that type of work. I question how useful it is if someone learns that in high school or college and then needs to apply it to do a task years down the road.
Edit: In other words it's not like learning how to ride a bike or play tennis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z
Then a ZX81, then a BBC Micro
What would now be utterly useless skills if I was suddenly in need of adding some code to my work years later.
Ten years ago AJAX was just appearing [1], Web 2.0 was the buzz, and the iPhone was 2 years away. What would you teach kids today to equip them for their work in 2025 ?
[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/11/javascript_a...
That said I'm still on the tutoring mailing list for my university's C.S. department, and so many people jump into it and then fall off a cliff. We are forcing an entire generation into field that many will not be successful in.
IMO we're pushing a mass of people in a direction with peaks, valleys, and cliffs, without taking responsibility for the numerous negative outcomes that will ensue.
"But we need more people in STEM!"
"But not everyone wants, or will excel in, STEM!"
"..."
I love my kids different interests. I think the 'learn programming in school' is highly overrated, unless it's a component of something bigger eg. Logic, technology).
Humans have been cooking for thousands and thousands of years, but modern schools have no idea how to teach it, hence the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, etc. So how on Earth can they teach anyone to "code" and should that reallly be priority?
Silicon Valley VCs want everyone to learn to code because it'll be cheap grist for their mill...
Too right. I've yet to read one of these that acknowledges that.
In the UK, all children are now expected to learn coding in school. What this actually means is putting 7-8 year olds in front of Scratch. AND IT WORKS REALLY WELL.
Writeup of my daughter's experience: http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/127964136013/it-turns-out...
There's been a zillion simplified languages intended to get kids coding, but Scratch appears to be the one that works.
She's one of the academically-bright ones, but I asked her teacher about it and he said the average ones and the academically-bad ones also like Scratch. So it's doing job number 1 right: get the kid actually interested.
And sometimes, as Marcus Aurelius said : The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Nope. This time PG wins, and I'd lose.
Very nicely done. Succinct. Nice. Elegant. Top stuff.
Sure, wish I'd read that in middle school.
Only one point left: Where can I apply to go back to, say, the sixth grade and have a do-over?
The entrepreneurs around me are numerious. My neighbor's are very rich. I grew up with wealthy kids. Many are entrepreneurs. They all(95%), or more gave one trait in common, and it's never mentioned in these Q & A's, but we are all in the big world now. That trait; They have a sympathetic/understanding/wealthy parent.
The wealthy parent(usually the father) bankrolls the Entrepreneur.
See, poor, middle class kids usually get one chance at a risky entrepreneurial endeavor. If they do get funding, it's usually high rate credit cards. If they fail, they don't get a do over card, and it's Hello UPS, or some other barely livable job where you need to commute 1.5 hours.
For some reason this is never talked about, and probally for good reason. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, guys like PG have tried to reverse the formula, but I have seen this combination work so many times, I feel comfortable calling it a law. It makes as much sense as Moores law, in my eyes. Rich dad helps(money, legal, generation of networking, sometimes the idea, the garage, encouragement, family CPA.) out kid=Kid becomes Entrepreneur. If you born into the right family--it's great. To the poor, middle class kids, do well in school. Get a credential in something. Don't fall for this BS about hard work, and a good idea. Give a rich boy a shot at funding your endeavor, but realize you will have to work a lot harder than the rich kid. Don't bust a gasket in the process. Most of the Entrepreneurs leave what I'm telling you out of their orations. It's embarrassing most weren't Horatio Algiers? Most of their wives, wives usually out of their league, don't even know the real story. I've only heard one Entrepreneur tell the absolute truth, and that was George Sorors. But George's first love is writing, and you can't be in denial if you want to be a good writer/journalist.
(Didn't edit, so please lay off my typos. I don't usually even come back to a post, so the nit picking goes unheard. I sometimes fear writing a post like this, because they can track an ip. And even if speaking honesly, we all need to play the game--smile, and act like the free money wasen't there. I really wish Google didn't index every word forever. Hopefully, one day, we will have the ability to pick, and choose what is on Google servers. At least, what we wrote?)
My parents are upper-middle-class. They're not rich, but they're wealthy enough that they know what to do with money. If I were thinking about starting a business, I could easily bounce ideas off my dad and get genuinely good advice. And if he couldn't give me the advice I needed, he knows people who would be able to do so.
In contrast, someone who grows up poor is working in a vacuum. Whom are you going to ask, your deadbeat dad? His shithead friends? Your mom, who's working two minimum-wage jobs just to put food on the table and keep the lights on? They work their asses off, but they have no idea how to build a business.
As a result, it's no surprise that the wealthy tend to come from the middle class. The rich might fall from grace into the middle class, and the middle class will often make a whole bunch of money and become rich, but the poor tend to stay where they are.
Looking back, this was what separated the subjects I loved and was great at, and the subjects where I struggled. In the former group, at an early age I saw learning as a game where I could improve continously.
But it's a decent interview regardless.
Curious for more of an explanation here. I am 27. When is too young? As someone who sold their company, I can attest that it takes over your life, but the amount of things I have learned is insane and I wouldn't trade that.