Peter Thiel: I’m Really Not Crazy; I Just Want to Help Some Kids | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel: I’m Really Not Crazy; I Just Want to Help Some Kids

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67 pointsjayjay66643 comments

It's interesting how angry some people get if you suggest that not everyone needs to follow the traditional educational path.

It's not very surprising at all. People have invested a lot of time and money in it, and each student is worth about $100,000 to a university. So if you speak out against it of course there is going to be a backlash, a) from the people who invested in it and b) from those who profit from it.

They're just talking their book.

It's not the time and money they invested, which is a sunk cost, but the prestige they keep on deriving. Paying people to stop out of college is an attack on the prestige you think you're getting from your college degree.

There's also an endowment effect involved - the more time/energy/money it costs to obtain a credential, the more people resent losing the perceived benefits.

I agree. However some of the reason for the anger may be that anger sells more Slate magazines than intelligent discussion would.

Maybe they are angry because they see this as somebody bribing young kids to make what might be the biggest mistake in their lives.

not sure why you're being downvoted as that seems like a valid assumption (that some people might be angry because they see this as somebody bribing young kids to make what [the angry people think] might be the biggest mistake in [the kids] lives)

If delaying college for a few years is the biggest mistake you make in your life, you have been far too cautious.

This position is discussed and Thiel addresses why it is not a reasonable position in the article. If you want to advance this position again, protocol says you need to provide a new argument or new evidence that was not considered in the previous round.

Didn't down vote you, but think I understand why someone might have.

it's not clear if hristov is actually arguing that it would be a mistake or just putting forward as a possible motivation for people getting upset

I read the article carefully and I do not see Thiel discussing that at all.

Note that Thiel does not target kids that are about to go to college but kids that are already going to college. So he intentionally wants to interrupt an ongoing college education, not merely delay it. People say you can always go back but that is often not the case. If you are in a very competitive school or program it is very doubtful they will take you back if you took a couple of years off. Actually it would be probably impossible. And believe you me he will choose kids from competitive programs in order to get maximum news exposure. I can imagine how this can be a huge mistake at least for some kids.

It is just a very perverse situation ... he says here is all this money but you have to give up something to get it. Usually when one does charity one tries to help the people one does charity to, and does not pose to them difficult and maybe even dangerous bargains.

If he thinks these kids are so valuable, why would he not give them the stipend before they go to college or after they finish. It is just a couple of years difference either way?

It's usually pretty easy to get a leave of absence, maybe even moreso at competitive schools. Harvard, for example, lets you take a leave of absence for up to five years. And even after 5 years you can go back if your petition is approved. MIT has a similar policy. I went to a lesser school but I was allowed to finish up after an 8 year leave of absence.

We moved one of our girls recently, from a fairly traditional private school, to a Montessori school (which is working out brilliantly, btw). The reaction from other parents at the original school was extremely negative; you'd think we'd taken their kid and condemned them to a life of, well, something horrible. Amazing.

I find it interesting that those proclaiming that students bypass education (including Tony Hsieh) are products of the top universities.

They themselves might be, but some of the notable people they've invested in have dropped out. Granted for Zuckerberg it was Harvard he dropped out of.

Zuckerberg is actually the only one I can think of, though I assume there must be at least one or two others. But if you look through Thiel's portfolio companies, they're stuffed to the gills with people with degrees, often multiple degrees, from top universities. PayPal was all people with degrees, LinkedIn is people with degrees, Palantir was founded by a PhD, etc.

Singularity Institute founded by someone who went autodidact after eighth grade...

Plus there is always the fact that when you drop out of Harvard, they usually give you the ability to come back later on.

Makes dropping out to pursue a startup a low risk / high uncertainty bet.

Also interesting to note that they're generally the product of upper middle class families and probably had a strong financial support system to fall back on if they failed.

Somehow I doubt he's looking to invest in people who would starve to death if their company failed. He asks rhetorically in his response whether college is worth going "a quarter of a million in debt" for, which gives you an idea of who he's talking about when he says college might not be the best choice for everyone.

Thiel himself has two degrees from Stanford. He appears to have liked higher education enough to keep going back for more!

Does that invalidate his current opinions? People can change their minds.

I suppose it boils down to not really believing that he's changed his mind. His expressed views on academia are quite consistent over the past 25 years. He wrote frequently against academia while he was getting degrees, but continued to stay there and finish two degrees anyway. Take a look at late-80s and early-90s issues of the Stanford Review, the right-wing newspaper he co-founded.

His main beef with academia is that he feels it's one major impediment to libertarian politics, so he wants as few people as possible to be exposed to it. Perhaps he also now genuinely believes that finishing his two degrees was a mistake, and it's actually in kids' own best interests to drop out of school. But I'm skeptical that that, rather than politics, is the real reason, as I usually am when someone's professed beliefs: 1) don't match their own actions; yet 2) conveniently match their politics.

I agree. I think this is really a libertarian attack on academia. If you read the atlantic and the economist you will notice that an attack on academia had been going on for a while now from libertarian circles.

Which is kind of ironic because universities overloaded themselves with libertarian professors (some with very flimsy scholarly credentials) in the last ten years in order to suck up to the Bush administration and the right wing donors that are getting more and more important.

But of course libertarians are not happy to have some professors in universities. After all universities offer tenure and independence of thought, etc. They much prefer to have no universities and have all scholarship done in "think tanks" where "scholars" follow orders and get fired at the first sign of disobedience.

> Which is kind of ironic because universities overloaded themselves with libertarian professors (some w scholarly credentials) in the last ten years in order to suck up to the Bush administration and the right wing donors that are getting more and more important.

Holy random statement, batman. Do you have a citation for this? The idea of libertarian professors being a plus to the Bush administration makes effectively no sense whatsoever.

I'm guessing he's referring to the conservative/libertarian donors who've established Ayn-Rand-studies endowed chairs at a few universities. It's a pretty small number, though (I think three), not really a tidal wave.

It's not at all surprising if you consider that it's the expected thing to do for upper-middle class kids. Presumably having gone to those schools also gives them knowledge of what the experience provides and how it did or did not help them start a business. I doubt it's some kind of evil plot to keep kids out of school.

I'm not sure it's knowledge so much as hope: they didn't have the guts to skip school and just start a business, but they hope someone else will. Whether it'll work or not is an open question, but I would've had more respect if they took that route themselves, rather than paying other kids to do their experiment for them.

(I doubly distrust Thiel in particular on this, because not only did he not take this advice himself, but he also has a decades-long political feud with what he views as the too-liberal political climate in higher education, so would like it to be bypassed, regardless of whether he honestly believes it's a good choice for the kids in question.)

I have understood that Thiel thought college is the right option for million of kids. It's in the article.

Top universities don't produce students, students make top universities.

I applaud Thiel for offering this alternative to ambitious students.

What I don't applaud is this myth of the genius college dropout who changes the world. That just doesn't happen enough to make a rule out of it. I think it gives students the wrong idea - especially those whose never managed a business.

As opposed to all those students who leave their VP Sales jobs to go get an education?

What Thiel and many others (this seems to be something of a theme in libertarian circles) are saying is that a college education is not relevant to certain kinds of activities. Sure, it may be beneficial, but not beneficial enough to forgo something more beneficial for four years.

Right - but I think what Thiel should do when explaining his fellowship is qualify it. "Drop out of college ...and, oh yeah, make sure your some superstar, prodigy, and/or really lucky because in the past those were the qualities that kick started the billionaire stars of today."

Sure, a college education is overpriced and, at times, overrated. But, I hope these young people come in fully aware that failure stings and when you're heading in that trajectory - even temporarily in any thing or venture - a lot of choices you made do not look too bright.

the article is pretty bad.. http://www.slate.com/id/2271265/

it paraphrases his views as saying.. "giving women the vote wrecked the country"

Ugh, what a nauseating hatchet-job. It's such blatantly distorted, emotionally-loaded propaganda that it hurts to read. I can understand someone wanting to criticize Thiel's plan, but that article makes him out to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain.

Haters are going to hate.

However, at the end of the day, people who attack their opponents like that deserves to be ignored, whether they are liberal, conservative, or libertarians.

The article didn't paraphrase, it quoted him directly: "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."

my favorite line: "I question how closely education links with entrepreneurship."

it doesn't. i think competitive fields or sports (physical or mental) are the best test of an entrepreneur's DNA

source?

that quoted line is in the interview w/ peter thiel

but regarding sports... the title of chapter 6 in kevin o'connor book, "The Map of Innovation" (http://amzn.to/atJrRi), is: "The Right People: Hire Smart Athletes"

he defines athletes not as jocks per se, but as people who have a high pain threshold, a fighting spirit, and a fear of losing. he also says that dwight merriman, his co-founder/cto at double-click, is one of the best "athletes" he's ever known.

One of my investors told a story about a company he invested in because the guys were Navy SEALs, and seems like they'd stick to their guns through the startup life. They caved after a little over a year...

I tend to see a lot of the stick-to-it-tiveness in athletes, but a lot of times I see them doing a bunch of "reps" while essentially spinning their wheels. Good entrepreneurs are a perfect storm of many things, and they rarely start with all the pre-reqs. I think "Know thy self" and having a willingness to keep improving yourself is a big part of being an entrepreneur.

right on about self-awareness for learning/improving. though i like sports as a pyschological indicator because of that too - can't expect to be an awesome basketball player, a great programmer, or an expert chess player if you suck at monitoring yourself and you're not constantly evolving.

no one-size-fits-all obviously like you mention though

I don't think he's crazy; I just think he's wrong.

Ideally, kids should drop out of college because they found something better to do with their time, not the other way around.

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