The New 95 (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The New 95 (2017)

1517fund.com

44 pointsjeffreyrogers24 comments

The authors make many valid points, but nonetheless, for me, this essay comes across as... ideological. Consider: The essay offers only criticism, making zero practical suggestions. The focus is exclusive on the Humanities; there is zero mention of Math and the Hard Sciences -- you know, fields in which persevering on homework exercises and interacting with others who are much more knowledgeable is actually necessary or useful for true learning. The examples in the essay are cherry-picked; there are numerous people who have benefited from attending college in the US; the essay mentions zero. I'd give the essay a C+, maybe a B-.

I think it's intended to be ideological. Recall that Luther was a theologian who initiated what became the Protestant Reformation.

Ideology isn't inherently bad. We all have one, and it guides our behavior.

The ideological nature is sort of the point though: the article attempt is to make a fund for investing in smart young people to found companies look as ideological and radical as the Reformation. Which it isn't, obviously.

I'm sure they could write a better critique of higher education if they weren't going for the Luther schtick, but unless you're looking at starting a company/project that Peter Thiel might want to fund I'm not sure they necessarily have the alternatives to hand.

I think they could have said something more profound if they hadn't been so obsessed with hitting 95. Martin Luther's 95 theses were organized, clear, and consistent. This, on the other hand, is disjointed, rambling, at times obtuse, and overall not nearly as complimentary to their institution as they had perhaps imagined.

I feel compelled to point out that Luther had a college degree.

This may feel like snark (and I've certainly condensed it for pithiness), but it's at the heart of my issue with this piece. It tries to argue that education is broken, that it is useless, and that no standards should apply for sake of individual liberty.

Those don't go together. If it's useless, you don't have to care that it's broken. If no standards apply, it can't be broken.

My personal opinion is that the author would've been better off to focus on the "broken" part and omitted the other two - both because they muddy the argument, and because, from my POV, the latter two are detrimental to a working education system.

There is truth in this, like many "top ten lists" that have 7 solid entries, or "101 reasons to..." which run out of steam after 30.

It's a shame really to invite, even demand, comparison with Luther's text by this formula - and then fall so short of it.

Perhaps a bad stylistic choice?

A good analysis of how to reduce college administrative costs to 1980s levels would be helpful. I occasionally point out that Stanford has a Redwood City "campus" for lesser administrative functions. It has more administrators than Stanford has professors.

(On the other hand, having been through Stanford CS for a Masters back in the 1980s, back then they really did need more administration. CS used to be in Arts and Sciences, run by a rotating chairmanship, and just wasn't well organized. It was a bunch of professors each doing their own thing, without much of an overall plan. When CS opened an undergrad program, the department was transferred to Engineering, which had deans and associate deans to put together a curriculum and schedule.)

I'd really like to see a thorough analysis of college budgets. Pick a few schools and look at what they were spending on in every decade since the 1950s (which I'd argue was the beginning of the modern college paradigm, thanks to the GI Bill?). If there's a good, sourced analysis along these lines somewhere, I'd appreciate a link!

Not sure if it matches what you seek directly, but Graeber in "Bullshit Jobs" did have a section doing this sort of analysis.

So what have they done in 3 years?

Not to be dismissive I tried looking through their portfolio.

https://www.1517fund.com/portfolio

I wish I could have my own VC fund where I could just ramble and get paid for it.

I'm sure they're doing good work, but the names of those companies look like randomly generated parodies.

> Jay Z, Kanye, Drake.

Is that supposed to be substantive?

It's not even _correct_. It follows a list of people who had "no college", yet Kanye went to an Art Institute for painting before transferring to an English degree in a state school and ultimately dropping out at the age of _twenty_. I'd hardly call that "no college".

The lack of correctness is plastered all over this. Random pick: "Illiterate sailors on a rickety ship overthrew a thousand years of university Aristotelian scholarship in 1492."

Columbus was extremely well-read for his time. He also didn't overthrow thousand years of scholarship because pretty much anybody who cared (i.e. sailors) knew the earth was round well before Columbus. Erathosthenes computed its circumference sometime ~300BC.

A college education with a focus on humanities and how to research things might have improved the theses :)

But it's not a list of college dropouts either...

And listing Jane Austen is odd - how would she have been able to, and why would one assume she wouldn't have benefitted? Why not list other people who weren't white males and didn't go to college in the 1700s? I mean, it obviously wouldn't feel right in support of the thesis, but why did these lists seem to make sense to the author?

Edit: I was thinking maybe this is some sort of parody or satire or gotcha, and then I decided to check out the main page and I read:

"We helped launch and run the Thiel Fellowship, working alongside Peter Thiel to identify and work with young founders building new technology"

Which instantly repositioned the theses as validation in my mind of the general dislike of him that some people have. He may not be directly responsible, but I can't help feeling that if this is the sort of people who like him...

The irony is that few highly successful companies have been as closely linked with universities as Thiel's Paypal and its many senior recruits from his alma mater or his big investment in the Harvard Facebook. Outside that particular bubble, it wouldn't occur to anyone that investing in the person who doesn't have the Ivy League degree is Reformation-level radicalism. I looked at the bio of one of the GPs and chuckled as I spotted 'lectured at Stanford' and 'started Oxford PhD' alongside working with Thiel in the career highlights.

88. If the signaling value of a college degree is its most valuable part, then we are creating a society that values the appearance of success more than actual success.

Someone might be a bit confused about where the causality arrow is pointing.

Can you elaborate?

I meant that 'creating' is rather the wrong tense, and that this is probably a symptom that it's pretty well entrenched by now.

Ah, got it, thank you.

I feel like college has less signaling value in most jobs than it functions as an idiot check, which is really valuable for people fresh out of college with few ways to prove they're not complete idiots.

I'm not saying there is no signal value, or that some positions have more signaling than others. I just don't think it's the dominant factor in the majority of cases.

So what is the proposed alternative? It's fine to complain about a system, but it's not helpful unless you have a workable alternative instead.

95% less slogans and soundbites might've made this an interesting read.

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