19 year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout Andrew Hsu is Changing Education
startupsopensourced.com
startupsopensourced.com
I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students.
Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.
some new theories and applications to learning are coming out of neuroscience but I am unsure if Andrew specialized in that area at least from the interview.
The older neuroscience stuff we are already aware of that humans remember in 3s, 5s, and 7s of items, several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used, etc.
Your reply comes off as highly authoritative, but I don't want to just default to trusting that you are an expert in every (or even any) field mentioned, and hence, are able to produce an authoritative hierarchy of their usefulness as applied to a specific unsolved problem.
Sorry to be that guy!
It would be difficult to defend any sort of hierarchy in a rigorous way, but there is generally a pretty good consensus on which findings are the most important. For example, the is a pretty broad agreement that if a kid shows up at school after having not eaten for three days and their parents have been beating the shit out of them, then they probably aren't going to learn very well regardless of what neuroscience theory you're using. And since these sorts of problems effect 80+% of the kids in many school districts, you basically have to design schools around these sorts of issues before you can really start optimizing the content. Albeit all of the research sort of fits together.
It's a good question though, so I'll throw up a Squidoo page with a bunch of the best books on education that I've found.
I'm not sure if you're refering here to the so-called "cone of learning" ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ..."), but if so, then from what I know this idea was debunked; it turns out to be a multiple-level iterative misinterpretation of a research paper on a completely different topic. I wrote about it some time ago; sorry for Google Translate, but I currently blog in Polish only:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
//EDIT:
More details: http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.ht...
Andrew's not targeting college students, he's looking at younger children. He was still in public school up until 4th grade, where he was having attention problems. I would assume today's 4th graders are equally attention deficit when it comes to learning.
I get the feeling that going to his classes would be like getting swimming lessons from a mermaid.
"OK, now thrash your tail"
"I don't have a tail!"
"Oh... uhhh, so do those leg things move independently or what?"
Edit: Or they wanted to start a business in a field where graduate level credentials are required for people to take you seriously (e.g., biotech, clean energy, medical devices, etc.)
The "I need X, but existing X is nonexistent or crappy, so I'm going to make my own X" thinking seems to be a common motivator. Technically-competent entrepreneurs often fall into this case.
Meet some more grad students and you'll get a clearer picture of this fairly quickly. This is at least a consideration for many engineering grads.
You won't find too many PhDs starting companies that make web apps and iPhone games, though. They're starting companies in the really high tech areas, areas at the forefront of technology that folks without PhDs don't understand just yet.
[1] Scroll down to "PEOPLE": http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html
During this time, we tried out all sorts of concepts, worked with world leaders and world class theorists and researchers. We built all sorts of systems, and products, simulators, interactive games, expert systems, individual tutors, and other things of blended nature. These products were built for governments, research institutes, and commercial companies. Some of the 'products' had empirical results that surprisingly showed that they were 'useful', too. However, there weren't ever any revolutions in education or learning or educational theory, while I was there.
I eventually dropped out from this field from burnout. Why? Because of the people. This area of interest seems to attract people with very similar personality traits. Reading this article and the subject reminds me of the type of people who want to 'solve' education. It is not at all unusual to work with people in this field who complete advance degrees while still in puberty. I worked with a guy who ended up the chair of mathematics at world-class university before he was 20. These are all 'geniuses', as they have been taught and trained to think. And, interestingly they all seem to clamor around this tall flag of solving education.
I believe the failure of this field is actually that most of these people running it are very 'left brain' analytical thinkers. They think that they can solve these very dynamic, chaotic educational systems by decomposition and reductionism. It's kind of funny actually. Smart people get addicted to being smart, and they want to encourage the use of the systems that gave them the personal 'high' to begin with.
(one of the best videos I've seen)
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-game...
"Serious games"
http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.ht...
Child-driven education
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
Music + hands-on creative work
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015...
There's an incredible story (inspiring & practical) of a boy without healthy legs gaining access to salvaged computers and free software to apply his graphics skills to pull his way out of the slums....it's less than 3/4 of the way through this speech by Eben Moglen called "Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century" http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/audio/DSG-CUNY-BeforeAndAfter...
I've been collecting a ton of related links and posting them at http://re-configure.org/drupal/node/33
I wonder how many people who go on to do Nobel-quality work were in college at the age of 12? My intuition is very few. I think something very important is lost when bored 12-year-olds don't learn how to experiment on their own. Essentially 100% of the pioneer hackers cut their teeth this way.
Of course, I'm probably just jealous that I didn't matriculate early and have 3 BS's by 19.
Grad school is all about what you can do for yourself, not following other people's vision. You set your priorities, determine which classes you take (you could combine a history of Shakespearian tragedy and quantum mechanics with a CS degree, for example).
Here's some reading that might encourage you to rethink grad school. The memoir of James Watson (Watson and Crick, discoverers of DNA double helix) Avoid Boring People. Also, Hamming's speech "You and Your Research." (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html) Both talk about why overspecialization is bad, and what you can do as a young researcher to broaden your understanding.
...
Hats off.
On the other hand, I wonder if this may be the case of being extremely book smart and not so streetwise.
Why not wait till you finish your PhD at the young age of 22? You will be more mature by then and know quite a bit more.
If you already had built a working prototype(doesn't even have to be MVP) and experienced some sort of positive feedback, sure drop out.
Otherwise, continue working on your ideas in your spare time. Bill, Larry and Sergey only dropped out when they had something happening.
For those already in the workplace example of patio11 is very admirable.
The interview mentions that they are just getting started and are at least 6 months from a prototype. Unless Andrew has some sort of edge from his studies, this venture doesn't have any inherent advantages.
Disclaimer: I dropped out at 19 partially because I heard the PhD guys I was writing software for complaining so much about their progress. It took me 15 years to get back into school.
"I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu
I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.
I know it reads as blatantly bragging, but from my interactions with Andrew (having met him at his office personally and then having done the interview over Skype), he didn't come across that way. It sounded to me like he had explained it many times before and was trying his best to succinctly give a straight answer. He seemed pretty normal by social standards, and I have some engineering friends who are sincere assholes with an ego much larger than Andrew's, if that's how you perceive him. I think most hackers and especially programmers have some amount of that cockiness though, that's not something we're all immune to. Even the CS professors admit that CS students walk around feeling more entitled than liberal arts students (and it's scribbled on the bathroom stalls: "Liberal arts degree dispenser below" right above the toilet paper roll in an engineering building on the campus I went to). Anyway, that wasn't the vibe I got from him, although I can see how you could read it that way.
It's an interesting point brought up: has he had enough painful experience with education to build a solution to it all? I don't know. I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now. But I'm really interested in seeing what his team comes up with, and if someone wants to work on education, I'm more than supportive of those efforts because that whole process sucks right now.
Why so?
And yet teachers have trouble getting students to learn anything.
First, grinding (really farming, no one outside of Korea grinds anymore, which I'll get to) in an MMO or playing Farmville is pretty low intensity mentally, it does not require that much of your attention. Multi-tasking is easy, for example. I'm not so sure that you would be able to grind away at mentally taxing activities. It generates fatigue.
Second, though, is that video games have not figured out a way to effectively reward boring activities. Let's use MMORPGs. When I played Final Fantasy XI, grinding was so tedious I quit before level 20. EverQuest 2 was better, but not too much more. WoW was fairly easy. RIFT was a breeze. Each new release is easier than the last, indicating that grinding is something game developers have learned to avoid rather than create ways of rewarding it. As an empirical test, it seems like a resounding rejection of thesis.
I'm not sure gamification is going to get much done on the education front. I think this idea resounds with techies because they like video games, they often like to show their accomplishments and they like the ego-stroke the concept of displacing education with games brings.
Sounds like a bunch of haters insecure about their cognitive abilities. Questioning his humility is pretty low.
I didn't think he sounded arrogant at all actually. He stressed that he thinks genetics play a small role. He then explains much more thoroughly the systematic approach he used to maximize his studying proficiency. I, in fact, think he was quite humble about his merits.
But if that's not the case, I wouldn't blame him either. He's human after all. So he is conditioned by his environment as much as we are. If I would be labeled as genius at 6, have 3 B.S. degrees by the age of 16, and pretty much everyone agreed I was "special", I think it's pretty expectable that I might end up believing that.
To work out this cognitive dissonance, you start to look what you did differently than your peers and you notice that you were doing math (or cs, or electronics, or biology or whatever) as early as you remember, while your averagely performing mates from university only started doing something serious in university classes or maybe in high school. This feels like a pretty good explanation, especially when one takes into account a 10 000 hours rule, but being a rationalist (who you surely are), you cannot discard the impact of your genes, but as long as it is not measurable, you can believe it's small.
That's how you come to the state of mind when saying things similar to the quoted ones seems pretty natural and not at all out of touch with reality.
(I say this from my own experience, so it's easy for me to sympathize -- I'm not as brilliant as the guy from the article, but I'm getting two bachelors (math and cs) next year, by then being 20.)
Ok, tongue out of cheek. In all seriousness, I've repeatedly felt that whatever (minor) financial success I've had is pretty undeserved. I have a fairly nice career as a graphics programmer, and I worked on an extremely popular online videogame. And why did I get that opportunity? Well, as far as I can tell, dumb luck. I happened to decide in ~5th grade that I wanted to learn programming. By 9th grade, I was sleeping through class every day, then going home and teaching myself game/graphics programming all afternoon and all night. For years.
I happened to find it interesting. And people happen to currently value my experience from it. But it feels less like I'm a genius and more like I just got lucky. But my friends and family all have the impression that I'm some kind of genius or something, and if I had an ego, I'd probably start thinking of myself as one. But I know I'm not. I'm just a hard worker who was interested in a field that turned out to be valuable.
I occasionally play a certain online game, and I've been friends with someone on there for a couple years now. He's about my age, still lives with his mom, and isn't really doing anything with his life. But I can tell you for a fact he's just as intelligent as me, and just as capable. I feel so bad knowing that the only thing he probably has to look forward to is a job in construction.
Conversely, it's hard not to be... condescending... of certain people I see every day. They believe their opinion is so perfectly accurate, and that they're so capable, when every objective measurement would show the opposite. And so you wind up getting into a strange state of mind, where you feel you're somehow "better" than them. I try to resist feeling that way.
If you want to read what the childhood of a true genius is like, or just read a really great book, then check out Feynman's "Surely You're Joking". It helped me to realize how much of a monkey I am in comparison.