Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

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Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's a disaster to everyone, not just me.

To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special online high school and get tutoring help just to graduate. He is very bright, but the system just crushes him because he can't operate within it very well and the system doesn't care.

I did once try to get into research. Academic research has a whole boatload of its own problems, including the professor/graduate student ponzi scheme and the overemphasis on getting published. I decided doing research on my own would be much more fruitful.

My classmates were usually quite smart. They were also usually just as frustrated with the system as I was.

You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit out the marrow.

Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the PhD system. However, meaningful research will require interaction with interested colleagues to increase the chance of useful work being done. This can take place independent of the so called Ponzi scheme. While there is some truth to that description, it has no bearing on your refusal to engage with research as an undergrad and is totally dilatory. If you hold yourself to such high standards you should be ashamed to use that as an excuse.

What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and raytracing graphical techniques.

Grad school probably would have run me into the ground. It would have done so for all the wrong reasons. Again, I'm not interested in a hyper-competitive environment where I am judged on all the wrong things. I'd rather do my own research, and have actually made progress along several avenues I'm quite proud of, but currently haven't crystallized into something I can write a paper about (also due to time constraints).

Stop glorifying long work hours. They aren't productive.

Camp in 3rd floor Padelford Library.

If your code compiles, it's proved.

Oreilly titles, Stack Overflow, net et al >> `non-coder friends, chuckles, and puppies'.

Play computer chess against `chess', not human limbic systems.

Original discovery is greater than a paycheck.

Have fun.

Realize, please, that many as passionate as you, and with many of the same opinions, have gone into education to try to improve it. Not just now, but for decades.

That is exactly the point that I raised in the essay. Education is a really hard problem. I don't claim I know how to fix it, but while everyone seems to agree that everything is broken, we are heading in the wrong direction.

I wouldn't say education is that hard on any fundamental level. It is, however, quite heavily constrained by factors that have nothing to do with actual education.

Imagine someone told you to build a robot out of wood and brass and whatever you could dig out of the ground, as a one-man effort, in a workshop. You might come up with steampunk and completely impress "someone", but more likely you'd just fail utterly because "someone" has given you loads and loads of extraneous constraints that have nothing to do with "build a robot" and everything to do with "I've dropped you into the late 19th century".

That is how education gets constrained.

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