- I was a defense contractor with Top Secret clearance working on ML for the airforce, which included research-level work with bayesian networks (I built tractable heuristics for solving partially observable markov decision processes).
- I built a scheduling heuristic for an international law firm (an NP-hard problem) using randomized algorithms.
- I built a recommendation engine for my a multimillion dollar startup I founded using SVDs.
- Today I open sourced a bloom filter implementation I wrote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443675) that uses recent research to be several times faster than a traditional implemention
- I implemented very efficient Reed Solomon coding using numerical methods and linear algebra for secret sharing
And I'm by no means unique. I know other dropouts who are doing world class work in distributed systems research and NLP. There's absolutely no reason you need to go to college to learn if you're motivated.
Your accomplishments are very impressive, but you clearly are not the norm, which is why Thiel's advice can be damaging.
Thiel is simply arguing that we need to make sure kids know about other options available to them besides college.
Of course, if you want to be a medical doctor you need to go to formal school. But, if you have the right kind of personality and the right goals, college may not be the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.
And I don't think many people but Thiel are preaching that message.
but someone who does 3-4 years at Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc.
I have met many people from Caltech and MIT and the way you are saying it, it is like they are the distinguished elite... and yes maybe a select few are but don't generalize... they are really ditzy and honestly stupid people there. Structure, fear and the title of those prestige schools will keep you from doing something silly and failing out.
Last time I checked... Once you get in (from high school SAT / A-Levels / AP / CAPE) you are in for the full four years. So it is not the students. Scratch that.
So then what are you really saying the professors there will give me a better education than I will give to myself ? Ever heard of student cram sessions ? Students who study before class only to argue or sleep during ? I highly doubt a professor from another school will not provide a similar level of education other wise you are insulting them. So it is not the professors. Scratch that.
So is it their courses ? MIT has OCW, CalTech and Harvard I think have lectures on YouTube and elsewhere for the public viewing. So it is not the courses. Scratch that.
Stop giving credit where it doesn't exist.
And you missed what smanek is saying. This is someone who has either learnt material that would be covered in first year uni (which happens if you do AP or A-Level) or who is learning on his own. No one said that one will not learn jack shit when on the work force .. that is just stupid.
</rant:driveby>
Signed Pissed off Canadian on behalf of -UFT -McGill -UofA
You make a worthwhile point, though: for people studying without being in college, how can they make sure that they get the useful but scary- or boring-looking stuff? I would propose that some respectable people put together lists of the subjects that are important to understand for various fields of study, so that un-college folks don't just accidentally miss something important like linear algebra. You could go a step further and create tests or projects or some other mechanism for people to demonstrate that they've studied each topic and understood it. There's no inherent reason why colleges have to be in charge of both education and accreditation. (I think that the Khan Academy or one of its competitors may eventually grow into this.)
I've found that it's easiest to learn things -- especially difficult things -- when you actually care. One of the hardest problems that the best teachers in college face is getting students to care. The thing that struck me, reading through the article and some of the stuff on uncollege.org, was the pervasive sense of actually giving a damn about education. There's got to be a way to use that.
We're engineers not because it pays well (which thankfully it does) but...because we just _had_ to be. I was born to be an engineer and my official first day on the job was when my dad brought home an Apple IIe.
College might be part of some engineer's education, it may not be for others. It was part of mine, but I learned how to work with Bayesian network, randomized algorithms and linear algebra after college.
I dropped out of liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas because I’m behind a social movement called UnCollege which supports Mark Twain’s mantra: “I have never let school interfere with my education.
First, I think it's really silly basing life decisions on witty quotations by dead people. Second, I can't wait till these kids re-discover FFTs or randomized algorithms, or Bloom filters, or suffix arrays, or linear algebra, or the SVD, or Bayesian networks, or countless other things that are effective solutions to real-world problems.
Hope they know that they're part of a high-risk, no-better-than-average reward experiment.