It wasn’t the case for him but I’d like people to also note that in Korea, one of the strategy for getting into good universities is to actually drop out of high school and grind for the national exam by going to cram schools (hagwon)
People do this because there are certain admission categories where the university only looks at the test results. So they go “okay, by not going to school, my child can fully focus on exam instead of wasting time on useless subjects like art and PE. And school math curriculum is too easy anyway”
This really saddens me because schools should be more than gateways to universities, but I digress.
Contains a couple of pop narrative cliches that always turn out to be gaudy exaggerations for journalistic effect: "he came from art, he is driven by beauty! he stunned the mathematical world!", it's bollocks really, and he's no doubt quite embarrassed by this article. He once thought about being a poet, but actually didn't like the work. His parents had a mathematical academic background and he picked that up as an undergraduate. He exhibits fairly typical neurodivergent behaviour of people with ADHD and/or autism. I would like to see journalists start writing about actual poets, or sculptors etc, in this absurdly valourizing, mythologizing way.
Imagine every kid had had a maths professor that demonstrated live research in the classroom, like the Japanese teacher that June Huh benefitted from - who knows, the world may be full of similar talent, we will never know.
We should remember not to just present results, but to teach, demonstrate and live how to get there more. It's not even abour rich vs. poor education - almost all go through the whole system never seeing this, and for June Huh, sleeper maths genius, meeting that one person changed everything!
There's definitely scope for doing more of that. But notice also that of the 200 students who also got that opportunity alongside him, 195 stopped attending those lectures after just a few weeks; we don't know about the other 4 but I'm guessing they didn't all change their life trajectories as a result. So you're looking for needles in haystacks, and if you do too much of it you're providing an experience that 95% of your audience concludes is a waste of their time.
The path of progress is strewn with needles.
I'm a trail runner. When I look at the ultra runner community, there definitely is a sense that some people have gamified their ancient brains and mastered the skill of short-term inconvenience to obtain long-term success, and it translates to many areas of life. I don't think it's unlikely that somebody is successful in multiple areas; surely you need some natural ability to reach the top in any specific discipline, but if you learn to apply yourself and persist, clearly that can help you in many areas, regardless of innate talent.
My point being that maybe it's not unique sleeper inborn talent, but just learning grit, persistence and well, not being stupid, that will lead to success in life. If one thing doesn't hit, try another. So maybe you don't become a poet, but a math genius, or a soccer player, or a dancer; something else than a TV consumer.
Related:
He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37010709 - Aug 2023 (75 comments)
He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31985400 - July 2022 (136 comments)
Thanks.
I wonder if this helpful service of integrating past comments on the same story ould be easily automated by looking for repeat URLs (and perhaps clustering old and new comments to integrate them so they can be presented as topical threads).
Dang is a mod here, he's commented previously on how these posts are made, saying they're 'semi-automated'. I imagine if you search for "comments" in their comments you'll find threads with more details.
I wonder if the recurrence equations for the number of spanning trees in the GxP_n graphs also meet the log recuirement.
I wonder if somebody already has scanned the OEIS for all recurrent relations that are "log concave". These are mentioned on https://oeis.org/wiki/Index_to_OEIS:_Section_Rec . just scanning the page, I guess there are not so many that are unimodal and log concave.
"The work showed that “you don’t need space to do geometry,” Huh said. “That made me really fundamentally rethink what geometry is.”"
That is one of the most thought provoking things I have ever read.
I share quite a few of his quirks. I was also rejected by most of the grad schools I applied to. So how come I didn't amount to anything?
Seriously, a well written article including the accessible explanations of his work. Plus, LoL funny. Thank you.
It's not over yet my friend
I've started my bachelor's at 35y, last year. Still waiting for grade on last exam, but it looks like after 4 tries (since 2008) I finally passed the first semester.
Congratulations! That takes so much courage - more than most of your classmates have ever had to exercise. The next semester should be easier!
I did this too, a little before you (started around 27ish)
The B.S. changed my life. I graduated, you will too.
Congrats. You’ll get there! Just take it one semester at a time.
This is the friendliest comment I've seen on the World Wide Web today. Thank you for posting.
Quanta Magazine was already brilliant before, but this article has improved the way the cutting-edge work is presented acessibly to (relatifve) laypeople.
So grateful to the late Jim Simons for funding basic research and its popularization (and Quanta Mag.)!
So he belongs to a wealthy family then, correct? Poetry is typically the pursuit of the bourgeoisie. It does not pay very well, especially to afford a family and only work three hours per day, as per the article. It’s great that he gets to live this lifestyle, for him, but there are some of us who pursue poetry at a net loss to quality of life. I’d possibly even contend that most people who actively engage in creative writing do so to their own detriment in a consumerist society with little to no safety net such as the US. Perhaps South Korea has a generous public endowment for poetry, and I would love to hear about it if so.
Otherwise, I’m not particularly moved by another chronicle of superior outcomes in creative pursuits due to hereditary wealth articles.
Calling yourself a poet does not excuse this meandering illogic
Accelerated hero's journey.
Very cool that at least in S. Korea one can "mess up" by dropping out of high school and eventually go on to study under, work with, and finally win one of the most prestigious medals in the world. I think this _may_ be possible in the US, but would be much harder. This is isad because the US has a more anyone can do anything culture, which is normally great. But maybe it doesn't exist in some fields/schools/industries.
>Very cool that at least in S. Korea one can "mess up" by dropping out of high school
It's not even messing up there, it's a strategic move made by a lot of people. It's important to remember that not every system works the same as in the US.
But he did it in the US? Got his PhD at a US University. Works at a US University, did his award winning work in the US. Not sure how this is anything but a US success story?
Modern education system is broken.
Fine, but can he solve the Riemann Hypothesis in iambic pentameter?
Clearly a very neurodivergent person. Glad he found a place in society where he could contribute within the quirks of his personality.
This story is a bit of a misnomer when you look deeper. His dad is a statistics professor and he was mentored by well known mathematician in undergraduate so it's not like he didn't have a lot of schooling.
I don't think his dad helped him that much? The article says his dad gave up on trying to teach him.
We can't really know for sure. We have the anecdote about the workbook but what about earlier and did he absorb any of his dad's teachings or aptitude by osmosis.
Even if we accept he didn't he still went to college and had an unusual experience as an undergrad in being mentored by an excellent mathematician.
That he took a gap year in h.s. doesn't seem that noteworthy to me.
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> he dropped out of high school to become a poet.
Not even college, high school. Really misleading/unfortunate title.
As an aside, why would anyone need to drop out of anything to become a poet?
In case you’re asking the question not rhetorically - this is the kind of thing you can afford to do when you have an extremely strong/privileged support system.
It’s myth-making, and shouldn’t be confused with “dropping out to take care of your sick parent” or “dropping out and going to work at McDonald’s”.
> the kind of thing you can afford to do when you have an extremely strong/privileged support system.
Are you talking about his family specifically, or South Korea in general? What makes it extremely strong or privileged?
>What makes it extremely strong or privileged?
The fact that his parents were math and literature professors who entertained him dropping out of school to write poetry. If I had done that my parents would have offered me exactly three choices, get a job, go back to school, or pack your bags and pay your own rent which would have forced me to get a job, understandably so because as working class people they didn't have the resources to sponsor me for another decade while I go soul searching
Yes it is not a wealthy family, but in terms of education for children, having parents already in academia is just as good of a privilege as wealthy parents.
The person you're responding to didn't imply that privilege is a "sin". Not sure how you're interpreting that.
Sinply put, most working class parents simply don't have the financial respurces to support an older child's artistic pursuits. It is a privilege, i.e., an _advantage_, to have those means and werewithal to do so.
I’m not familiar with the privileged support system in South Korea. Is it different than in the US or Europe?
I believe Einstein dropped out of high school and traveled a bit through Italy.
We definitely need a world where more young people can drop out for a few years.
The educational track in South Korea is extremely competitive, and everything hinges on how well you do on the Suneung (a kind of SAT on steroids). If you drop out, it is usually because you have intergenerational wealth, exceptional non-scholastic talents, or a route to study/work abroad.
Or you just don’t like studying. There are plenty of Koreans who drop out of high school because they don’t feel like studying is for them. Yes, parents are more likely to try to force them to stay in school compared to other countries. But South Koreans are people too.
It feels disengenuous if you're seriously stating you're not familiar with how people with stable families and familial wealth have a much larger level of freedom in their choices to pursue the arts compared the average person.
Just curious, do you live in a capitalist country?
In your country, how easy is it for someone to professionally work on their _art_ - i.e. have a career not just art-adjacent, like doing creative work as a graphic designer or animator or tattoo artist, but actually their own art, such as original paintings, poetry, or novels - which pays the entirety of their bills (presuming their bills actually include rent, food, transportation)?
In your country, is their any pressure on an individual working in the arts to work another job?
Can they sustain a family?
Do artists typically live with their parents or receive familial support until they hit it big?
Do they live out the starving artist stereotype or are they given a less meager existence?
Of the people that grew up poor that you know, do you know how many of them wanted to be artists, but had to take care of family or their own survival ahead of pursuing their art?
Of people you don't consider wealthy growing up, how many of them could afford a year at a prestigious private school for a year ahead of high school? (Relevant to the author here)
If you can answer these, it may give you some insight on SK. I can give you more if that's not enough.
From the article it sounds like he was able to do something like the GED and knew he would be attending college later in South Korea still.
Where's the myth making?
The exercise of how one drops out of the first year of high school to “become a poet”, gets a GED, and then proceeds to enter one of the top universities in Korea (notorious for its particularly cutthroat academic culture) right on time at 19 is left to the reader.
No there is also admission based on school grades, essays and achievements(수시). You still have to take the national test and get the minimum required grades though.
what is the GED you are referring to here ?
I just read between the lines in the article that he must have gotten something like that since he said in the article that when he dropped out to be a poet he knew he would not have to attend college in two years.
Looking into it, I think they actually translate their version of it as GED too:
https://www.ice.go.kr/en/cm/cntnts/cntntsView.do?mi=10019&cn...
To spend more time on it.
Spend more time on what, exactly? Writing poetry actively, all day, every day? That’s a lot of writing.
How often do people become very good at something without spending the vast majority of their time on it for a long time?
I do not think you are aware that most people's process of writing good poetry is quite involved. It's okay not to understand, but be cautious about implying that another person's artistic work could be done in a spare hour here or there between coursework. It is disrespectful to the hard work of the written word.
That’s basically what Paul Erdos did for math. People who dedicate their lives to a skill are the ones that tend to push humanity forward bit by bit.
It can also involve a lot of reading and thinking, also stuff you need time for
I was thinking that this was my path, I was a Math major (well actually Math-English double major) and I dropped out to focus on English. Of course I never got a Field Medal (or much success as a poet for that matter).
Sounds great. You don't need a Fields Medal for life to be worthwhile, or it's hopeless for all of humanity.
Joseph Brodsky dropped out of communism to become a poet, which did not amuse the authorities.
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(2022)
Added. Thanks!
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Did you read the article? It doesn't say anything like he just woke up one day and changed majors, but that he made a connection in a class that most people dropped out of with a research professor.
Yeah and which class was that? Calc 1?
It wasn't at Princeton, not a class he had to get access to. Says the class had 200 people in it--wow the big exclusive club he used dirty family connections to get into to cheat at winning the Fields Medal: a class with 200 people enrolled.
His father is a Statistics professor and he was taking a graduate level math course (algebraic geometry) from a Field’s medalist. This is a course nobody but math majors would take:
> In that sixth year, he enrolled in a class taught by the famed Japanese mathematician Heisuke Hironaka, who won the Fields Medal in 1970
> Ostensibly, the course was an introduction to algebraic geometry, the study of solutions to algebraic equations and their geometric properties
You seem weirdly personally invested in this:
> the big exclusive club he used dirty family connections
I didn’t say anything like that - I’m just saying the article wants to suggest he just happened into math and that’s clearly not the case.
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I would be interested to know if any of the latest AI models can 1. Verify the solution (should be easy). 2. Produce the solution.
Trouble with 2 is they've probably already read the article and similar.
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My academic work was very close to June Huh's; my Ph.D. thesis was directly inspired by his Fields Medal winning work. His accomplishments have undoubtedly moved the field forward and connected various ostensibly disparate areas of math, not to mention he is one of the clearest writers and speakers in all of mathematics.
There are very few people in pure math that care about transformers; they have had practically zero impact on the sort of research mathematics that the Fields Medal is concerned with.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Don't be curmudgeonly."
Is "Don't be curmudgeonly" a new addition? I don't remember that one before.
Indeed it is! Comments seem way too curmudgeonly lately.
You're really kicking against the goads with this one.
Dang, with all due respect, this comment was really not that bad. You are too heavy handed
As a late observer, equally respectfully, it very likely wasn't dang's hand that downvoted and or flagged your comment.
You're responding to an after action review comment by moderator as to what might have caused the flag.
I know it sucks to get scolded by a mod, and it's not my wish to make anyone feel bad.
How did transformers move forward pure math?
there is a straight-faced argument that transformers are already a mathematical research tool and even a source of new theorems. and if true, surely more revolutionary than some ultra complicated corner of math
Does there exist a person who would make this argument straight-faced? I am a professional mathematician and have yet to hear of anyone coaxing an even slightly interesting new theorem out of AI. I think the day is clearly coming but it's not here.
I do research in this field. LLMs can be used as (ridiculously inefficient) implementations of some search algorithms that we haven't yet identified and implemented in software ourselves, but which can be inferred from a statistical analysis of the literature. Sometimes those search algorithms generalise to new areas, but more often than not, they flail. The primary advantage of a language model is that it's one big algorithm: when one subcomponent would flail, another (more "confident") subcomponent becomes dominant; but that doesn't solve the case where none of the subcomponents are competent and confident in equal measure. In short: to the extent it's useful, it's a research dead-end. Any potential improvements we understand are better implemented as actual search algorithms.
You've probably seen that thing where ChatGPT cracked Enigma[0]. It used several orders of magnitude more computational power than a Bombe (even given Moore's Law, still thousands of times more electrical power), and still took two dozen times longer. You would literally be better off doing brute-force search with a German dictionary. Thus is it with mathematics: a brute-force search is usually cheaper and better than trying to use a language model.
Terry Tao is one of the staunchest knowledgeable advocates of GPT models in mathematical research, and afaik he doesn't even bother trying to use the models for proof search. It's like trying to build a house with a box of shoes: sure, the shoe is technically more versatile because you can't use a hammer for tightening bolts (the shoe's sole has enough friction to do this) or foot protection (the shoe is the right shape for this) or electrical isolation (the bottom surface of the shoe is largely rubber), but please just use a hammer if you want to manipulate nails.
[0]: https://www.techradar.com/news/we-watched-an-ai-crack-the-en... – and I know that's not the original ChatGPT®, but I am not rewarding this company for such a wasteful and pointless publicity stunt.
Should Berners-Lee get a fields medal if the web helped math? How about a farmer that is proven to have fed the most mathemeticians?
Big if true.
very big
You're right/wrong. It goes for big breakthroughs, but not all of them, depends mainly on "networking", like Nobels.
That is very sad but understandable, incentivize is hard to overcome
Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile.
Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc.
Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.
Look I’m a first generation American with a sister 3 years younger. We grew up in poverty in the 2008 aftermath. Like food stamps and stretching leftovers by mixing them with pasta broke
I navigated the system alone for myself then again to help her after I had learned from all my college friends. We both went to “prestigious private schools” with single digit acceptance rates and have similarly “prestigious” jobs
Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
What about stepping back a bit and realizing that proper life success has almost nothing to do with school you go to? I am not saying not going to school per se, but this hard focus on career as soon as possible... where is focus on quality of life for example?
Optimizing hard for some rat race for some soulless (or soul crushing) office jobs among high functioning sociopaths that management inevitably always is. Most of those folks are not properly happy by any measure, thats not a win in life to end up there nor something to respect.
We are in rather unique period of time, especially folks here, that life fulfillment and happiness can be achieved for almost everybody and not just some top 0.1% if correct direction is taken. How about we realized that and focused more on actually long term important aspects of life?
(here is another guy who went the proverbial rags-to-modest-riches on my own but I would never had such mindset, when talking about successes of my life its about countries I've travelled, people I've met and intense experiences that shaped me more than career paths taken)
> Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
How many others have tried to put the work you did and didn't achieve it?
I think that's the crux of it, being possible doesn't mean anything if it shuts out the majority of the ones who attempt it. It's possible to become a professional athlete and still a lot more kids fail to achieve that even if they put the work for it. Contrary to being a professional athlete, good education is both much more accessible and much more needed.
Exactly because you managed to achieve it that I believe there should be more empathy for how fucked up the system is, imagine how much less suffering you would have gone through if there was a better way? Why not work for it to be a better way even though it's already possible?
It's not impossible to be the fastest Olympic swimmer in the world, and it's a LOT easier with money. But, just like your story, you can't guarantee it will happen by "understanding the expectations and putting in the work to meet them".
As orphans (?) did you get scholarships to the private school? I'm curious if you couldn't afford to eat, how the school worked out? Did the jobs come through school connections?
Let me tell an alternative story. I didn’t even apply to college because nobody told me I should, or explained when that happens, etc.
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University admissions are generally aware such things exist, though. And if they're actually evaluating on chance of success at university, will take that kind of thing into account. (I.e. a kid from a poor background and a bad school who manages to get good grades will be given priority over a rich kid who went to a good school and got perfect grades. Often the limiting factor for the former in terms of admission to a top university is that they're not ever told that it's a realistic option for them and so they don't even apply).
The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Fundamentally, the university is going to analyze all its applicants, more-or-less rank them according to its standards, and then take the top X applicants according to its metrics. Since you can't half-accept someone, there isn't a way to do anything else.
And once you have that measure, you are now subject to Goodhart's law [1]. There is no escape.
So, your university gives points for applicants who have extracurricular activities? Here comes someone that joined 15 clubs. Oh, do you want them to be leaders in their activity? Here comes someone who is the president of six clubs, and founded two more. Oh, do you want them academically accomplished instead? Here comes someone who in high school published six scientific papers (please don't look too hard at which journals they were in). No, wait, we don't like what that's encouraging, let's just look at standardized test scores... and here come the perfect scores.
Applicants will make themselves one dimensional. They'll tune to whatever dimension you're measuring on, no matter what you try to do to the basis vector of that dimension. And they'll beat out anyone who is just being normal, or even more cynically, just being honest about their actual activities.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking.
The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once.
[1]: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
> The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional.
Ultimately all things are reducible to a function applied to the state of the world. The entire point is that by introducing additional dimensions to the metrics of 'acceptable for admission' the 'representation of the student' ("state of the world") is made out of a higher dimensional variable.
Now, you can game the "one dimensional" student representation or the n-dimensional version. For each of the possible (predictable, finite set) attacks on the function there can be remedies. where there are cases where we can not have effective remedies, that fact itself appears to be independent of the number of dimensions.
Ultimately, it seems hard to argue against a higher dimensional metric given that it is more information rich. And, I venture to guess young teens would also welcome the mere possibility of 'choices' in electing areas to excel.
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
They really, really do. Admission to top universities has become hyper competitive. They're getting tens of thousands of highly qualified applicants with perfect GPAs and great SAT scores. So what they're looking at is more, "Will admission to this university help them to do something special?" or is admission the end goal for the student. And one way to see that is if the applicant is well-rounded and explorative. Are they setting creative fires everywhere they go?
Massive corruption and discrimination (like discrimination against asian students in US universities) would take place if you introduce more dimensions (most of them are subjective and can be gamed)
Are all the applicants who find school unfulfilling so skip it to go straight to university 1 dimensional? For example, some might be more mature than their peers and are going to flower at university.
If they look at more than it makes sense to spend more time improving all of those aspects instead of wasting time at school.
Which is why American universities require a HS diploma and good grades in a variety of subjects
But why waste time getting the grade if you could pass the final today?
Disagree. Peter Thiel wrote about this in zero to one. The "well rounded" candidate is essentially hedging their bets. An indefinite optimist.
> You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
> A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.
I can understand his distaste for the indefinite, but does he actually make a strong case for the opposite?
To me this reads as claiming "making fragile choices is good", which outside of very niche situations I'd say is bad advice: like telling a college basketball player to not waste time outside of practice and later watching him go undrafted in the pros.
Hail marry risk is always better externalized.
You should read his book. Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter "you are not a lottery ticket"
> THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill. What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages.” Warren Buffett famously considers himself a “member of the lucky sperm club” and a winner of the “ovarian lottery.” Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon’s success to an “incredible planetary alignment” and jokes that it was “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains.” Bill Gates even goes so far as to claim that he “was lucky to be born with certain skills,” though it’s not clear whether that’s actually possible.
> Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist.
> In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success is never accidental.”
>Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in The Atlantic, reporter Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply: “ ‘Success is never accidental,’ said all multimillionaire white men.” It’s true that already successful people have an easier time doing new things, whether due to their networks, wealth, or experience. But perhaps we’ve become too quick to dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan.
> Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we’d have to rewind to 2004, create 1,000 copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
> From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.” No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.
> If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is worthless if you’re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit’s foot to rub or how to tell which machines are “hot,” but it can’t tell you how to win.
> Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon, or did she “lean in”? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design?
Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters.
I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.
This is a straw-man argument. There's value in a well-rounded liberal arts education beyond job preparation. I say this as a math major with a molecular biology PhD. I took multiple classes in history, economics, etc. It allows one to develop healthy critical thinking skills; and also not underestimate the complexity of social issues facing us - in other words, it fortifies you against the likes of Thiel, who has no problem buying politicians with $$ and pushing for his extreme and frankly dangerous political agenda. Conservatives used to understand and value a classical Western education with room for the great works. Authoritarians don't like thinking citizens, however.
> discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
Often when you look at the other dimensions, it's a way for the admissions office to smuggle in criteria that other people find objectionable.
this whole thing is like a crypto currency exercise where you input x compute for an expected value of y prestige points over 3 yrs
The story includes some skipping class yet getting a Fields Medal.
At least here in the US:
In academics, a grade of A is better than the rest yet still some independent or from outside school results can mean more than grades and even make poor grades irrelevant.
Some examples:
E.g., for getting into a selective college, SAT Math scores (from outside of school) the highest in my high school class made everything else irrelevant. E.g., overlooked my F in Typing!
Actually, the Typing class was very worthwhile and learned touch typing, but the class was nearly all girls, GORGEOUS, who buzzed away with perfect accuracy at maybe 30 characters a second!
E.g., in graduate school, found a problem and in two weeks got a solution accepted right away by Mathematical Programming. Suddenly had an impenetrable shield and all grades and everything else were irrelevant.
E.g., before grad school thought of a problem and had a first solution; in grad school wrote a first draft; wrote and ran the related software; and wrote the document, all independently. Stood for orals and graduated.
Again, course grades are not everything, and good independent work can make everything else irrelevant.
Not really possible when success in South Korea is literally like the Squid Games and entrance exams are extremely difficult compared to what Westerners may be accustomed to. I agree the signal provided by this is low-dimensional, but it’s an objective way to measure applicants.
Take the weekend off :)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4064129
> Take the weekend off :)
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4064129
How does this paper relate to GP's comment?