Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University
Fairly embarrassing half memoir, half rant. One common feature of the (public-facing) Thielverse is cussedness: being so annoyed and contemptuous, of whatever, that you become annoying and contemptible. As you'd expect, Gibson is incredibly derivative of Thiel and has the same tubthumping view of the productivity and science slowdown and the spiritual failures it uncovers. It is absolutely true that credentialism is out of control and that many authorities do not deserve respect. But dismaying to see people who agree frothing at the mouth and arguing by spicy adjective.
I have no idea if his fund is any good. Something about his pitch rings my alarms. (Merton Scholes.):
(The "paper belt" is the East Coast words-based industry: media, education, ads, banking. Gibson gleefully imagines making a rust belt of it. This would be more convincing if he had some idea of what to replace it with. Remember that the culture war is first of all an intra-elite thing.)
The first few years of the Thiel Fellowship drew in some of the age's defining independent scientists/engineers/businesspeople (e.g. Laura Deming, Chris Olah, Vitalik Buterin, David Luan). It's not clear how much of this is due to Gibson and Strachmann, though subjectively it seems worse since they left. (At least half of this fall will be due to the adversarial hacking of the application process of anything high-status which is older than a few years. In hindsight it's impressive that they held it off for more than one iteration.) It's pretty daft of him to suggest that this kind of programme could replace education, that they "represent not some group of extraordinary outliers, who cannot be taken as a model for the average student, but the beginning of a new era in education".
This bit accidentally makes Thiel look like a shallow rube (or physiognomist):
His concept of "edge control" (basically: stomach for uncertainty, ability to act well despite bad info) is a good one.
Somehow this book makes what he has done seem less impressive.
I have no idea if his fund is any good. Something about his pitch rings my alarms. (Merton Scholes.):
1517 Fund’s returns place it in the top one or two percent of all funds in its class. So the fact that we perform this well, are a brand new fund competing against the Yankees, and limit ourselves to investing in dropouts or people who never went to college is truly extraordinary.
(The "paper belt" is the East Coast words-based industry: media, education, ads, banking. Gibson gleefully imagines making a rust belt of it. This would be more convincing if he had some idea of what to replace it with. Remember that the culture war is first of all an intra-elite thing.)
The first few years of the Thiel Fellowship drew in some of the age's defining independent scientists/engineers/businesspeople (e.g. Laura Deming, Chris Olah, Vitalik Buterin, David Luan). It's not clear how much of this is due to Gibson and Strachmann, though subjectively it seems worse since they left. (At least half of this fall will be due to the adversarial hacking of the application process of anything high-status which is older than a few years. In hindsight it's impressive that they held it off for more than one iteration.) It's pretty daft of him to suggest that this kind of programme could replace education, that they "represent not some group of extraordinary outliers, who cannot be taken as a model for the average student, but the beginning of a new era in education".
This bit accidentally makes Thiel look like a shallow rube (or physiognomist):
At the end of our deliberations, we’d go to Peter’s house to show him who we were picking and why. The first year, we were in his dining room, standing around the table. Peter was looking down at a sheet of photographs of the twenty we’d chosen. Danielle remembers thinking, “Are we really doing this?” Peter scanned the photos in silence, nodded, and gave his customary approval: “Ok, looks good.”
His concept of "edge control" (basically: stomach for uncertainty, ability to act well despite bad info) is a good one.
Somehow this book makes what he has done seem less impressive.