I believe he's referring to Strogatz's introductory textbook "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering".
Thanks for linking, I enjoyed the talk. I'm currently in the middle of the "go back to school for CS" route into software development, and it was heartening to hear your success story. Between starting on CS a few years late and spending too much time on Hacker News, it's easy to feel discouraged at how little I know.
Being able to "check the further destruction of the retina" is a therapeutic benefit when it comes to macular degeneration. It's the best outcome you can hope for on any of our current treatments for it. The retina is still relatively poorly understood, and our treatments for the pathologies of it are unfortunately limited.
I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late.
That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.
I am a fresh graduate, and I came into university with the same attitude as him, in a scholarship program full of people with my attitude. Fortunately, the dean talked to my freshman class during orientation. He said: "Yes, you're smart. But you'll find here, everyone else is also smart. You'll find that you have to distinguish yourself through the work you do.". Admittedly, my ego was too big at the time to really take the thought seriously, but after meeting so many wonderful people at the university, and many people who were so ridiculously smarter than I was I realized how special I wasn't. For the most part, I found people who kept my attitude didn't fare as well as the students who did change.
I also think posts like this ignore all the students who navigate the system successfully. It makes our universities seem as failures, when they provide so much value and sucesses.
They are situational tools. They are not the catch all sink of learning, in the same way public instructor driven 30 students 40 - 60 minute blocks x8 chalkboard and tests isn't the catch all way to teach the masses in general for 12 years. The problem is everyone wants a one size fits all answer that takes in toddlers and spits out hyper-successful professionals in the most prosperous industries and human beings aren't best placed on conveyor belts in a factory.
Some people benefit. Some people suffer. Some are indifferent and get bored. The bigger problem is figuring out there are many ways to learn beyond a book and a grade, and that we need to figure out how each individual learns best.
I appreciate founders sharing their experiences like this, but I feel like most of this list suffers from premature generalization. Especially if these are lessons learned the hard way, I'd rather hear more of a "war story".
Some, like "They plan details about sh*t that never sees the light of day" are quite self-sufficient, but some of the others are pretty vague or even come across as contradictory. "They seek too much advice from too many sources with too many conflicting views" but also "They do mental incest by bouncing ideas off the same people every time"? I know that different founders make different mistakes, but I'm still in the dark on how to find the happy middle.
For ones like that, or "They have no clue about their market", I want to hear what happened! What's the story behind the advice?
I know that this is beyond the scope of a list like this, but maybe it could be fodder for some future blog posts.
I agree! Some of the things are even contradictory from what you hear in the Lean Startup echo chamber now. They would make a ton more sense if they carried examples or some sort of 'war story'.
Why would you expect them to not be contradictory? People will have made mistakes on both sides (and the author may have made them both within the same startup too).
I agree that it's difficult to generalise but the utility of a list this comes from the introspection it can provoke. "Am I talking to too many people?" "Am I following vanity metrics?" "Am I planning details that matter?"
I commend the entrepreneurial traits this man showed, but I don't see how you can simply dismiss the fact that he's profiting from a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Just because there are some good things about his attitude doesn't mean he can't be criticized.
This story isn't really about the wealth-producing sort of entrepreneurialism that I come to HN for, so I'm not surprised there are negative comments on this post.
Obviously I thought it was called for. Some people are criticizing because it's "illegal" and therefor wrong. Someone below brought up how GrubWithUs illegally inserted flyers into daily papers and they were praised for being scrappy. Another mentioned the legal grey areas of startups like Uber or Airbnb.
And you're right this story is different than the norm on HN. I wanted to relate those criticizing to something they understand like patent trolls who try to rip others down or someone criticizing another for going for it while they sit behind a desk for 40 years implementing 1% of someone else's vision. My point was that maybe they should be rooting for the person that goes for it whether it's a SV startup or selling widgets on the street.
"rooting for the person that goes for it" is an example prime of a subjective statement. Do you not think that patent trolls perceive themselves as "going for it"?
The only thing that literary criticism ever inspired me to criticize was literary criticism. Perhaps it was simply taught badly, but I received an excellent primary education - if the better schools around can't teach this stuff then I question how many students learn any critical thinking skills from it.
I learned a lot more about critical thinking from history classes. Those obviously have to be taught well, too. The standard regurgitate-some-dates won't impart any critical thinking either. But I think history as a subject is richer soil to grow these skills from, and isn't mixed up with the teaching of both writing and literature at the same time.
The point of the original post was that we devalue literary criticism because it's so often taught poorly. But the same is true for a lot of disciplines!
"""The only thing that literary criticism ever inspired me to criticize was literary criticism. Perhaps it was simply taught badly, but I received an excellent primary education - if the better schools around can't teach this stuff then I question how many students learn any critical thinking skills from it."""
The same can be said for tons of fields. You think the teaching of computer science is really that better?
My post was not an objection to teaching literary criticism. It was an objection to defending literary criticism by appealing to the value of general critical thinking skills.
If someone proposed to cut computer science from a curriculum, would your defense be "but without computer science, students won't learn how to think critically"?
I also think we're in danger of equivocating over the word "criticism" here. Literary criticism shouldn't be assumed to teach critical thinking well just because the names are similar.
"""If someone proposed to cut computer science from a curriculum, would your defense be "but without computer science, students won't learn how to think critically"?"""
Yeah, I would say that. CS can teach a lot about critical thinking, in a way that few subjects can. Programming is a very effective way to test hypotheses and cut through the BS.
If I was to give a list for "critical thinking enhancing courses", I'd also put History and Math up there (also language stuff, spelling and grammar, but as a prerequisite).
So, would literary criticism make the list? I'd say, yes, we need some form of art criticism to enhance a blind spot the other subjects leave to our critical thinking --i.e thinking about things that cannot be reasoned in a 1+1=2 way.
Now, Chemistry, Physics, Biology and the rest, I find secondary in regards to critical thinking.
For example, learning about evolution is not "critical thinking" itself.
That would be learning to argue WHY evolution is more plausible or learning how to find faults in "intelligent design". Or to be able to spot holes and inconsistencies in any theory in general.
I'm not certain that I agree with your point. I love computer science, and credit my interest in programming with the vast majority of my intellectual development, but that doesn't necessarily make it better at developing students intellectually than other fields. As I've grown older and made friends with people passionate in other fields (e.g. mathematics, physics, economics), I've learned that those people have developed similar powers of analysis and logic as I have. Through the lens of my conversation with them, and I can see the intricacies and thought processes of their fields of interest, which developed them much as the manipulations required in CS have for me. JMStewy makes a good point. For the literary-minded, literary criticism may be a great way of honing their abilities. For you and I, computer science and practicing on problems in the digital field train us well. I don't think we can say with statistical certainty that any field (let alone literary criticism) are optimal for the majority of students.
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos-Applications-...