Paul Graham, and entrepreneur and technologist who I have a lot of respect for, gave a talk at RailsConf 2006 this year titled “The Power of the Marginal.” The talk detailed the benefits of being on the “margins”, a place that is often looked down upon. It is from the margins, rather than the mainstream, that new ideas and innovation spring. The idea is to straddle the line somewhere between insider and outsider, with this line being defined by a particular fields standards…
A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for distinguishing between them. And the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the test itself
So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider. This tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with authorities, whether it’s worth going through the usual channels to become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in this field at all.
Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for quality, and the people running the test really care about its integrity. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are fairly honest, for example. The professors will get whoever they admit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well, and they have a fair amount of data to go on. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be much more hackable.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”
Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.
How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders. If you’re an amateur mathematician and think you’ve solved a famous open problem, better go back and check. When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat’s last theorem and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source of tips– more like manning a mental health hotline. Whereas if the stuff you’re writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that’s not necessarily a problem.
As an engineering student with a strong passion for business I’ve contemplated switching majors more than once, but never made the plunge. I believe this puts into words my feelings exactly. Engineering is a field that is less “hackable” as Paul Graham might say. There is a certain amount of credibility that cannot be attained without a degree in Engineering, whereas in Business the “tests” are more subjective. In the business world the best of the best are unlikely to be confined to a drab life of research and teaching unruly undergrads. Sure, there may be various philanthropic reasons for one to teach, but when was the last time you saw a Warren Buffet or Jack Welch caliber executive teaching at a University. However, in Engineering, a field defined by research and accomplishments, the academic institution provides exactly what the best of the best are looking for.
Better perform a careful Cost/Benefit analysis on this one!
Leave a Reply