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Inside Peter Thiel's Genius Factory (backchannel.com)
In 2011 the Thiel Fellowship "was created to prove that a college degree doesn't matter," writes Backchannel, saying it's now evolved into something much more Silicon Valley. mirandakatz quotes their article:
What began as an attempt to draw teen prodigies to the Valley before they racked up debt at Princeton or Harvard and went into consulting to pay it off has transformed into the most prestigious network for young entrepreneurs in existence -- a pedigree that virtually guarantees your ideas will be judged good, investors will take your call, and there will always be another job ahead even better than the one you have.
This year's class are all established entrepreneurs -- some of whom have already graduated from college, according to the article, although having at least "stopped out" at some point remains a requirement for the program. "It's offensive, the way people ask about it," one fellow tells the reporter, who summarized his belief that "To go back [to Stanford] would imply personal failure. Why would he ever do that? He had his network started already, and clearly the opportunities came through the network... This network, he contended, was far more valuable than any he could build in college -- even at Stanford."
This year's class are all established entrepreneurs -- some of whom have already graduated from college, according to the article, although having at least "stopped out" at some point remains a requirement for the program. "It's offensive, the way people ask about it," one fellow tells the reporter, who summarized his belief that "To go back [to Stanford] would imply personal failure. Why would he ever do that? He had his network started already, and clearly the opportunities came through the network... This network, he contended, was far more valuable than any he could build in college -- even at Stanford."
...in 5...4...3...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
It's nothing more than a common watering hole for all the already-successful young entrepreneurs to all gather. Let's see, basically get a bunch of already successful young people and throw more money at them and give them even more opportunities to succeed... and they do it!? *rolls eyes*
Well, that and Putin's hackers. Truth burns like an STD, so quick fucking everyone around and you won't have to worry about Putin's hackers.
"It's offensive, the way people ask about it," one fellow tells the reporter
Sounds perfect for entitled millenials. I wonder when the house of cards will come crashing down in their lives.
Thiel is correct, that college is a waste of time and money for most people in most professions. Hopefully other programs will be setup to help usher in a new era of higher education. The vast majority of people can benefit from skipping college, not just Thiel's "precious snowflakes."
As a side note, this is why I am against socialist programs that want to give everyone free tuition. It's an unbelievable waste of money.
According to Peter Thiel, diversity is dumb and stupid. Nowadays immigrants coming to take stuff is bad, because going into foreign lands and establishing colonies and abusing the inhabitants and getting their resources was only cool from 1492 to the year 1800.
White is the winning color! No other races are needed.
We didn't need the Chinese to invent gunpowder, guns, paper, paper money, rocketry, and the crossbow.
We didn't need the Indians (Mysoreans) to invent metal cased rockets.
We didn't need the Olmecs to cross-hybridize local plants to invent corn/maize crops.
We didn't need dark skinned Africans to build the pyramids.
We didn't need Indians or Mayans to figure out the mathematics of zero.
We didn't need black slaves to provide the economic engine for the USA.
We didn't need the Chinese for discovering how to variolate against smallpox.
We didn't need the Incas to discover that Quinine works against shivering fever (malaria).
We didn't need the Chinese for discovering ephedrine.
We didn't need Indians and Sri Lankans to invent crucible steel.
We didn't need Satyendra Bose to discover Bose statistics to understand photon behavior and uncover the Bose-Einstein condensate.
We didn't need Hideki Yukawa to uncover the existence of the meson.
We didn't need Susumu Tonegawa to discover how antibodies are made.
We didn't need Reiji Okazaki to help uncover how DNA replication works and discover Okazaki fragments.
We didn't need Har Gobind Khorana to figure out the RNA code.
We didn't need Ahmed Zewail to invent the femto second laser.
We didn't need Abdus Salam to help develop the Standard Model of physics.
We didn't need Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar to work out the the physics of how stars develop.
All hail the white privilege. Whiteys educating whiteys so they can stay smarter. Ahead of the game. Yay!
We're not human. We're races. We should care only about our race. Other sentient beings be dammed.
What this really represents is yet another way to attack education, especially public education. If you've actually been a teacher, then you should know that the most important thing about the best students is to avoid holding them back. Thiel is just exploiting this reality to make public education look bad: "See you don't need an education so the government should stop taxing rich people like me to educate you bums."
The people Thiel is picking for this program would have been extremely successful even if they had gotten more of that traditional education. However, if you take the very best and brightest with the highest motivation, and then you make sure they have the resources to learn whatever they need for their work, they are almost certain to succeed. In this case, I'm sure the house (Thiel) is even rigging the game, pumping in extra money and guidance to make sure there aren't any failures because the REAL point is to make education look like the failure.
This is just an extension of the dismembering of public education that has been going on for many decades. The best students are streamed into elite schools and most of the students are given obedience training to make them docile wage slaves, easily handled prison inmates, and obedient consumers who will buy the right soap and vote for the right political candidates, just the way the ads tell them to behave.
Worked pretty much exactly as they wanted it to and now it's time to harvest the whirlwind. Most American workers can't compete, and it's only going to get worse going forward. Much worse.
But the richest 0.1% will do better than ever. Government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% shall rule the earth?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Does any one experience 12 days of Crismas? When is the beginng and when is the end day?
Sure, to make a large amount of money, you do not need a real education. Just have a talent to rip-off people.
In order to qualify as "genius" in modern times and be able to actually contribute to society, as opposed destroying wealth (as so many of those that amassed personal riches routinely do), a PhD in your chosen field is about the minimum. Without that, you will never get deep enough into a subject to really understand it and to really understand the difference it makes to really understand it.
Methinks this thing is about as valid as "Trump University".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This makes it sound like he's /producing/ geniouses, but isn't it more like /collecting/ them? Might still be valuable to them, but if he wants to come off as someone who's /producing/ something, let me know when he's putting a random sample through the 'factory' and the output is still genius.
She didn't lose, she won the democractic vote. More people chose her. And that was despite Russia trying to get Trump elected.
There are always traitors to their country like Peter Thiel and Paul Manafort. Manafort in particular has worked on putting in several of Putins puppets around the world. Trump is only his latest.
CIA just *confirmed* Russian hackers attacked BOTH DNC and GOP. They only released a bit of sexed up propaganda for the DNC. This is troubling because it means that Putin *both* manipulated the USA election *AND* he has leverage against elected GOP.
http://gizmodo.com/cia-report-concludes-that-russia-tried-to-help-the-trum-1789957086
"CIA Report Concludes That Russia Tried to Help Trump Win"
"Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances."
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
Colleges today are far-left ideological indoctrination centers and serve one purpose alone.....
https://youtu.be/9IEFD_JVYd0
"It’s about creating a home here!©"
So there are more entrepreneurs, creating more IOT gizmos and more Googles and more plastic that ends up in landfills, pushing us faster towards the Singularity. Is that being a successful person? A successful society? I didn't go to college and grad school to get a job or create a network: I went to become educated. I learned things that I could not have learned on my own because formal education provides rigor and a support structure that forces you to continue through it. Today, at 60, my biggest regret is that I did not finish my PhD and I am thinking about going back to school to study what I love - physics. Besides family, knowledge is all that has meaning to me at this point.
Then it will become the same as Yale or Harvard, and those able to promote their kids there (private tutoring for example) will pay more to get their kid enrolled. And having this place on your resume will become just as desirable and garner you unearned respect and position as a Harvard degree.
Stop collecting kids. Don't let enrollment become a priori proof of excellence. Go out there and promote the geniuses. Be their advocate. Don't be their new Yale.
...tells me everything I need to know about Thiel and the people selected for this group.
Thiel set out to disrupt the existing educational institutions. He suggested he could do a better job at training a small cohort of gifted individuals, and that once free of the shackles of a conformist degree-making institution, these fellows would be capable of jumpstarting human progress.
So, you know influencers - Big Fucking Deal - I want people who know how to do things, and get them done on schedule, on budget, and done right. I don't give a shit if you know how to get to know other people who also only know how to get to know other people.
Furthermore, I consider it essential that when I make a reference to a major historical event, piece of art, literature, music, you understand why that reference applies to our current conversation. I also consider it essential that your education allows you to draw upon a variety of knowledge in order to make good decisions. And you simply will not get that education by working 18 hours a day on whizz-bang.bullshit-me-to-death.com, because all the buzzwords in the world don't contribute at all to the benefit of society.
My company does not exist solely to make me rich, it exists to allow me to explore ideas which can be turned into real physical products which actually help people in some way, usually labor saving, sometimes life saving (or enhancing), but never parasitic. Because *anyone* can be a parasite, and pretend to "manage influencer relationships", whatever the hell that means.
Thiel's personal heavy petting zoo?
Is alive and well.
so anything PT does is suspect
Trump is the end of our country; PT is an accomplice and anyone who works for or endorses him is a co conspirator
from paul krugman twitter feed
Clinton lost 4 states (FL, MI, WI, PA) by ~1 point. If not for Comey/Russia, she probably wins them all by ~2 points & strategy looks great.
So at end of close election, FBI deeply hurt HRC based on no (literally no) evidence, while CIA sat on clear evidence of Putin interference for Trump.
Things Republicans trumpet but don't actually believe in: 1. Honest government 2. Fiscal responsibility 3. Free markets 4. Patriotism
Should rename it that - works on so many levels...
So these geniuses are pushing the forefront of technology by writing digital marketing apps, food delivery apps, etc. So sick of this shit and the crap coming out of SV. Call me when you have developed a positronic brain, or some REAL development in computer science. The crash can't come fast enough.
Harvard will pay you're way 100% if you're an actual genius. Hell, most schools will. You'll be rocking a 1600 SAT and can write your own ticket. The folks who need help are the average students. But they're not who Thiel is after. He wants folks who can power his High Frequency Trading and AI/Automation investments. The wave of the future is skimming off the top and/or getting rid of those pesky employees and their meddling wages & benefits. You need geniuses for that because it _hard_.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Does Theil madturbate to pictures of Trump?
It's funny the next Slashdot story is on Pogue complaining about breaking the space bar page-at-a-time scrolling convention by littering the frame with advanced wanker-bling web design (seriously, who ordered all this poptastic page cruft in the first place?)
So check out backchannel.com.
backchannel.com is formatting pull quotes as img objects, and the text of the article title is also an img object, impervious to search, much less cut and paste.
Never assume malice where stupidity is an adequate explanation is drawing a full on &imgsp; blank here.
Check out the HTML snippet for the page title element. Is this the modern face of stupidity? Or something else?
cult cult cult
What this "academy" produces are one-sided useful idiots like Zuckerberg whose lack of exposure to the humanities and critical thinking makes them putty in the hands of manipulative ideologues like Peter Thiel.
He set out to disrupt the existing educational institutions by paying kids to not go to college. And it failed miserably.
So now he's just cherry-picking kids who did that on their own and were already successful at it.
And the rich get richer.
So more of a warehouse than a factory?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> The "Russian hackers", of which we have yet to see anything resembling evidence, were not the problem.
WHAT? We have lots of evidence!
I mean, the Washington Post told us that anonymous government sources told them the Russians did it. And there was that statement by the Coast Guard and all those other agencies that said the hacking was totally something Russia might possibly like to do. Also, we have Wikileaks! The completely bogus phishing email that bit.ly seemed to think Podesta clicked on to reset his Google password claimed there were hackers from the UKRAINE trying to get in. That's basically the same as Russia. And it would take their elite hacking skills to find his public Gmail account and send him a bogus Google login form.
And why would the government ever lie over something like this that could cause a war? Do we really think they'd once again lie to us, like they did about the WMD's and yellowcake uranium to send us to war in Iraq? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't fool me no more.
Sounds to me that you don't know what you want. You say it's an attack on public education, then go on to indict it - correctly I might add. You also don't like what he's doing - skimming the cream off the top.
Let's start at the beginning, schools in America were started by religious orders, such as the Catholics to teach people how to read the bible. They moved on of course to teach a lot more. Then the government got involved and made public schools. They were very successful and they had a LOT of religion, patriotism, good old American values. I can show you high school year books from my parents from the 1930s and 1940s. Today they'd make a liberal pass out in rage. I know, I've shown it to an almost liberal and they had a fit.
So what's the problem if we dismantle the very broken public education system? For those of us that pay taxes, look at how your property/county taxes are spent. I bet they're around 50% or more are spent on the county's public schools. They are also chock full of waste, because they don't care. There is no boss, it's the county government. There is no reason to do better or even save money. I used to do the budget for a county government and it was hard to do because of all the BS. BS that everyone can see, if they look. Waste put into place by a large extent by public unions. Hold hostage the kids. Want to cut something? Cut police, fire or education. Never cut the waste. That's never on the chopping block.
We *COULD* have a first rate education system. Not the way it is in place now. Here's a thought, fire all the janitors. In Japan they don't have ANY janitors. The kids do all the cleaning. Something they all take home. Over here, we have plenty of people that live in trash. We can go on from there.
http://healthlivingyoga.com/13005/food-items-and-exercises-to-reduce-pot-belly-considerably/