The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [131]
According to Sean, the decreasing returns to sticking with the establishment in your education, and the increasing returns to choosing the road not taken, stem from the Internet. “When these incredible tools of knowledge and learning are available to the whole world, formal education becomes less and less important. We should expect to see the emergence of a new kind of autodidact/ thinker/entrepreneur/businessperson/leader who has acquired most of their knowledge through self-exploration. Because for the first time in human history, all of the world’s knowledge is available at their fingertips. Perhaps more than anything the Internet has given us, this is the most significant discontinuity event.
“My career unfolded along the leading edge of this transformation, so in a sense I was too early to reap all the benefits. But there’s a generation of kids coming, who have grown up with Wikipedia, who have grown up with a notion that they’re not just a consumer of media, but a participant. They therefore have a deeper and more ingrained skepticism of the media, and therefore have a better capability to distinguish truth from fiction, authority from charlatan. This capability for meta-analysis of information is essential as they wade through the vast sea of information. For the first time in history they have all the world’s information at their disposal, accessible from anywhere they want. The result is that this emerging generation no longer has reality dictated to them—they are finally empowered to construct their own unique, and possibly idiosyncratic, perspective on the world, if they so choose.
“Any high school student in the world can get online and dig deeply into anything that interests them. What’s changed is that the information is linked in a hypertext manner, so they don’t need to learn things linearly. The traditional method of instruction is to create some linear progression of information that can be put into a textbook and can be read one page after another, starting with things that are thought to be foundational, and moving onward. When in fact all human knowledge is massively interconnected in complicated ways and isn’t structured linearly at all. That linear structure is something that is necessitated by the medium of a book and the chronological experience of life in a classroom. The potential exists now, with all of this information linked together now in totally arbitrary ways, to follow your own path through that information.
“I think we’ll start to realize that the real enemy, in terms of human progress, is social conventionality, in the general sense, and not just via institutionalization and bureaucracy. I think we’ll look back at institutionalization and bureaucracy as a problem and artifact of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and we’ll start to more clearly see that that was a special case, of this more general case, which has been a part of human history since the beginning: conformity, or a lack of individualism. Bureaucracy and institutionalization are just expressions of that deeper current throughout history.”
Sean Parker graduated high school in 1998—and did not move on to college—just at the outset of this “dislocation event” he describes. He was at the crest of the wave. To get a sense of how thoroughly this wave has transformed the way cutting-edge young people are thinking about education now, we can turn to the story of a young man named Max Marmer.
Max entered Stanford as a freshman in the fall of 2010, but he soon felt out of place. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted my future to be, how can I make a big impact, and what would be my best, most direct route to doing that. Many of my peers had given very little thought to all of that.”
During the time he was deciding to leave Stanford, multiple friends and mentors began forwarding to Max a link to Peter Thiel’s announcement of the Thiel Fellowship that fall. Thiel’s encouragement