Open Education Serves Its Own Milieu
Note: This is very tech-centric, partially due to tech being more or less the only industry that really embraces open-education, but mostly due to it being the industry I’m familiar with. That said, I’m quite certain it’ll be similar for pretty much any other field.There’s a certain milieu that leads to the “young 20-something PhD equivalents who have already started and sold multiple companies” that silicon valley VCs fall head-over-heels for. It’s characterized by the presence and encourage...
Open Education Serves Its Own Milieu
Note: This is very tech-centric, partially due to tech being more or less the only industry that really embraces open-education, but mostly due to it being the industry I’m familiar with. That said, I’m quite certain it’ll be similar for pretty much any other field.There’s a certain milieu that leads to the “young 20-something PhD equivalents who have already started and sold multiple companies” that silicon valley VCs fall head-over-heels for. It’s characterized by the presence and encourage...
Epistemic Inequality
Five years ago, I graduated from my public high school in rural Pennsylvania where there wasn’t much of anything except for trees. And when I went to college that fall, I found myself surrounded by people who went to high schools with full-fledged software engineering departments, extracurriculars that sent satellites into space, group theory and quantum physics courses, intricate knowledge of how the American university system works, and more. And that pissed me off. But it’s not because I d...
Epistemic Inequality
Five years ago, I graduated from my public high school in rural Pennsylvania where there wasn’t much of anything except for trees. And when I went to college that fall, I found myself surrounded by people who went to high schools with full-fledged software engineering departments, extracurriculars that sent satellites into space, group theory and quantum physics courses, intricate knowledge of how the American university system works, and more. And that pissed me off. But it’s not because I d...
Shoulder to Shoulder with Dragons
Note: I wrote this somewhere else in May 2021, and I just got around to posting it here. No matter who you are, in your life, there's always someone who's plainly better than you. No matter how hard you try, no matter how deliberately you plan, they're just smarter, faster, better, stronger. Whatever it is you do, they've been doing it longer - they grew up surrounded by exactly what they needed to excel at it. Their biological hardware is just better for it in every singl...
Shoulder to Shoulder with Dragons
Note: I wrote this somewhere else in May 2021, and I just got around to posting it here. No matter who you are, in your life, there's always someone who's plainly better than you. No matter how hard you try, no matter how deliberately you plan, they're just smarter, faster, better, stronger. Whatever it is you do, they've been doing it longer - they grew up surrounded by exactly what they needed to excel at it. Their biological hardware is just better for it in every singl...
Why We Still Don’t Have a Good Alternative to Universities
Note: I wrote this in September 2021 somewhere else and I just got around to posting it here. Remember 10 years ago when everyone was saying that MOOCs would massively disrupt higher education? They obviously haven’t - why? They provide access to lectures and homework from “top tier” universities to anybody with an internet connection, no matter where they live. Many of them provide it for free, but the ones that don’t are vastly cheaper than the ~$5-10K price tag you’d have to pay for a sing...
Why We Still Don’t Have a Good Alternative to Universities
Note: I wrote this in September 2021 somewhere else and I just got around to posting it here. Remember 10 years ago when everyone was saying that MOOCs would massively disrupt higher education? They obviously haven’t - why? They provide access to lectures and homework from “top tier” universities to anybody with an internet connection, no matter where they live. Many of them provide it for free, but the ones that don’t are vastly cheaper than the ~$5-10K price tag you’d have to pay for a sing...
The Web3 Infra Paradox
There’s a somewhat unsettling pattern I started to notice in the space about a year ago. Over the past few months I’ve seen it play out more and more, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s brought it up. But I haven’t seen any good articles about it, I decided I’d share my thought on the matter. Web3 infrastructure has a problem. Many networks have launched offering a decentralized market for a previously centralized service. Examples include L1s like Ethereum, L2s like Polygon and, and inf...
The Web3 Infra Paradox
There’s a somewhat unsettling pattern I started to notice in the space about a year ago. Over the past few months I’ve seen it play out more and more, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s brought it up. But I haven’t seen any good articles about it, I decided I’d share my thought on the matter. Web3 infrastructure has a problem. Many networks have launched offering a decentralized market for a previously centralized service. Examples include L1s like Ethereum, L2s like Polygon and, and inf...
