Hasnain says:

I feel like this lesson is glaringly obvious - as the author calls out - but only in hindsight when it’s staring you in the face.

I know there has been a general disdain of tests - and rightly so, as they don’t measure actual learning - but this was eye opening for me to understand the long-term downstream effects this can have on people and society at large.

I should probably reread this weekly. Have already gone through it twice.

Would be curious to see if/how this aligns with general education policy at large. There is some place where this approach will fall apart.

“Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test. That's why the conversation would always start with how to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to be better. It must be the test.”

Posted on 2019-12-09T00:04:59+0000