Thread by Timothy B. Lee

twitter.com
1 Recommender
1 Mention
Recommend
Post
Save
Complete
Collect
Thread
I think people who predict technology will disrupt seemingly wasteful institutions like higher education, business travel, or cities drastically underrate the importance of serendipity.
One of the most important turning points in my career was hosting a DC poker game in 2004-5 that counted @mattyglesias as a regular guest. I met @ezraklein through Matt and a decade later that helped me get a job at the @washingtonpost and then @voxdotcom.
Obviously at the time I didn't think of this as a career advancement strategy. I had a day job at a think tank and was thinking about going to law school. I was just trying to have fun with friends.
You can think of a university as a way of institutionalizing this kind of serendipity. It's a weird kind of artificial community where everyone (students and faculty) has an unusual amount of free time and is encouraged to do stuff that doesn't have an immediate economic payoff.
Most of the stuff people do proves not to have any longer-term significance. Your Lacrosse games are just Lacrosse games. But sometimes your buddy from the Lacrosse team winds up offering you a job 10 years later.
And this can work in less crass ways too. You go into college planning to study one major, but then you get to talking to your boyfriend's roommate about what he's studying and decide that you want to switch majors and that puts you on the path to being a successful scholar.
If you think of a university as an uncharismatic professor droning on in a big lecture hall to 200 students, it's easy to think you can design a better way to learn stuff.
But a lot of the value comes from students in that lecture hall making friends with one another and telling each other about opportunities elsewhere on campus. The inefficiency is the point. Because you can't predict which people are going to get value from which activities.
This is even more true with industry and academic conferences. Often you learn the most talking to people in the hallways in between the formal presentations. But nobody would fly across the country for a "stand around in a hallway talking to people" event.
Mentions
See All