The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.

I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.

Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.

Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.

You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.

If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.

How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.

replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but...

can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...

Capitalism: > an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

Any semblance of capitalism we have is a shambling corpse barely getting around. Do you know who pulls on all the strings of our economy, gives out student aid loans to kids who just barely graduates high school? Who controls market interest rates, and gives massive multi billion dollar contracts to Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Who approved of the printing of the 50% increase in the dollar supply in the last 5 years?

Take a guess. I'll give you a hint, if you don't pay them on a yearly basis 30-50% of your paycheck, you go to prison.

While I think there are a lot of problems created by capitalism right now, I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all. These are companies that are surviving despite absolutely bleeding cash because the ultra-rich have decided that things would be so much more convenient for them if they didn't need to deal with employees anymore. This isn't "well, people are doing this because it's profitable". They're doing it DESPITE it being WILDLY unprofitable, mostly based on a weirdly religious faith that it's just going to work out because they really really want it to.

Recently I saw Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) on one of those market shows (CNBC I think? Something like that) and he was upset at Dario's doom trolling. Why was he upset? Because he was worried that the populist rage towards AI was going to result in a wealth tax! And the thing is he's probably right! The thing these people fear the most, socialism, is the thing they're ironically probably going to make popular in the united states by absolutely trying to bleed the population dry.