Darrell Silver!

thegongshow:

An entrepreneur once told me a story of the evolution of Advanced Chess, and it’s been rattling around in my head for awhile now.

Advanced Chess is a form of Chess where each player is allowed to use all possible resources at his/her disposal to make a move. One can use computer AI or ask friends for help. Anything goes.

The Grandmasters use Advanced Chess to help expand their minds in play. It allows them to get a different perspective on their typical Chess instincts. It’s useful in training. There are international Advanced Chess competitions.

In the beginning of Advanced Chess (I believe in the 90s), A single Grandmaster could beat a lesser opponent even if the opponent was leveraging Computer AI as a crutch. A single human could rule.

Post-Deep-Blue, Grandmasters could be beaten in Advanced Chess if their opponent had amazing Computer AI at their disposal. It was the rise of the machines. So the new unbeatable combination became a Grandmaster that leveraged Computer AI well.

But in the middle of the last decade a new winning combination emerged: a combination of Human Computation and Computer AI. The best Advanced Chess algorithms now start with a Computer AI recommended list of moves and then a crowd of expert humans vote on the best move. The combination of a crowd plus excellent AI can best a single Grandmaster plus AI.

I love this story. It’s another example of how Soylant Green (“It’s made of humans”) algorithms are taking over the world. I look for this characteristic in every startup I talk to. I consider it a special subset of a Network Effect.

Algos + humans are the future of consumer web services. Great enterprise software has been this way for years, and it’s finally coming to consumers because we’ve figured out how to get the prices down.

Steve Blank during his SXSW talk, as relayed by J.J. Colao of Forbes (via ParisLemon).

Even talented, hardworking CEOs and founders can get caught up in the hype. Why? Blank lists seven reasons:

1. Ego

2. Ego

3. Ego

4. Vanity metrics

5. Attract talent

6. Get funding

7. Drive customer demand

If CEOs get caught up in doing press for reasons other than the last three, he says, their companies are doomed.

Very true. Even worse: press is a hack that can temporarily drive customer demand. It is not a stable acquisition channel.

When we talk about the efficacy of college the only accreditation worth measuring is getting a job. There needs to be a lot of room in college for self-exploration, but thankfully all that work doesn’t appear on students’ transcripts. An op-ed in yesterday’s NYTimes tears into the declining grading standards across higher education, but mostly picks the wrong target. Kevin Carey writes,

The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system. Grade inflation, even (or especially) at the most elite institutions, is rampant.

It’s true: colleges self-rank. But that’s not the real issue. Colleges grading themselves is problematic not because there’s some sort of missing regulator of college grades. Rather, it’s because the grades themselves have become less valuable after college. For employers, far more important than grades is who’s issuing them. College life is filled with partying largely because the biggest achievement of a college student is getting accepted in the first place. For the more adventurous and fast-learning students, this realization helps explain (along with cost) why dropping out is becoming fashionable. The one place where grades are still paramount is students who need them for graduate school admissions. In other words, university grades still matter to universities.

Employers of new grads care about three things: which college you went to (pedigree), how much drive you’ll have on the job (grit), and whether you can perform on day one (training). The economics of a shrunken economy aside, employers hire from the best schools they can find, and that’s not really changing.

For degrees that lead students into employment (of which there should be more), there’s really only one measure of a successful education: getting a job.