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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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18 Dec, 5 tweets, 4 min read
College is a scam, you don’t need it.

- Stanford ‘00, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06
There was a time when a degree was worth it in terms of cost/benefit. That time has passed.

The in-person campus is obsolete technology in 2021. Especially at $80k/year. *Especially* without the SAT filter.

We prove it by hiring non-college grads and building true alternatives.
Good review of growing alternatives to college, several of which provide jobs and/or portfolios in addition to education.

I’ve invested my own capital into many of these, and plan to do more.
jeffburke.substack.com/p/eight-educat…
See also this podcast with @tferriss where we discuss the concept of crypto-credentials and on-chain resumes. @layer3xyz, @rabbithole_gg, and @gregisenberg have done good work in this area. tim.blog/2021/03/24/bal…
I’d love to see a post by @DStrachman and @William_Blake taking a victory lap on the Thiel Fellowship as well.

It was extraordinarily successful, producing @VitalikButerin, @LauraDeming, @zoink, and many more.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
15 Dec
Truth over popularity, always. But popularity is also nice.
Notice what else is in the top 10 list besides [excellent] web3 content from my friends @cdixon, @naval, @katie_haun, and @VitalikButerin?

It's longevity, quantified self, and self-improvement. Transhumanism is what's next.
tim.blog/2021/12/14/the…
Btw, I've thought a lot about the tradeoff between popularity & truth.

Failure mode 1: just become popular
Failure mode 2: just focus on scientific truth
Success mode: discover truths, then popularize them, ideally via a vehicle that makes them undeniable
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
15 Dec
Thoughtful piece by Noah, even if I disagree with some specifics. In particular, I wouldn’t characterize currency competition as financial anarchy. Often it’s financial stability. In the past, dollarization restabilized inflationary economies. Today that may be bitcoinization.
Noah's post is worth reading in conjunction with this excellent thread by @AriDavidPaul on the possible/likely abuses of CBDCs.

I agree with many of the points here too, but there is a third angle...
There have been two theses on central bank digital currencies like the digital yuan.

1) CBDCs boost efficiency
2) CBDCs enable tyranny

Here's a third:

3) Inter-CBDC competition may increase self-sovereignty

All three can happen. Not mutually exclusive.
foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bit…
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
15 Dec
The ability to steal huge amounts of money is not new. In fact, institutions do it all the time.

That's why Bitcoin was invented: so that each person can decide for themself whether to shoulder the risk of a corrupt establishment, or take the responsibility of self-sovereignty.
You now have a choice of who to trust.

You can still keep your funds with a centralized custodian. But now you have a choice: that can be a bank, an exchange, a smart contract, etc.

You can also go fully self-sovereign. Or something in between, like multisig or social recovery.
This is true, but cuts the other way.

The only secure backend services by ~2040 will be on-chain. The reason is that chains get hardened by constant attack, with 24/7 bug bounties included by default. Compare this to current government IT security.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
12 Dec
We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network, and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it.

Such is the nature of great protocol politics.
foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bit…
A summary.

1. Network proximity > geo proximity
2. Defi matrix → currency competition
3. Remote → market for citizens
4. Bits reshape atoms
6. Property → encryption
7. Rule of code
8. Web3 vs inequality
9. Network layers merge
10. Power decentralizes
archive.md/sYwAL
As context, this is a respectful response by me and @paragkhanna to two thoughtful articles by @ianbremmer and @stephenWalt.

You should read them as well for full context. First, here's Bremmer's piece:
archive.md/RIYYm
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
7 Dec
Apple didn't need BlackBerry
Netflix didn't need Blockbuster
Amazon didn't need Barnes & Noble

And we don't need legacy banks or media corporations. Though we do need to replace them!
The basic reason not to interview with them is that doing so legitimates them, endorses them, grants them control — when we need to be decentralizing power away from US media corporations and towards the people of the world with every word and every deed.
One part of it is unplugging from the establishment.

But another part is building something better. Replacing corporate truth with cryptographic truth, and obviating the inherited "paper of record" through the distributed ledger of record.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
5 Dec
Astrology doesn’t work, but machine learning might.

Suppose you are Facebook or LinkedIn. You have a massive database of life histories. So you could probably do a decent forecast of where a 30-year-old with X job in Y city is likely to be in 5 years, using similar profiles.
There’s clearly tremendous demand for personalized forecasting.

Right now that market is mostly served by pseudoscience — but if we can replace the astrological with the logical, we might make progress.
An actionable version:

- here is a summary of all the people with life histories similar to you, but a few years older
- those who did X reported improvement in their lives
- those who did Y did not
- correlation isn’t causation, but can test to see if X has a causal effect
Read 4 tweets

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