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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

(cs.stanford.edu)
674 points peterkshultz | 1 comments | 19 Oct 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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neilv ◴[19 Oct 25 21:14 UTC] No.45638049[source]▶
Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me:

> Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little.

Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage.

ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world."

> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.*

Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that.

You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.

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Cpoll ◴[19 Oct 25 21:20 UTC] No.45638095[source]▶
> sociopath career

If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.

I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).

Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.

> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.

He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.

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1. neilv ◴[19 Oct 25 23:46 UTC] No.45639021[source]▶
Not sociopaths, but sociopathic careers, as a term of condemnation.

And a lot of people light up the BS detector like they wouldn't believe.

Loosely put, the majority of them fit the stereotype who think that everyone is ruthlessly self-interested, but they don't think of it as ruthless, and they think of themselves and the others as (in Bay Area stereotype, for example) nice and cheerful and progressive. Their vague awareness not to be crass about it, according to the social conventions they've gotten in their peer groups thus far, is insufficient to hide it.

But others of them think they are "the alpha", and believe themselves to be more aggressive than others, and more meritorious. Yet, of the ones I've noticed (and this might be why I noticed them), they're not as smart as they think they are, when they try to manipulate, and don't know how to fake being someone they aren't. They instead lean on family money and connections, alliances with power structures, gaming, underhandedness, aggressiveness, etc.

Though I knew one very smart and very charismatic ruthless person, who was smart enough to avoid the tells, so I know they exist. One way of describing it is that they could play parts of different personalities, thinking of things the personality would think of, as needed for different audiences. Once they started tipping their hand, it was too late to stop them, and society is significantly worse for it. I speculate that these people are a very small minority, because I think otherwise they would have taken over more positions of power. Yet we can see that many powerful tech companies are headed by people who obviously do not have these qualities of brains, charisma, and empathy. Maybe the non-ruthless ones become great writers, actors, and teachers instead.