Paul Grahamのサイトで最新のエッセーが公開されました。“The Power of the Marginal”です。

　しばしば挑発的(provocative)と表されるPaulのエッセーですが、今回もまた非常にprovocativeで、かつinterestingなものになっているように思います…と言っても、まだ2/3程度しか読んでいないのですが。

　Testのセクションでは、文系と理系の学問の評価基準について触れられていて、「なるほど」と感心してしまいました。特にこのあたりです:

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders. If you’re an amateur mathematician and think you’ve solved a famous open problem, better go back and check. When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat’s last theorem and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source of tips– more like manning a mental health hotline. Whereas if the stuff you’re writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that’s not necessarily a problem.