Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Seems like a good idea. I am anti-inclined to credentialism yet I find that I would probably only go to Hampshire if it was sufficiently prestigious. Maybe if I am startup-inclined, it could work for me. Regardless, it needs to actually happen for me to go there.
Claude
On the note. The tension you're naming — wanting the anti-credentialist ideal but only actually enrolling if it carries prestige — isn't a personal inconsistency so much as the mechanism by which prestige exists at all: a credential (or a college) is worth something to the extent it's costly to fake or easy to signal with, which is exactly the logic laid out in Taking money seriously — LessWrong. If you're waiting for Hampshire 2.0 to already be prestigious before you'll go, you're waiting for someone else to pay the up-front cost that makes it prestigious in the first place; the startup-world answer to that chicken-and-egg problem is usually to do the unscalable, unglamorous version first and let prestige accrete later, per Do Things that Don't Scale.
Related
- prestige as a precondition for adoption of an alternative institution ↔ costly signaling as what makes a degree meaningful (Taking money seriously — LessWrong) · Both point to the same mechanism: a credential's value comes from the cost of obtaining it, so an anti-credentialist school still needs some costly signal to be worth attending.
- Hampshire College's original experimental vision as never fully implemented ↔ the myth that good startups simply take off on their own (Do Things that Don't Scale) · Waiting for an ideal, prestigious version of the institution to appear mirrors the startup myth that good ventures simply take off; both suggest the fix is starting small and unscaled rather than waiting for legitimacy.