On Aaron Swartz …

“I’ve hired a lot of very talented programmers, and one of the things I discovered was that the people who didn’t graduate from college couldn’t finish projects,” his father says.

“Because when you go to college, there’s all sorts of stupid stuff you have to do in order to get through.” “He had thousands of pages of notes about different things,” Quinn Norton says.

“Books he was reading, books he was writing, theories he had. He started writing a bunch of different books. One was a novel, there were books on social theory—he didn’t finish any of them.” “He was freed of all the disciplining experiences of life,” Lawrence Lessig says.

“His parents got him out of school early, which was great because it allowed him to become somebody who wasn’t the product of puberty in a public school. But it was bad in the sense that it gave him a confidence about his own judgment, which is dangerous.”