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I’ll be honest that colleges have done an excellent job of conflating the ideas of education and credentials to the point where a sizable percentage of Americans believe that you cannot possibly have learned anything about a subject unless you’ve done so in a university and received a course credit if not a diploma from a university. It’s a brain bug that most people have been trained to believe that keeps them willing to spend big money to make their learning count even if the return on the investment isn’t there.
I think that this is starting to change as the prospects for those students is known to be less than people who study more job-skills oriented degree programs. The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”. It’s probably going to change a lot more as competition for good office jobs gets fiercer and thus the need to get a useful degree becomes paramount, the idea that you can’t hobby-study these interesting but not very useful things on your own will fall away. It’s hard to remain a snob about having a diploma on your wall when you have a job that doesn’t require any college and owe your college $100K in principle and interest and cannot ever see yourself being financially successful
Traditionally, a diploma functions as proof that a reasonable person has assessed what you've learned about a subject and confirmed you actually understand it. A lot of autodidacts think that they know more about the subject than they do; you need someone to push you in uncomfortable directions and point out the flaws in your understanding.
Obviously, universities are increasingly bad at this, but it's still necessary.
It's one of these things repeated uncritically, like how it used to be common wisdom in the anglosphere that raising a kid bilingual somehow confuses them. Literally, where are you getting this from?
The autodidacts that I've known, as well as those online such as Yudowsky. Just because it's a stereotype deployed by the woke to hold onto power doesn't mean it's not true. On-the-job training is different, you don't need universities specifically, but for most people you do need somebody else involved in your study for you to bounce off. Have you ever had that experience of confidently describing something to someone, and then they ask a question and you grind to a complete halt because you've never considered it before? I certainly have. Likewise I have a friend who is a well-known jazz player and he told me that you can learn to play the instrument by yourself but you'll never get good unless you play with others to force you out of your comfort zone.
The same is true of self-professed skeptics in my experience. Skepticism is good, but my experience somebody who tells you they're a skeptic is likely to be incredibly uncritical of whatever counter-orthodox ideas they've picked up. Again, it's a stereotype that's often cynically deployed to support orthodoxy, but as with race, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
I'm open to the possibility of it being true, I'll just need something more than a single example of an internet blowhard. In particular I'll need something, anything that shows they tend to be worse than the average / people who attended college, that doesn't boil down to "trust me bro".
That already effectively concedes Maiq's point. Keep in mind what he said was:
None of this implies that he thinks you can get just as good without trying to apply your skill to get a job done, or interacting with others, be it through competition or mentorship.
The question would again be if they're worse than average.
Sure, I was offering my opinion on why people tend to want to see a diploma, I don't expect you or @MaiqTheTrue to fall on your knees and acknowledge that I'm right about everything.
In my opinion, somebody who tells you that they're an expert in X and has no X-related credentials is IMO less likely to know what they're talking about than somebody who has the credentials. There are other relevant signals: significant achievements in X, like making working gizmos using X or having a wife who only speaks X, or being associated with someone who has the reputation for knowing about X, but all else being equal I would be more dubious about auto-didacts than about the conventionally educated. I exclude certain subjects that are so captured and removed from reality that studying them actively makes you less educated (gender studies, etc.) but studying these at home is a bad idea too.
Universities have become bloated providers of unnecessary credentials, I agree. But that doesn't mean that the average person will not get more out of going to a good university than they would out of watching the lectures online. If you're going to tear down Chesterton's Fence, I think it's important to remember what it was put up for.
I think so. The Hive Mind contains multitudes and usually has to come into contact with reality to some degree. I've known too many skeptics who refuses to believe anything unless it's -1 * conventional wisdom and only get angrier and more alienated with time. Regardless of political orientation, the tendency towards purity spirals is very real.
I’ll point out that I’m not totally against career-related credentials. Their main use is in allowing a business to know whether you have relevant knowledge and skills to do the job or offer advice. It’s basically useful as a way to quickly check your abilities. If I have a CS degree from UCSD, you can look at that and know that if you hired me, I will know the things that are in the UCSD CS program. Useful if you are hiring a professional programmer. It’s vetting your knowledge.
But if you’re not looking to be hired or sell your expertise in literature, the expense of getting certified as knowledgeable in literature doesn’t seem to add much here. It’s nothing that I’m looking to make life or death decisions on, it’s a hobby. Art is a hobby, studying literature is a hobby, philosophy for most people is a hobby. I don’t personally see much added value to getting certified an expert in a hobby.
Understood.
Lots of people say things like, "But you don't need stained glass and statues to worship God, we're going to sell all that stuff and give it to the poor," and then it turns out that very few people are inspired by praying in a concrete Brutalist box or at home next to the washing machine.
I'm a smells-and-bells man by nature. I think that rituals, milestones and that kind of thing are important. They inspire us and draw us on. In an ideal world, going away to learn about literature, to spend time with other people learning about literature, under the tutelage of somebody wise who knows a lot about literature, to finally face a tough-but-not-insurmountable challenge and then be able to call yourself "a doctor/master/teacher of literature" has value that cannot be captured by reading at home, however diligently.
Where we went wrong was in allowing that ritual and that earned credential to become coinage for a career. A degree ended up being proof that you were a thinking, diligent person, and like all metrics it became a target. The difficulty was reduced, to stop people ruining their careers by getting low grades; there weren't enough good teachers, etc.
I’m not objecting if you A) have the means and time, and B) don’t need a credential to get a good paying job. But I think the number of people who would meet those criteria are pretty small, especially those who would at the same time want or need the kind of bragging rights that having a degree would provide are small. People spend thousands traveling as well, it’s just that this isn’t generally seen as the best option for everyone.
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