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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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I honestly think much of society is overeducated. It wasn’t until recent decades you found phrases like “educated idiot” to become more commonly observed in our parlance. In one sense if you make it independently out in the real world you have to become increasingly informed as the world today is a more complex place than it was a thousand years ago. Assembling an iPhone is much more difficult than figuring the basic uses of a garden hoe. Turchin I think was also onto something when he formalized the argument in greater detail.

It wasn’t until recent decades you found phrases like “educated idiot” to become more commonly observed in our parlance.

The older phrase is "learned fool", which you'll find in Shakespeare.

I was never a fan. Shakespeare is homo to me.

Yeah, especially there's a gap between formal education and actual learning or erudition. You can breeze through a university degree these days with very little effort or knowledge acquisition, certainly never learn to think. It was bad before AI but it's gotten way worse now. I think universities should be closing down undergraduate courses en masse, in many places it's basically a scam where they coast on prestige earned by a more learned generation of scholars, conferring fancy pieces of paper on foreign students to fund vast bureaucracies that just make life worse for all involved.

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