200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated.

So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people.

Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.

Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues)

For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers

For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks

These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends

[Edit: are —> aren't]

I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.

Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.

University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school.

As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :)

We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.

The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable.

[1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...

It's like basic math....

Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties?

I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.

The useful skill is being able to find the information on the Internet if you want to run for governor of Kentucky. If you grow up in Kentucky learning it once in seventh grade is sufficient so you know it's a possibility, but will most likely never matter again after that class.

Without an understanding of math you can only cargo cult problems. You can get away with being lazy with computation with no real issur but only if you understand the underlying theory.

Not that it really proves anything in the larger scope they seemed to imply. At least, not anymore than losing on the old show “are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

Most people know that college education has become dramatically "simplified", but fewer seem aware that this is also true of nearly all of our education systems. And it's all for the same reason. When education was not required nor expected, what education that did exist was able to excel and push a group of people who genuinely wanted to learn in ways that are not really possible today, outside of things like elite preparatory academies.

And I think this lesson is extremely important when beginning to think about how education might be reformed. It's easy to say that secondary (or even primary) education should be more sophisticated, without considering the implications of that on the student body. You can't really have widespread exceptional education standards and the expectation that most people should be able to achieve those standards. This is why reforming education is a far bigger task than the current idea of 'throw more money at it' could ever solve.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

Grammar I could probably have done in eighth grade but I forget some of the terminology.

Areas like history, I'd know a fair bit (as an American) but there's a lot of historical essentially trivia that I wouldn't know though may have known at one time.

Some of the double letters and other things in the spelling I'd probably get wrong. That's what red squiggly underlines when typing are for.

You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.

One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.

One word. Derrida.

ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.

Yet I loathe the words "synergy" and "optics". Gag me with a spoon.

And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days.

What have you read recently?

"Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)

Gleeson seems to be into the suffering for its own sake.

I don't think that jargon is created to confuse or obfuscate, most likely the opposite. My favorite example is in sailing. Every functional part of a sailboat has a name, because precise communication between crew can be critical and saying "pull the rope, no the other one, no the other other one" doesn't help. But telling a non sailer to tighten a jib sheet seems unnecessarily persnickety.

Not to me. I enjoy learning things like that.

I enjoyed watching the "Power" TV series not just for the plot, but for the colorful street jargon. For example: "I'll dime you" means I'll call you on the phone.

What have you read recently from academia?

> You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.

Sometimes things aren't simple.

That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities).

Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.

I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation.

How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either)

I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.

There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.

The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible.

> I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.

Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own.

Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.

College isn't only learning from experts though.

Instruction from experts is a good thing, and that part of college is therefore a good thing. But there are many aspects of college that is directly or indirectly not exactly the same thing as sitting there in front of an instructor.

Things such as paying tuition, socializing, walking around campus, getting classes on being more woke. These aspects add and detract from the central idea of college, which is instruction by experts.

Therefore students have to weigh the total experience and see if it is worth it. The article is saying many of them reckon it is not worth it anymore.

The idea that they represent a single orthodox is a little flawed.

To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different.

As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?

This is true, but in practice few people do it. Most people will not have much time left for study alongside a job. And without the "friction"/motivation college brings, most people will not learn anywhere near as much.

Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)

Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.

I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.

I don't necessarily see communism working over a long period even at that scale though. I think attrition would be too high. The chance of some whacko gaining too much power would be too high. Moral would degrade over time when people were able to compare their own situation with that of their neighbours under other systems.

Honestly, I think we'd be better off making room for small communes and giving them legal protections similar to corporations. Establish some decent laws that allow people to organize and live that way for as long as they want to but also ensure that such systems aren't abused and are held to account when they do wrong. There's a time and place for them in many people's lives but it isn't something we should try to impose on a broad, unwilling populace.

Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.

The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.

The majority of our history classes also frequently got bogged down before we could get to the civil rights movement and really have to go into the dirty little details of what the post-Civil-War US looked like.

Are you in college?

> can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for

Wow. That's pretty wild! Can you back that up somehow? On the Internet, extreme statements somehow have more credibility. In college, more extreme statements require more extreme support for them.

> Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.

What is more important than looking at ourselves in the mirror, and learning everything we can from others? It's not like we are doing so well right now.

It's not an extreme statement, just a brief description of well-known events.

There goal was to build a self-sustaining agrarian society and everyone who even looked like an intellectual, had a university education, had glasses, or some other trappings of Western life was eliminated or sent to concentration camps where they mostly died.

Why? Because the didn't fit the mold of "suffering farmers oppressed under capitalism & imperialism, waiting to be rescued."

Please, this is widely documented and trying to suggest otherwise seems quite disingenuous.

> I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for.

And then you took issue with the description of the Cambodian genocide. Despite the fact that he was agreeing with you. Now you start a whole new argument. I'm not even sure what are you trying to argue about.