Technologos comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 02 November 2009 01:18AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 November 2009 10:34:39AM 5 points [-]

So, I'm having one of those I-don't-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I'm in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it's not worth my time.

As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time--though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.

As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length of a normal class and officially two classes. It was about ancient Greece and Rome, and we had to read things like Works and Days and the Iliad. Afterwards, we were supposed to write a paper about depictions of society in the two works or something. I never wrote the paper, and I dropped the class.

Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?

Comment author: Technologos 02 November 2009 07:35:52PM 6 points [-]

Before I started college, I read this professor's speech, which attempted to explain, given your concerns, why an education may nevertheless be valuable. It's biased towards its audience (UChicago students) but I think its relevant point can be summarized as: few jobs allow you to continue practicing the diversity of skills employed by academic work, and having a degree keeps your options wide open for a longer period. However, the real thesis of the speech is that university is uniquely a place to devote oneself to practicing the Art, broadly construed, of generating knowledge and beauty from everything.

Other considerations:

  • Becoming an academic is very hard without an undergraduate degree, so if you want that life, stick with it.
  • It takes a great deal of luck to pull a Bill Gates. It is otherwise hard to convince people that your reasons for not having a degree are genuine and not ex post.
  • At least in my case, it has been hard to find anywhere near as high a concentration of intelligent and interesting people outside the university as in the one I attended.

Hope something in there helps!

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