OTOH there is a saying - just learn where and how to get the information you need.
And it's a big truth in that. It is easier every day to learn something (anything) when you need it.
Knowledge market value could be easily grossly overestimated.
It's easy to learn something when you need it... if the inferential distance is short. Problem is, it often isn't. Second problem, it is easy to find information, but it is more difficult to separate right and wrong information if the person has no background knowledge. Third problem, the usefullness of some things becomes obvious only after a person learns them.
I have seen smart people trying to jump across a large informational gap and fail. For example there are many people who taught themselves programming from internet tutorials and experiments. They ...
...has finally been published.
Contents:
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.