To some, it might seem like a strange question. If you think of being college-educated as a marker of class (or personhood), the fact that I don't have a degree at age of thirty-six (!!) probably looks like a scandalous anomaly, which it would be only natural for me to want to remediate at the earliest opportunity.

I deeply resent that entire worldview—not because I've rejected education, properly understood. On the contrary. The study of literature, history, mathematics, science—these things are among the noblest pursuits in life, sources of highest pleasure and deepest meaning. It's precisely because I value education so much that I can't stand to see it conflated with school and its culture of bureaucratic servitude where no one cares what you know and no one cares what you can do; they just want you to sit in a room and obey the commands of the designated teacher. Whereas in reality, knowledge doesn't come from "taking courses."

How could it? Knowledge comes from quality study and practice. Sure, it's possible that someone could study in order to "pass" a "class" that they're "taking" in school. But once you know how and why to study, it's not clear what value the school is adding that can't be gotten better, cheaper, elsewhere. Just get the books. (And start a blog, go to meetups, chat to large language models, hire a private tutor—whatever makes sense to get better at doing the things you want to do, without having to worry about whether the thing that makes sense can be made legible to distant bureaucrats.)

The people who believe in being college-educated probably don't believe me. They probably think my pæans to the glory of self-study are the rationalizations of a lazy student who doesn't want to work hard.

I can understand some reasons for skepticism. Sometimes people really are lazy, and suffer from self-serving delusions. Probably there are some confused people out there who have mistaken consumer edutainment for production scholarship and—maybe, somehow—could benefit from being set straight by the firm tutelage of the standard bureaucratic authority.

But without vouching for everyone who calls themself an autodidact, I think I can present third-party-visible evidence that my self-study is for real? I worked as a software engineer for eight years; I have 173 commits in the Rust compiler; I wrote a chess engine; I've blogged 400,000 words over the past...

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