How important is university and/or college?

[enchanted]

How important was college/university to your intellectual or personal development? Do you think you could have achieved the same level of without it? 

Leo always bashes academia (for obvious reasons) but considering it is something he attended, is it something that can be avoided or should one attend post secondary education? 

[LordFall]

I never went. I'm going of going back Q1-2027 because I have a fund that will pay me to go. Otherwise I wouldn't bother, anything that can be learned in a class can be learned outside of it. Campus life can be fun though, universities are often the social core of the towns and cities they're in. 

[Ulax]

Its a fantasy that you can get the level of development outside of university that you can in it.

[YIDIRYIDIR]

1 hour ago, enchanted said:

How important was college/university to your intellectual or personal development? Do you think you could have achieved the same level of without it? 

Leo always bashes academia (for obvious reasons) but considering it is something he attended, is it something that can be avoided or should one attend post secondary education? 

Very important to me personally, i went to engineering school for 2 years and architecture school for 3 (university in Morocco is free, suck it usa people), and the amount of things i learned is huge. problem solving, different types of creativity, hard work, history, the market, art, critical thinking,, soft skills, character development, technical skills....and more. why i quit because it was a stepping stone in my development and discovering my life purpose. 

But most importantly, it amplified my pattern recognition and big picture understanding.

Edited 5 hours ago by YIDIRYIDIR

[LordFall]

39 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Its a fantasy that you can get the level of development outside of university that you can in it.

What aspect of development do you think university gatekeeps precisely? I think the critical thinking that comes from writing a thesis is cool but that's hardly reserved for post-secondary. Plenty of independent journalists are higher quality writers with a bigger audience than most academics will ever have. 

Edited 4 hours ago by LordFall

[Carl-Richard]

It was very important, especially because I valued it for doing exactly that, deepening one's intellectual capacities (meanwhile if you simply go there for e.g. career, then you might not get as much benefit in that direction, although it's unavoidable at some level). Also, the particular degrees I studied touched on so much of Leo's content, it really consolidated those things.

Leo himself has said something to the effect that if you don't go to university you're not taught how to think rationally (so it explains why so many people are irrational).

 

5 hours ago, LordFall said:

anything that can be learned in a class can be learned outside of it.

The thing is, while this is true, college forces you to learn things you otherwise probably wouldn't learn. It forces you to be a kind of a generalist at some level (that's at least what an undergraduate degree does to you), and that gives you a good foundation for understanding things (even if you're limited to just one field, which you usually are, because every field eventually links to "reality" in some way, think of it like a big web of connections spreading outwards).

For example, there are not that many 'degrees of separation' from say understanding what research ethics is (which you have to learn in essentially all degrees to various extents) to what laws are vs what is ethics, what the government does and what are its limits (what other institutions exist, how do they work, how do they link together with the government, who in an institution is responsible for what, etc.).

What I also often notice in people who did not go to college is they lack basic epistemic practices like judging the quality of one's sources of information. Also, simply learning to read and write at a higher level (and to write clearly) is invaluable for learning how to think. And not least, you learn to work consistently towards something, you learn structure, which translates to anything else you will do on your own that requires those things (I would most likely not have started coding a website or started seriously exploring the kind of business ideas I'm currently exploring if I did not go to university).

Edited 55 minutes ago by Carl-Richard

[Ulax]

1 hour ago, LordFall said:

What aspect of development do you think university gatekeeps precisely? I think the critical thinking that comes from writing a thesis is cool but that's hardly reserved for post-secondary. Plenty of independent journalists are higher quality writers with a bigger audience than most academics will ever have. 

One key aspect is feedback loops

[trenton]

I tried finding a path outside of University. I failed. There simply are no feasible options other than going to University. Any job available sucks. There are no realistic business opportunities. The competitions such as chess tournaments cannot be won on the highest level without being born into a privileged position with a stable family that supports your dreams. I believed that hard work would allow me to actualize this dream. Once my family refused to give the necessary support, I lost my sense of direction. I ended up on Actualized.org because I was looking for some alternative life purpose which I never found anyway.

I'm going back to University in January. I plan on picking up a part time job in the meantime to help pay for the loans. I have an associate's degree. I didn't finish partially because I didn't have a clear sense of direction. Furthermore, I had medical complications from depression which disrupted my attempt to finish a Bachelor's degree. I plan on majoring in Sociology and transferring to Germany long term. There is no future with my family. And there is no future without at minimum a Bachelor's degree. Bill Gates predicted this a long time ago.

Now that I am done grieving the death of my dream, I can start building a completely different life in a completely different context, completely unrelated to the family that abused me. I found a pill that works on my OCD, so it helps with the spiraling thoughts. However, I need to build up tolerance because of the side effects. Psychiatric drugs are brutal to me. If I could improve my tolerance somehow, it would be perfect for putting to rest my spiraling thoughts that fixate on the abuse my family did to me. I just can't make it stop without some kind of medical intervention.

Long story short, there is no real option in this economy outside of going to University. Trust me. I tried. It is not worth it.

[Ulax]

24 minutes ago, trenton said:

Long story short, there is no real option in this economy outside of going to University. Trust me. I tried. It is not worth it.

You tried every single option outside of going to university? Very impressive!

[LordFall]

45 minutes ago, Ulax said:

One key aspect is feedback loops

University has very long feedback loops compared to the marketplace and content creation though. I guess your professor grading your assignments every couple weeks is one way but it's also conformist due to being at the mercy of their bias and not being the real marketplace. If you run an ad and you see how much $ it takes for customers to message you, that's a real feedback look that can be ran daily with Meta ads for example.

[Joseph Maynor]

It really gets you in your head which has pros and cons.  

[Ulax]

33 minutes ago, LordFall said:

University has very long feedback loops compared to the marketplace and content creation though. I guess your professor grading your assignments every couple weeks is one way but it's also conformist due to being at the mercy of their bias and not being the real marketplace. If you run an ad and you see how much $ it takes for customers to message you, that's a real feedback look that can be ran daily with Meta ads for example.

Fair point. Regarding business subjects, I'd make an exception.

[Willie]

1 hour ago, trenton said:

I tried finding a path outside of University. I failed. There simply are no feasible options other than going to University. Any job available sucks. There are no realistic business opportunities. The competitions such as chess tournaments cannot be won on the highest level without being born into a privileged position with a stable family that supports your dreams. I believed that hard work would allow me to actualize this dream. Once my family refused to give the necessary support, I lost my sense of direction. I ended up on Actualized.org because I was looking for some alternative life purpose which I never found anyway.

I'm going back to University in January. I plan on picking up a part time job in the meantime to help pay for the loans. I have an associate's degree. I didn't finish partially because I didn't have a clear sense of direction. Furthermore, I had medical complications from depression which disrupted my attempt to finish a Bachelor's degree. I plan on majoring in Sociology and transferring to Germany long term. There is no future with my family. And there is no future without at minimum a Bachelor's degree. Bill Gates predicted this a long time ago.

Now that I am done grieving the death of my dream, I can start building a completely different life in a completely different context, completely unrelated to the family that abused me. I found a pill that works on my OCD, so it helps with the spiraling thoughts. However, I need to build up tolerance because of the side effects. Psychiatric drugs are brutal to me. If I could improve my tolerance somehow, it would be perfect for putting to rest my spiraling thoughts that fixate on the abuse my family did to me. I just can't make it stop without some kind of medical intervention.

Long story short, there is no real option in this economy outside of going to University. Trust me. I tried. It is not worth it.

Sorry to hear, and wishing you the best.

[aurum]

Certainly useful for developing basic STEM competence.

But, I found the best part of university to be all the additional autonomy. That autonomy allowed me to start taking philosophy seriously for the first time.

[LordFall]

14 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Fair point. Regarding business subjects, I'd make an exception.

Right but the whole economy is based on business so it seems like a pretty pivotal thing to get right. It's actually the precise reason a lot of corporate people are gonna lost their jobs in the next 5 years, because they are so far removed from the feedback loop of the real economy. So many people in middle management appear like they are doing stuff but are actually either useless or harmful to the businesses that employ them.

This thread in the off topic section is a great example for the gaming industry but this corporate gloating effect is present in all industries. 

I see universities taking on a new form like 20 years from now they'll probably be free and be more like a community and research hub rather than a mandatory step in most people's lives. Whenever I talk to college student and they tell me about how busy they are with assignments or like midterms I feel like a voluntary slave is complaining to me about their life. If they worked that hard on their own business they would be financially independent by the time they graduated!

Business has way less hand holding and is more stressful, it's not for everyone but I think every university student should try starting one in their gap year before they pay a lot of money to take classes. 

[Joseph Maynor]

I lost some friends when I started going to college and ultimately University.  They saw it as an attempt by me to do something wrong.