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I somewhat disagree. High IQ people are not the only ones who can do these jobs and there is a value in cultural production, preservation and appreciation.
There is a benefit of a shared culture and that requires more than just highest IQ people to sustain it. While some subjects can be more niche and others need to be removed entirely.
What is necessary is to purge far leftists, those who side with foreign ethnic identity while are deconstructing and are hostile to their own. So the field must be reformed. I am not against cutting it down though, so you have a smaller but more efficient at transmitting positive culture. Or exchanging academia for hobbyists who then would be more funded. Someone like the Culture Critic on twitter is reaching a lot of people. Things outside of academia such as having more neoclassical styles over more minimalist and ugly architecture, or more films that touch on themes can be part of the change.
It is fundamentally important to promote the passing the torch idea and show people a connection through their roots, and to create a common continuous culture that appreciates that they stand on the shoulders of giants and want to continue on that legacy.
A common culture that appreciates this isn't just the result of academia and so there might be areas that we can get more bang for our buck for normies while also retaining the humanities but in a more lean form, while more focused on what is good and important and with less of the negative.
This requires people writing books on history, and appreciating it. Same for great works of literature. It doesn't require certain niche stupid obsessions and certainly if we get rid feminist, marxist lenses academia, ethnic minorities and women studies, nothing of value will be lost.
Regarding Egyptology, Chinese civilization studies, even Russian studies, etc, etc, some fields can be legitimate but makes sense for them to be niche. Appreciating foreign history cannot be too subsidized but can exist in a limited degree as part of legitimate study. It isn't healthy for them to be too mainstream of an obsession, but also not necessarily a bad thing for people who retain objectivity to have such understanding and interest. But certain subjects that are pushed as a X group studies are just part of subversive foreign nationalism, and meant to instil self hatred and guilt and grievances and hatred on the intersectional alliance member groups and fit too much within progressive activism ideology and so they are much more destructive. They also have been pushed too much with the attempt to make them a mainstream obsession that parasitizes over healthier issues.
This divide and conquer education at expense of your own civilization is a net negative and I would rather to just reject that than throw away the humanities concept. Education became much more far left leaning, and much more for retaining self hating guilt complexes due to a march on institutions of ideologues who had this agenda and it can change again to promote healthy values.
I think there is certainly a value in appreciation. I’m rather a fan of history, philosophy and similar subjects. Where I think the reformation must come is in decoupling it from the protected and tenured oligarchs of college professors in university. I’m thinking of a much more open model where instead of people going to university to pay $100K to have guided programs of reading literature and history and philosophy, you simply make such material available online. The uselessness of the diplomas is in fact a good reason for moving to guided self study for those interested. You don’t need much to read literature. You need books time, and on occasion study aides all of which can be made available for cheap if not free. Once there’s no institutional value and the material is cheap/free there’s not much reason to keep the initial institutions captured. Nobody would be going to 4-year university for history or literature.
It is. People still go to four year universities all the time.
By why do the university part for 100K a year? I can buy the works of Shakespeare for $50 or less. And unless you actually need the credentials, paying a house mortgage for a piece of paper that says you’re a Shakespeare expert is pretty prohibitive for most people.
A lot of people don't understand what they read or how to apply it until they have had a conversation with others about it. Hence the usefulness of book clubs.
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I don't know why people do this. But lots of people take on a mortgage to get a piece of paper saying they studied when the resources for autodidacticism are readily available.
I’ll be honest that colleges have done an excellent job of conflating the ideas of education and credentials to the point where a sizable percentage of Americans believe that you cannot possibly have learned anything about a subject unless you’ve done so in a university and received a course credit if not a diploma from a university. It’s a brain bug that most people have been trained to believe that keeps them willing to spend big money to make their learning count even if the return on the investment isn’t there.
I think that this is starting to change as the prospects for those students is known to be less than people who study more job-skills oriented degree programs. The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”. It’s probably going to change a lot more as competition for good office jobs gets fiercer and thus the need to get a useful degree becomes paramount, the idea that you can’t hobby-study these interesting but not very useful things on your own will fall away. It’s hard to remain a snob about having a diploma on your wall when you have a job that doesn’t require any college and owe your college $100K in principle and interest and cannot ever see yourself being financially successful
This isn't new. Us Millenials had "What do you say to an English graduate with a job?"Big Mac and a large fries, please and "Barista of Arts"
Sorry, Gen X said the same thing about English majors.
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“Underwater Basket Weaving” as a pejorative for worthless degrees dates back to 1953.
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Traditionally, a diploma functions as proof that a reasonable person has assessed what you've learned about a subject and confirmed you actually understand it. A lot of autodidacts think that they know more about the subject than they do; you need someone to push you in uncomfortable directions and point out the flaws in your understanding.
Obviously, universities are increasingly bad at this, but it's still necessary.
It's one of these things repeated uncritically, like how it used to be common wisdom in the anglosphere that raising a kid bilingual somehow confuses them. Literally, where are you getting this from?
The autodidacts that I've known, as well as those online such as Yudowsky. Just because it's a stereotype deployed by the woke to hold onto power doesn't mean it's not true. On-the-job training is different, you don't need universities specifically, but for most people you do need somebody else involved in your study for you to bounce off. Have you ever had that experience of confidently describing something to someone, and then they ask a question and you grind to a complete halt because you've never considered it before? I certainly have. Likewise I have a friend who is a well-known jazz player and he told me that you can learn to play the instrument by yourself but you'll never get good unless you play with others to force you out of your comfort zone.
The same is true of self-professed skeptics in my experience. Skepticism is good, but my experience somebody who tells you they're a skeptic is likely to be incredibly uncritical of whatever counter-orthodox ideas they've picked up. Again, it's a stereotype that's often cynically deployed to support orthodoxy, but as with race, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
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If you can self-study to the same level then definitely do it! It takes a lot of self-motivation though. Humans are social creatures and being around other students and professors is the typical way to become invested and excited about your ideas as they'll have more purchase with those around you. The internet and new remote learning models could maybe compensate for some of this but not all.
Then, obviously, the career value of a degree, any degree.
I mean it depends on the goals, but finding or creating a reading group for a bunch of relevant books or on a given topic could probably, given appropriate study materials do at least as well as the median introductory courses are n that subject with the added bonus that unlike the students in most introductory courses, the group using a study guide and meeting to discuss the book are quite likely to have read the material in question. In most of the same courses at university, most students don’t care enough to actually read the text and quite often barely bothered to read the study notes of the text. Most only care in the sense that they want to figure out how to get a decent grade from the course while doing as little work as possible.
And unless you’re going to try to make a career of that subject, it’s probably much better as far as utility goes as instead of spending $100K on a lit degree you can spend the time and money learning career-based skills that allow you to pay off the loans. I don’t think “a degree, any degree” advice really holds anymore. It might have been true in 1970 when going to college was pretty rare and thus “BS in X” was rare enough on a resume to make you stand out. By 2024, college has become the default, and thus “degree in X” is almost expected. In fact, outside of the skilled trades, almost anyone hiring for a liveable wage job expects you to have college, and preferably something that at least signals a practical minded person. At least by getting a skill-based degree and learning about literature or history on your own, you’ll be able to get as good a job as your talents allow rather than having to try to explain to the interviewer how your four years of reading French literature makes you a good fit for the hard nosed number crunching corporate job you’re applying for.
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