Do anons on this board really believe that you can consider yourself to be knowledgeable because you read lots of books? To become genuinely knowledgeable, you need to succeed in academia. You need experts who can mentor you and guide you. The education you get from high school and higher education is always going to be significantly better than anything you can learn from just reading books in your spare time. You cannot read yourself into becoming as educated as someone who as been to Harvard or Oxford. Someone who has been academically successful will always be far more intelligent than any autodidact.
Do anons on this board really believe that you can consider yourself to be knowledgeable because you read lots of books...
Asher Taylor
Adrian Evans
won't say you're entirely wrong but it's really only people outside the academic world (or on its fringes) who imagine this
Austin Phillips
I failed out and I can't afford to go back. Hold me bros.
Adam Brooks
You're conflating knowledge with intelligence. They're unrelated. Additionally, by your logic, if I were to watch enough YouTube videos and do the work, I'd be just as knowledgeable and expert as anyone else, more knowledgeable and intelligent than any autodidact... as long as the YouTube videos come from Harvard. Or are you trying to tell me that the physical feeling of being in those giant symposiums with hundreds of people constitutes the genuine Harvard Mentoring Experience (yes, that'll be $40k per semester plus tip)? Or is it the meetings with the enthusiastic and highly-accomplished TA's wherein lies the value?
Nigger, please. Maybe this kind of talk impresses people who were born in a cornfield, but if you've been around the "elites," and if you know enough people who went on to go to ivy league schools, the institution starts to lose some of its glamor.
Carson Morris
Not in my experience. I excelled in academia but very rarely read in my spare time. Nevertheless I always find myself cringing when someone who reads a lot but never went to university/did poorly in academia thinks they are more intelligent than me. It always shows pretty quickly that they aren't.
Parker Long
If I get a PhD will they teach me not to conflate intelligence with knowledge at the end of my paragraph and thereby undermine my argument?
Lucas Ross
>always find myself cringing when someone who reads a lot but never went to university/did poorly in academia thinks they are more intelligent than me
How do you know they aren't? What's your metric?
Colton Walker
They usually have irrational views, and are more likely to be reactionary. I'm in the UK, and they're more likely to be Brexit voters. Their lack of understanding of the world always come through.
Christopher Taylor
True in theory, often untrue in practice. Many areas of academia have become circlejerks and ideological instruments. For example, humanities and social sciences.
Everything I learned after my first year there was unnecessary, and usually political indoctrination.
Jordan Perry
seen anybody about it yet?
only joking, it's really not something you come across though. the real benefit of good schools might be in that old chesterton remark 'without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.'