3 ms·

The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things

The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. I was replying to this. I don’t find this “offensive”, I find it misleading and untrue. Maybe some tiny percentage of people will prefer sitting at home watching YouTube videos to the experience of attending a top college. For everyone else, the university is a better choice, not least because you’ll build a better network. Not everyone wants to sit at home alone and watch videos. I’m not sure why that is difficult to understand.

benreesman 3y ago
This remains a bundling of two levers that we at one time tangentially related, but have sharply diverged: learning difficult topics in a deep and time-efficient way, and building a potent network. It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. The best universities (in the modern sense of the word) face and pretty much always faced a stark tradeoff between a faculty that were exceptional regarding novel research, and faculty that were chosen on the basis of educational outcomes, there's even a term for it: "teaching professor". Excellent researchers at the cutting edge of their field are only competent educators by coincidence, they're at a minimum different competencies, and arguably pull in opposite or at least different directions. Many of the best academic researchers in the world teach in some country where they learned the language they teach in late in life: every undergraduate in STEM has professors they struggle to even understand via verbal communication (people that smart can generally master written communication in another language far more easily than verbal communication). There are better lectures (even restricting the field to e.g. MIT OCW) online and social interaction in a lecture is, with a few exceptions, disruptive and frowned upon. And even if someone wants to listen to a university lecture in person, universities generally have a formal or informal mechanism for non-students to attend them without any acceptance criteria or a staggering bill at the end. The networking that happens at a top school is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to achieve any other way. I'm only interested in having this conversation if you're willing to address those points individually rather than as an atomic unit: they are not an atomic unit.
- keiferski 3y ago
  It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. This isn't an argument. Not everyone wants to stare at a computer for 15 hours a day. Maybe you do. Some people prefer in-person interaction and discussion, others don't. Yes, in 1-to-1 comparisons, a YouTube video about a topic may be better than a university lecture in which you are mute and can't interact with the professor. But university isn't just mutely watching less qualified professors give lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the entire university experience, which also includes: learning how to work with others, discussion groups, office hours with the professor, managing your time to complete tasks, building social skills, dating, on and on. It's a complete package. The key element is that you are immersed in this environment and interact with the community of people around you. A university is not merely a place that stores information. When you attend a quality university, all of these things are a part of the learning experience. They are not separate. To use myself as an example: I have a degree in philosophy from one of the higher-ranking programs in the world. The Internet and YouTube are full of lectures and podcasts and free books about philosophy. And yet – none of them comes even close to the experience of sitting in a room for 3 hours intensely discussing metaphysics, or logic, or Kant, or another complex philosophical topic with a small group of other students and professors. That doesn't happen on the Internet and no amount of innovative video formats is going to change it. When you directly interact with another human being face-to-face and discuss/critique ideas, (in my experience) you learn much better than just watching videos. There is a huge difference between someone that has merely read a lot of books on a topic, and someone that has been through a rigorous discussion and critique with qualified interlocutors. Finally, on the networking element: if you look at most of the actual top performers in the tech industry, they all have one thing in common: they know each other. Learning how to interact with people – and not merely acquiring information – is a key element of actually being successful. And that's still learning. It's not some nebulous hand-wavy thing that you can brush away. Building the next Google, which is what the original essay was about, necessarily requires you to build and navigate complex human social structures. It's not something you can just watch in a video. Merely having information in your head isn't actually that useful if your goal is build a company.

benreesman 3y ago

This remains a bundling of two levers that we at one time tangentially related, but have sharply diverged: learning difficult topics in a deep and time-efficient way, and building a potent network. It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. The best universities (in the modern sense of the word) face and pretty much always faced a stark tradeoff between a faculty that were exceptional regarding novel research, and faculty that were chosen on the basis of educational outcomes, there's even a term for it: "teaching professor". Excellent researchers at the cutting edge of their field are only competent educators by coincidence, they're at a minimum different competencies, and arguably pull in opposite or at least different directions. Many of the best academic researchers in the world teach in some country where they learned the language they teach in late in life: every undergraduate in STEM has professors they struggle to even understand via verbal communication (people that smart can generally master written communication in another language far more easily than verbal communication). There are better lectures (even restricting the field to e.g. MIT OCW) online and social interaction in a lecture is, with a few exceptions, disruptive and frowned upon. And even if someone wants to listen to a university lecture in person, universities generally have a formal or informal mechanism for non-students to attend them without any acceptance criteria or a staggering bill at the end. The networking that happens at a top school is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to achieve any other way. I'm only interested in having this conversation if you're willing to address those points individually rather than as an atomic unit: they are not an atomic unit.

keiferski 3y ago
It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way. This isn't an argument. Not everyone wants to stare at a computer for 15 hours a day. Maybe you do. Some people prefer in-person interaction and discussion, others don't. Yes, in 1-to-1 comparisons, a YouTube video about a topic may be better than a university lecture in which you are mute and can't interact with the professor. But university isn't just mutely watching less qualified professors give lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the entire university experience, which also includes: learning how to work with others, discussion groups, office hours with the professor, managing your time to complete tasks, building social skills, dating, on and on. It's a complete package. The key element is that you are immersed in this environment and interact with the community of people around you. A university is not merely a place that stores information. When you attend a quality university, all of these things are a part of the learning experience. They are not separate. To use myself as an example: I have a degree in philosophy from one of the higher-ranking programs in the world. The Internet and YouTube are full of lectures and podcasts and free books about philosophy. And yet – none of them comes even close to the experience of sitting in a room for 3 hours intensely discussing metaphysics, or logic, or Kant, or another complex philosophical topic with a small group of other students and professors. That doesn't happen on the Internet and no amount of innovative video formats is going to change it. When you directly interact with another human being face-to-face and discuss/critique ideas, (in my experience) you learn much better than just watching videos. There is a huge difference between someone that has merely read a lot of books on a topic, and someone that has been through a rigorous discussion and critique with qualified interlocutors. Finally, on the networking element: if you look at most of the actual top performers in the tech industry, they all have one thing in common: they know each other. Learning how to interact with people – and not merely acquiring information – is a key element of actually being successful. And that's still learning. It's not some nebulous hand-wavy thing that you can brush away. Building the next Google, which is what the original essay was about, necessarily requires you to build and navigate complex human social structures. It's not something you can just watch in a video. Merely having information in your head isn't actually that useful if your goal is build a company.