Heck, in college I thought I’d major in sociology, so took the entry level class in that subject. When studying for an exam I realized I could take each book and an index card, write down title, author, and one or two phrases, and bullshit my way to a top grade on the test. Don’t recall any of what I studied way back then.
I wound up pursuing an interdepartmental major in medieval studies, which was even less useful but a lot more interesting. And I remember more of it.
So it’s not hard to believe after all?
Yeah, I used to know quite a bit about Hume, for instance. Now I only remember the name. And only the last name, at that.
What I do clearly recall is a highly useful piece of information that I gather can also be learned in mathematics fields:
One person’s utterly obvious is often another person’s utter nonsense.
[ETA: That, of course, is not one of the things they were trying to teach me.]
Again, yes. If you use it (or if as @EddyTeddyFreddy says you remain interested in it), you hang on to it. But I think the experience gives more credibility than the degree.
In most fields, it’s become impossible to get the experience without first getting the degree. But in cases in which it is possible: give me the person who’s been doing the job successfully for 20 years over the one who’s got the degree and either has no experience or has been screwing up for 20 years.
Unnecessary snark aside, “hard to believe” was meant to imply that I think such folks are rare.
OK. I think they’re quite common, but I don’t have any statistics to back that. Maybe we just know different groups of people. (Well, certainly we know different groups of people; but maybe that’s what’s accounting for our different opinions.)
Mocking people with severely deficient critical thinking skills regardless of formal education level* is a satisfying and often necessary activity.
*some of the worst offenders have advanced professional degrees and were respected in their fields of endeavor.
Ben Carson and Ben Stein leap to mind (maybe it is about people named “Ben”).
I absolutely agree it’s class-based prejudice.
Give me a good tradesman (plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc.) any day. Worth their weight in gold.
Particularly stupid when someone says "those people who aren’t smart enough to go to university and end up at community college. My best friend from middle school went to a community college and learned robotics.He got a well-paid job driving around North America to service robots in car plants. I took a liberal arts degree at university. I’m making ends meet as an ESL teacher overseas.
Also Ben Shapiro (I think he’s capable of critical thinking in general but there are a few things he will happily bend logic into pretzels to avoid questioning, and these points inform his whole worldview. So any analysis he does afterwards is just post hoc rationalization of an irrational point he’s clinging onto.)
Meanwhile, the most intellectually formidable Ben of them all never even went to college.
isn’t that a form of cognitive dissonance?