Welcome to the Straight Dope. If you stick around you will some day look back at your first step here with some embarrassment. You’ve revived a thread 15 year old for no particularly good reasons and you’ve done so in the Pit, the part of the site set aside for vitriol and personal attacks not allowed in other subfora.
And you’re totally wrong to label most of this list as not being trained scientists.
Self-assurance.
I remember him. Are you going to dig up his dead body too?
Obviously, to inform us that no education is required to be a research scientist. And to offer stellar examples, in an assessment as comically ungrammatical as it is ludicrous, that those “who didn’t qualify as experts in their fields succeeded beyond what others with degrees have never been able to”. So clearly, not only is formal education unnecessary in order to advance the frontiers of science, you don’t even have to know anything. You just have to persevere, and bang – those pesky frontiers come tumbling down and the Nobel Prize is as good as won!
There may be arrogant academics who believe otherwise, but thanks to the wonders of Google – which I’m sure was developed by ignoramuses who didn’t qualify as experts in their fields* – Benjamin was able to resurrect this zombified pitting to set them straight.
Da Vinci, Van Gogh, etc., didn’t have MFA’s, and I’ve seen them in museums.
This thread reminds me of an episode of The Big Bang Theory, in which the Dean enters a room and says, “Good afternoon, Dr. (names each character there with a PhD.)” He ignores Howard.
Howard: “I have a masters.”
Dean: “Who doesn’t?”
Don’t listen to those people!
I currently have about 60 hours of college credit (but not enough in any one thing to get an Associates degree), I got my training at a trade school (“Can a phone call change… YOUR life?”), and now, almost 40 years later, I am almost making $100K a year (programming, C++, no Web, no Mobile, Windows only).
Back in the 80s, when Microsoft was growing so quickly, the common wisdom for MS was that they only hire college graduates. The company started by the world’s two best-known dropouts, won’t hire someone without a degree?
I laugh at people who graduated college but don’t know an effing thing that wasn’t spoon-fed to them.
Ah, but do they know not to give advice to people on what action to take 15 years ago?
I’m so arrogant I think this thread is about me.
I will have you know that my own brother, who still makes his BUSINESS getting under-achievers scholarships to the very best schools, at least for the first year, thought he could get me into Harvard a full year before Gates dropped out, which was about when I would’ve flunked out. I skipped the middleman, went to a land-grant college to save time and money, and am still every bit as arrogant as had I gone to Harvard.
Harumph, sir. I say HARUMPH.
I laugh at people who don’t understand the difference between “I am almost making $100K …” and “I am making almost $100K …”. A few years ago I almost won $25 million in a lottery. But because lottery officials are cold-hearted bastards with knowledge of grammar, I didn’t win “almost $25 million”. The education, she teaches us how to talk good, no?
I laugh at people who don’t understand academic salary ranges, some of which are far higher than you might imagine and some of which are literally off the charts because they’re outside the established norms. And all for good and valid reasons.
Also laughable is the idea of evaluating your personal circumstances in terms of income. To me there has always been something sadly nihilistic about the endless circle of earning money to pay the cost of living so you can keep living to earn money.
Is there something odd about using reasonable correlations to maximize your probability of success?
In many cases it’s admittedly silly that a university degree should be a bureaucratically imposed mandatory requirement, but for any job more demanding than cleaning out a parrot cage, if the person didn’t attend a post-secondary institution or didn’t graduate I’d be curious to know why. I might well be satisfied with the answer and the evidence of significant accomplishment, but I’d definitely ask the question. And for other jobs, it’s just mandatory, period. Like a university professorship. Or think in terms of your doctor, for another example. Would you like to have a doctor who never graduated university but claims to heal people with magnetic rays and prayer?
Actually, if you had gotten into Harvard you’d be in the club, and members of the club get to stay. Harvard, at least a few years ago, was famous for grade inflation. When my daughter was at the University of Chicago (which does not believe in grade inflation) someone from Harvard came to talk about the grade inflation problem.
He got booed.
So if you got in, and didn’t goof off, you would have graduated no doubt.
I haven’t encountered much of the Ph.D snobbery personally - in fact, quite the opposite; I’ve met or even interviewed several people whom I only found out later in the proceedings were actually Ph.D holders (not because they weren’t bright, but because they didn’t come across as typical academics at all).
What I’ve also noticed is a reluctance among many of the Ph.Ds I’ve encountered to refer to themselves as “Dr” in any except the most formal or serious of academic situations; when I’m clarifying someone’s name spelling and title for a story, I’ve had more than one person say “Well, technically I’m Dr McAwesome, but I’d prefer it if you could put my title as Mr (or Ms) McAwesome in the story; I don’t like to go on about the Dr thing.”
I have a Master’s degree and like to wind people up sometimes by telling them that the “Mr” honourific in front of my name refers to Magister rather than Mister, however. 
I’m taking a physics course this summer, when someone didn’t understand a mathematical formula, the Professor asked if they were a Bio major and then went off on a tangent about it, guess what my major is? I thought to myself later “Actually this guy might have a point, I’m not exactly the best at math.”
There are actual charts? Couldn’t they make the charts bigger if the salaries are literally off them?
No. They’re LITERALLY OFF OF THEM!!!
Listen, you snarky bastards, if I had known that I was shortly to be involved in a spirited debate elsewhere about abuses of the word “literally”, I might have used a different expression, though I believe here it’s defensible. 
“Off the charts” is usually a figurative expression but one very close to its literal counterpart, as in when I use it myself to describe the costs of US health care – it’s obviously on the chart or I wouldn’t know what it is, but it’s clear when looking at actual charts that they had to be (quite literally) extended to a much higher range than would otherwise be necessary solely in order to accommodate this one outlier.
With respect to academic salaries, most institutions have formally established ranges for each academic rank, but cases exist where specially negotiated circumstances create a salary that is (literally) outside the nominal range, perhaps along with other special perks.
A better title for this thread would be, “The unbelievable arrogance of some uneducated guy with a computer.”
Know what I think? I think Chuck Lorrie read this thread 15 years ago and thought up The Big Bang Theory on the spot.